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> In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today.

"Typical" is doing some really heavy lifting there given the kind of housing stock available in, say, East Coast urban areas. Most of those remotely-affordable houses are a hundred years old in the Boston area, for example.

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I would love to see historical rates in urban vs rural/suburban areas for this, alongside migration/growth rates - does something like that exist?

My son (in college) probably won’t be able to afford much of a house in the Bay Area, austin, etc. but originally he was going to become an electrician in Watertown, NY. You can get a house for $120k there, which seems doable on a 50k income.

I've seen it but don't have it on hand. Urban prices certainly seem to have disconnected quite hard from suburban/rural ones, but even suburban/rural might not capture it. I grew up in a not-all-that-wealthy town in Maine about the same size as Watertown, NY--a little smaller actually; an empty half-acre lot there costs more than $120K. (I'd love to move back there, but a house the size of my Boston-area house costs the same as my Boston-area house...)

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