You can still get those things from your 60s house, it will simply cost more (adjusted for inflation).

But I do not see how quality of life are any worse with LVT flooring instead of wood, or PEX plumbing instead of copper, or wiring in a hard conduit instead of not wiring in a hard conduit. I would even say quality of life is better. Why would I want to wax wood, and have a more difficult to repair floor. An LVT piece gets damaged, I just pop it out and put a new one in.

Effectively, advances in materials technology has made a home cheaper, and better in my opinion. I would buy a random 2022 house over a random 1960s house anyday.

Homes today are cheaper than the 60s? The 60s where a single earner family, where the earner was a schoolteacher, could afford a house before having kids?

The materials for the home are cheaper (adjusted for increase in quality/utility). For example, insulating a house to the same level is cheaper today than in previous decades. Same with the plumbing and flooring and many other advances where plastics technologies made a lot of things cheaper and safer too.

Land in certain locations of course a different matter, as well as labor.

There's no way the run-up in housing prices is all land. In 1960 the average house price was 11,700... about 115,000 in 2022 dollars. I'm 51 and have built several houses. Since I was 22 and started being interested in real estate, the rule of thumb was 20% land, 80% house for the value of a new build. That means the average house in 1960 (no land) was probably about 98,000 to build in 2022 dollars.

The average house size in 1960 was 1200 sqft, so call that $82/sqft in 2022 dollars.

The US average cost to build a new house in 2021 was $124/sqft. Meanwhile, the construction workers building the house were getting paid on average $6933/yr ($67,700 in 2022 dollars) whereas a construction worker now averages $47,000/yr.

So the labor costs have gone down by 30%, but the price of the house has gone up by 51%.

The materials might be better or they might be worse, but they're sure not making houses cheaper.

Modern houses have PEX plumbing. It has some advantages over copper, e.g. it won't burst if it freezes. But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.

> But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.

Another huge advantage is you can easily do plastic pipe plumbing yourself. You just need one clamping tool, that costs less than one hour of plumbing labour would cost. Plumbing with copper piping or steel pipes requires way more time, skill, and expensive tools.

PVC drain pipes are also simple to install correctly: a tape measure, a saw, and some PVC solvent cement is all you need for simple jobs.

PEX doesn't corrode like copper will. Depending on your local water this may not be an issue you notice, but one house I had it was an issue.

But will PEX harden over the years and eventually crack like most plastics?

Probably not - the plastics harden are a different type with different properties. The industry was burned with early plastics that did have problems and is paying attention to this. PE has been used in plumbing for more than 50 years with no problems, PEX should last even longer.

Assuming you follow directions of course: PEX has zero UV resistance and if exposed to the sun for a couple months will break down and be useless.

The hardwood floors sound nice, but as far as I’m aware plastic plumbing is much more preferable over copper.

Need to fix a leak in a copper pipe? Get ready to weld and bend pipes. Need to fix a plastic pipe? Unscrew that section, and screw in a new one. No drama.

You can use sharkbite for easy fixes on copper.

Quality seems to go through ups and downs, probably in line with economic cycles and periods of scarcity. Here, houses built in the 20s and earlier were made with high quality lumber that is scarcely available these days. I notice that rebuilders and renovations of these old houses are careful to maintain the base wood layers even when they completely strip the facing and almost everything else.

Also, there are billions more people who demand wood for their shelter. Is it reasonable to expect that quality of wood, which I assume is almost purely a function of time, to maintain the same accessibility?

I'm not sure that billions of people build houses with wood. It's definitely an American thing, Europe not so much (bricks and concrete.) China is concrete. India? South America? Mexico? Africa?

Because they do not have ample wood, not even the lower quality type farmed in US/Canada today. More specifically, the supply of the type of old school high quality wood being talked about in previous comments from 1920s and whatnot would certainly be impossible to satisfy global demand. Which is also a big reason why it is not used now. You can get it, it is just extremely expensive.

That wood doesn't exist any more. It's water under the bridge.