You're not crazy. Houses really were more affordable for your grandparents. The same with mine.
Today for I or you to purchase the same thing would cost many multiples. At lowest I'd say 150k, but most likely 350 and in what the middle class today euphemistically call a "good school distinct" it would be about over a million dollars.
So many educated people in 'modern days' have beliefs about the present and past which are in complete opposition to the facts.
> Something very bad happened in architecture around world war 2.
Thank you for noticing. The answer is literally a conspiracy against traditional building. I won't 'go on'. I'll demonstrate with images.
Here I'll insert a former comment I made related to this subject.
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3641/3546348607_d60d612554_z.j...
The first thought that struck me when I saw it was "that is a visual expression of Orwellian thought".
Deep down a majority of people prefer to live in houses that look like this:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/2e/40/a4/2e40a4bf4e33...
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/74/71/2747107_896ab24...
Do you remember the Shire in the Lord of the Rings? That is a synopsis of what people feel when they think of 'home'. Honest, humble but well crafted dwellings affordable by the average hobbit. As master Bilbo is keen to tell us:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
Brutalism is quite obviously something that came out of Minas Morghul.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/enbLZaUyr3s/maxresdefault.jpg
It is an architectural anti-thesis.
Mr Wtbob on HN made the most apropos remark that:
There is little more care for the inhabitants inside than there is for the ants, the ivy, the birds, the earthworms which could live on & around a homier structure. A Brutalist building spares no more thought for its inhabitants than does an abbatoir for those who enter its confines: they are a necessary nuisance, but mustn't be permitted to intrude upon the happiness of the architect anymore than absolutely required.
Brutalism is a kind of totalitarianism of architecture, a demand that those who build, those who inhabit and those who maintain must constantly bend their wills to the will of the Great Man (the architect), bend without love, without understanding, without hope, without fear, without joy, just mute, abject obedience to a cold and uncaring plan.
No thanks. Give me ivy, give me bricks, give me marble, give me dirt and grass and trees; give me men and women and children; give me sheep and dogs and horses; give me colours and light and ornament; give me emotion and delight; give me, in short, life.
It's clear to internaut and probably wtbob, that so called modern architecture is actually an attempt to erase the past, which is all the more amazing because all the users want traditional architecture to be built.
When all the end users want one thing, and most of the designers are wanting another thing we have to seriously ask what is doing on.
Of course it's not just architecture, it's in the art world too and the music world.
Nothing remarkable has come out of those for many decades now. The public is unable to name a 'masterwork' from those fields of endeavor.