> While housing has indeed gotten more expensive you can't compare absolute prices.

Horseshit. Homes built in 1946 are selling for millions of dollars, even if they're going to be torn down and rebuilt for marginal cost. You're not buying a house, you're buying the land and taking responsibility for everything on it.

And even then, the lumber you get out of such an old house is quite valuable virgin oldgrowth, a better quality product than you can buy at a lumber yard today.

And, to pick a nit... comparing the median income to median house price is an examination of relative price, not absolute.

In 1946 that house was in the styx with bugger all facilities and infrastructure about it. Fast forward 76 years of development and that house is now in the center of a large city full of facilities and opportunity.

To compare the 1946 houses location you need to pick something with the same level of amenity, which will be probably a country town.

The problem is that a cheaper house in the country no longer has jobs. Americans don't earn enough in average to afford to support local businesses, so every dollar made gets basically exported from the town to walmart or amazon.

That $150k house in the boonies, even if it was built yesterday, has less value, because the community it is in is in the process of dying and has no opportunity. That same house in the same town sold for $60k in 1989, while that very town was much more functional, alive, and happy than it is now.

>> First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946

Is that true? Something like 40% of the UK housing stock was built pre-WW2. Sure they’ll no longer have a coal bunker and they most likely have had insulation upgrades etc. but a pre-WW2 house in 1946 is still a pre-WW2 house today. The modern build will have less living space, predominately through smaller room sizes but should be cheaper to heat.

>> Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay

That lops off all the people who can’t afford a mortgage so i dont think that logic works.

Yes its true, see details in this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31156040

The data is inherently skewed. You only have a mortgage if you can afford the down payment in the first place and so of course it’ll follow the age old rule of 1/3 of your income. This doesn’t capture how housing supply hasn’t followed population growth/ all the people stuck paying rent in perpetuity.

> First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946.

Are you? You're getting a place to live and property you own.

You are likely getting lead free, asbestos free, central heating(cooling), double pane windows, vastly better insulation, more fire resistant, better and more appliances, and depending on locations things like: full basements, attached garages, screened in patio/porch, or pools.