It may be pandemic influence, but that's the world we live in now.
From USDA (source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/su...):
In 2020, food-at-home prices increased 3.5 percent and food-away-from-home prices increased 3.4 percent. The CPI for all food increased 3.4 percent over this same period. In general, food price inflation in 2020 was much higher than in 2018 (0.4 percent), 2019 (0.9 percent), and the 20-year average (2.0 percent).
The PCE fraction for "food and beverages" (home, away, alcohol) ranges from 13.8% to 17.0%.
That Wiki page also has a nice comparison to the consumer price index (CPI), which was previously used by the US Fed. US Social Security still uses CPI to adjust national pension payments.
Also, you wrote that food prices had more inflation in 2020 compared to other recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people had cheaper transportation costs, which would offset some or all of this food price inflation.
Obviously the purchase price matters, because the higher prices are, the more money you need to even get in the door with homeownership.
This reads like an oxymoron to anyone who's not a property owner, which is about half the country -- all of whom are in the bottom 90% referred to in the headline.
Should renters not have the opportunity to buy a home?
there should not be societal subsidies for people wanting to buy their home.
If rents are not growing at a rate that's higher than wage growth, then it is stable and thus acceptable. Owning a home is a privilege, not a right. Thus, the CPI calculations correctly only includes rental costs, and not ownership.
Nonsense. Theoretically if wages and rents grew 5% in step together yoy, but most other goods increased at >100% (say houses), your statement implies things would always remain stable. I'd think not...
The real reason CPI is garbage (for measuring total inflation) is because it doesn't track everything, and hence misses the inflation in things that the CPI doesn't track (such as houses). More specifically, it's a measure that only tracks what urban people CAN & typically spend money on. It doesn't track the things which some people have been entirely priced out of and hence don't spend money on (such as home ownership, as well as other assets).