Home prices are completely out of whack here too - I would guess they’ve gone up 50% in the past few years. Good luck getting anything like what you want either. I bought my home back in 2011 and my one big thing was that I wanted at least 5 acres, but preferably more. I ended up getting a home in desperate need of updates on 15 acres for 180,000. At the time places fitting that criteria in my budget popped up pretty often.
I just did a search in Zillow for anything with more than 5 acres, and all I could find is some farmland, a 40 acre lot that’s mostly swamp for 800,000, and a 12 acre lot that’s somehow split in to 3 pieces for 140,000.
Relatively crappy homes in town that were 100k back when I was looking are now north of 250k.
Just to compare, my parents bought an amazingly beautiful 60 acre lot back in the late 80s on a truck driver and school bus driver’s salary. They then built a huge brick house on it, though to be fair my dad did a lot of the work himself.
My wife and I both have degrees with good paying jobs and there’s no way we’d ever be able to afford anything approaching what they have.