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Yes, the increase in expectations of consumption – much of which was created during the 90s – that’s created a false impression of the baseline expectations of potential home owners.
Someone just sent me Austin figures which are informative, but not representative. National numbers are all over the place. I grew up in a small town in western NY state, and housing is ridiculous today. At present, I’m back living in the USA. I live a few miles east of the Microsoft Redmond WA campus, and we’re seeing east-asian sized apartments at NYC and San Francisco prices. Meanwhile the company (the tech sector) is exiting it’s (overpaid) middle layer on a scale we saw in postwar industrial sector in the 80s that led to the franchise boom as people were outcast from industry.
The Northwest saw this with Boeing in the 70s. Seattle was nearly a ghost town. I lived through the movement of tech sector from Boston to the west coast in the 80s but Boston recovered because of it’s institutions. I’m seeing the same near certainty in the current tech sector (where I made my wealth since the 80s).
So, between ‘the great sort’ and changes in urbanization, offshoring, asymmetry in the economy because of the tech sector, the tech sector obscuring the rest of the economy, questionable education expense, financialization of the economy, the pressure on the young remains prohibitive – and is more than responsible for suppression of reproduction.

I frame the increase in housing costs differently.
Our expected ‘minimums’ in every walk of life have vastly increased – particularly in housing. We don’t produce three bedroom ‘1000 square feet of house as we did postwar or even 1200 square feet we did in teh 60s. By 2000 we’d doubled to 2200 square feet.
And amenities? we’ve about quadrupled the amenities we’ve included in the houses.
In retrospect we’re getting what we pay for at a discount.
I focus instead on outsourcing the productive economy and financialization of the economy that has left the bottom half out of most gains since the seventies.
I do try to remind the bottom half that the reason that they’re in this position was their embracement of the democratic socialist program during those periods and how they forced business, industry, and finance to seek global markets rather than be ‘blackmailed’ by the combination of unions and the democratic socialist movement among the democrats.
Democratic socialism destroyed european economies. It just took until now to see that it’s irreversible. By the seventies we knew the end of socialism. By the sixties the end of communism. It’s taken us a long time to ‘get over’ the false promises of the marxist(class) -neomarxist(cultural marxism) – Postmodern(truth marxism) -feminist(sex marxism) -woke(race marxist) revolution – all lies and stupidity of silly people who were captured by false premises and magical thinking.

It’s exasperating how much harm believable lies were to humanity. It’s almost as damaging as the spread of abrahamic religions and the false promises they promoted but caused the dark ages in europe the middle east, central asia, and are still threatening us today.