Thread by @Noahpinion

A graph of home affordability in the U.S.

The ratio of median home price to median personal income has increased since 1980, but only by about 15%.

Here you can see median home price and median income side by side, relative to their 1980s levels.

Home prices and incomes track each other very well until around 2003, then diverge, then come back again, then diverge a bit after 2012.

But also note that the type of homes people have been buying have not stayed constant. The median size of a single-family house, for example, has increased by about 13% since 2000.

Oh, and as for rent, the CPI-Rent (a measure of average rents in U.S. cities) has actually increased more slowly than median personal income since 1980, meaning that renting is more affordable now than it was four decades ago. On average.

So we see that on average, living space has not gotten more expensive in America over the last four decades.

What *has* happened is that the price of living in certain popular cities has gone way, way up. The affordability crisis is local, not nationwide.

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