Was this ever true? During the 1950s, (the perceived heyday of American middle class wealth) the female labor force participation rate was 35%[1], which was close half of the male labor force participation rate.
2) That 35% number was likely even lower for married women.
3) Racism was still a systemic problem and was bad. Black men were excluded from the GI bill for example.
4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, when two adults are often working rather than one.
5) In short, Americans are working much harder today.
But it's pretty clear that over time the homes were remodeled, gut remodeled, extended, garages added, and so on, so they are significantly improved over the original. I've been in a couple, and the hallways are pretty narrow and everything is very cheaply built.
If you want to see what they were like originally, see the old Bob Hope movie "Bachelor in Paradise", filmed at a just-built suburban community.
I assume a crack den with busted utilities would go for less.
I've lived in this area my adult life. Pretty much all the open spaces and lots have been infilled with houses over time. Prices go down the further away from the business core. Being within commuting distance to Microsoft comes with a big boost in price.
Sources for these numbers? Also, housing is only a fraction of your costs.
Median house $7300 https://better.com/content/how-much-home-prices-have-risen-s...
Today ratio is 5.1 https://housingalmanac.com/affordability
You can get a 500sqft in podunk small town for quite cheap.
They weren't living in modern glass skyscrapers.
You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this.
Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year.
So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.
I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.
If you lock it in any way to something like “home ownership and simple vacations once a year” (which was absolutely possible in the 90s), it has plummeted.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
It's housing prices.
Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.