Every generation thinks the last one had it easier on housing. On the numbers, this time it is largely true.

The price, then and now

In the mid-1970s, the median U.S. home sold for the low $40,000s, according to Census figures. Today the median sits near $400,000 — about $399,000 in May 2026 by one widely watched measure, and roughly $403,000 in the government's first-quarter data. Even accounting for a half-century of general inflation, homes have grown a lot more expensive in real terms; prices have risen faster than the overall cost of living for decades.

The number that really matters: price vs. income

Raw prices only tell part of the story, because incomes have risen too. The clearer gauge is the home-price-to-income ratio — how many years of a typical household's income it takes to buy the median home. In the 1970s and 1980s that ratio generally ran around three times income. Today it is close to five times, near the highest on record, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. (A price-to-income ratio compares the cost of a home to annual household income; the higher it is, the more years of earnings a home costs — and the harder it is to afford.)

That single shift — from roughly 3x to 5x — is the core of the affordability problem. Wages have grown, but home prices have grown faster, so each dollar of income buys less house than it did for a buyer in 1976.

The mortgage-rate twist

There is one way today's buyers have it easier: borrowing costs. Mortgage rates in the mid-1970s ran around 8–9%, and in October 1981 the 30-year rate hit a record 18.6%, per Freddie Mac data — a level that made even a cheap house punishing to finance. Today's rates, near 6.4%, are far below that peak.

But lower rates haven't rescued affordability, because they apply to a much bigger loan. A 6.4% mortgage on a $400,000 home can carry a larger monthly payment than an 9% mortgage on a $45,000 one, even before accounting for the far larger down payment a pricier home requires. Cheaper money hasn't offset dearer houses.

Why homes got so expensive

Several forces stacked up over decades. Supply is the biggest: restrictive zoning, slow permitting and years of underbuilding after the 2008 housing crash left the country short of homes relative to demand. Investors — from individuals to institutional landlords — now compete with first-time buyers for a limited stock, bidding prices up. And incomes for typical workers have not kept pace with home prices, so the down payment and monthly cost claim a larger share of a paycheck than they did for earlier buyers.

The result is a generational gap in sentiment as well as economics: surveys find the large majority of younger adults believe buying a home is harder for them than it was for their parents.

Why it matters

For households, the math reframes a rite of passage: the first home now typically demands years of saving for a down payment and a bigger share of income for the mortgage, delaying ownership — and the wealth-building that has historically come with it. For the economy, housing costs are a major driver of where people can afford to live and work, and a persistent source of the "cost of living" strain that shapes politics and spending. And for policymakers, the price-to-income gap points at the remedy most economists favor: building more homes. Boursel gives no advice on when or whether to buy; the point is that the arithmetic of homeownership has genuinely shifted against the buyer since 1976 — not because of any single villain, but because prices have simply outrun incomes for a very long time.