Housing is not included in the CPI I believe. https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4777/why-arent...
Now, there are legitimate debates about the imputed rent method by which owner-occupied housing is included in the CPI, but housing is definitely part of the CPI.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1...
CPI includes both rent costs for actual rentals and imputed rent for owner occupied housing. [0]
> but thats what more than half of average couples combined income is spent on.
More like a quarter. [1]
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
From what I've seen inflation has been very high for the past 20 years, but has not been evenly distributed at all. The deflationary pressures of offshoring, automation, technological advancement, and device convergence have caused tech, appliances, and gadgets to drop dramatically in price, creating the illusion in many sectors of low inflation or deflation. Offshoring and automation have also held wages down and kept consumer product and service prices from inflating much. The Internet has completely collapsed the price of media (music, TV, news, etc.) too. If you're looking at these things then inflation looks low.
Tuition, health care, housing, and energy on the other hand have all inflated quite a bit. Housing is the big one. In some markets it's at the level of "real estate hyperinflation," rising to absolutely ludicrous 8-15X median income multiple prices. There's also been a lot of asset and stock price inflation and bubbles in things like trendy tech and cryptocurrencies can be considered secondary symptoms of a lot of money sloshing around.
I've heard the present condition described as "in-deflation": deflation in everything you make and in therefore labor, inflation in everything you need such as health care and housing/rent. My hypothesis is that this results from an impedance mismatch between inflationary industrial-era economics and monetary policy and deflationary information-age pressures. Both high technology and globalization are extremely deflationary. We did a ton of QE to re-inflate the economy after 2008 but since high tech and globalization were such powerful deflationary pressures the only place all that money could go was real estate, stocks, and speculative bubbles.
In any case they've pumped so much money into the economy we may now be about to see a little bit of wage growth.
But it (that CPI doesn't including housing costs) is a completely false statement that can only be made (other than dishonestly) if one lacks even a basic knowledge of the matter being discussed.