Meanwhile I'm working 3/4 time (25% retired! Woo!) earning less than ever in an overpriced tourist town. And yet the bank accounts are doing just fine. Sure, gas is pricier, but not as pricey as it was at the peak, and not enough that I pay attention.
But that's just me. My bicycle-commutin' self.
One place I think is really hitting people, is real estate and rentals. I'm unaffected because I'm well into paying off this house that I got cheap after the bust at a tiny interest rate; the rental value of my home is about double the mortgage payment.
We can't build houses quickly enough in this town--and we are doing it, with lots of new houses and apartment blocks going up everywhere. I think they get snatched up by families and investors immediately, something that would probably still keep happening even if we were building inventory 10x faster. (Why wouldn't you, an investor, buy everything we built?) And if you have a big rental or mortgage payment and (God help you) decide to shop at Safeway, you are certainly feeling it.
Inflation could fall to 0% and people would still be feeling the pain of their housing prices.
[Edit: thinko]
Idk how CPI is calculated in the US, but in France the way housing cost is taken into account in the inflation calculation is ridiculous, so it doesn't help.
(Basically what they do is that they don't count people that buy houses, because “it's an investment you know”, and then they count how much the people who rent pay as a fraction of their revenues, and divide that fraction by two because “it's only half the population”, and also they do hedonic price adjustment on the average housing quality even if existing people's home aren't improving and the price of newly built homes isn't being accounted in in the first place because of the previously mentioned “investment” characterization)