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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

In 1970 a $300/month apartment would be ~$2000/month in today dollars. I do think rents are too high as productivity and supply chains are much more efficient. I think in the 70s we were still using black pipe for gas, iron septic lines, and copper pipes for water. But, I don't think new builds or renovations are cheaper inflation adjusted (harder to estimate).

Cost of money (inflation), building, and maintenance is the floor for rents.

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The median monthly rent for houses and apartments in the U.S. in 1970 was $108, or around $930 in today's dollars. So, in today's dollars, that would be $11,160/year. Median household income in 1970 was $9,870, or $84,714 in today's dollars.

Median rent in the us today is around $1,750, or around $21,000/year. Today's median income in the us is around $89,000. So, housing cost has nearly doubled, while wages have only risen by about 5%. And that's just housing. I'm sure the math for healthcare and education costs is even more grim.

You seem to be using family income and not household income for 1970.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

What we spend on housing has doubled. That doesn't mean the cost has doubled. It means that we buy a lot more housing than we used to.

Real estate cost is local and there are parts of america where the prices have gone nuts. But there's a lot more where it hasn't and housing is affordable.

Both are true. We’ve made cheap housing illegal and we’ve demanded ever higher quality housing.

We need to allowed for revealed preferences. In developers we trust.

> But there's a lot more where it hasn't and housing is affordable

In many of those places salaries have been stagnant or work has dried up

So we have a weird situation where someone living in a big city with a large salary is priced out of real estate by high prices, and someone living in a smaller city with more reasonable real estate prices is priced out by a lower income

It's not universal of course, but it's a squeeze that a lot of people are feeling

Most of the sunbelt isn't like that. You can buy a 4 bedroom house in Atlanta for 270k and a 2/1 for like 160 and salaries are fine.

Supply of housing has not kept pace with population since then. So you have more people chasing relatively fewer houses.

Also compare a 1960s or 1970s house to one built today. Today's houses are bigger and much more luxuriously appointed, with gourmet appliances, stone countertops, multi-head showers, walk-in closets, huge bathrooms, etc.

Once the boomer generation dies off or goes into assisted living you'll see a lot of those 1970s houses coming back on the market.

The house I live in has one small bathroom. It was probably built before there was indoor plumbing. (Early 1800s.) A back of the mind concern when the day comes I end up selling but not much I can do about it. The house has had a lot of upgrades over time but some things can't be easily changed.

> Once the boomer generation dies off or goes into assisted living you'll see a lot of those 1970s houses coming back on the market

But will they be affordable? Or will they be bought up by real estate conglomerates to be rented to the younger generations?

More supply should make them more affordable. Buying a house was never "easy." Some people seem to think that minimum wage workers were buying houses back in the 1970s and that wasn't the case. At all.

> So, housing cost has nearly doubled

That is in line with expectations:

1. The average house is ~60% larger than in 1970. More house equates to higher costs.

2. In 1970, the typical working-class man would spend time in a public house 5-6 nights a week. Today, third places are nearly nonexistent. Houses, largely driven by the internet opening it up to the world, has become more than a place to eat and sleep. Monetary spending is naturally directed to where one spends their time and energy.

This is only part of the picture. Part of the reason houses are so much larger today is cultural, but I would argue a larger part is that economies of scale scale make it more profitable to build larger houses, so that's what developers build.

Also, the average cost of raw, undeveloped land in 1970 was about $197/acre, or about $1690/acre in today's dollars. Today the average cost of raw, undeveloped land is about $4,350/acre.

All of the other costs associated with building a house are higher as well. There are more regulations, materials are more expensive, etc. Labor is probably the only part of the equation that isn't much different after adjusting for inflation.

So it's not just that we all decided to buy larger houses and that's why they are more expensive. There are a lot of structural issues at play.

> So it's not just that we all decided to buy larger houses

If we haven't all decided to buy larger houses, who is buying them? Are you suggesting that they all sit empty? That data doesn't support that. Life isn't like Field of Dreams. If you build it, they won't necessarily come. You have to offer what the buyer wants, else they'll say "no thanks".

The 1970's median salary was $800 (so rent was 37%), the 2026 equivalent is $5220 or 49%.

Incidentally, the 1970s are when productivity kept rising, but typical worker pay stopped rising with it.

Were apartments $300/month in the deep suburbs of cities though? Because I'm always surprised to hear my parents tell me rents for 1 bedrooms in the place I grew up in outside of Boston are in the $2-2.5k range (confirmed just now, not an affluent suburb). Census data seems to put the equivalent in Massachusetts at $120/month in 1970, which would be roughly $1k/month in 2026. $300/month in 1970 might even be high for what people were paying in Manhattan in 1970.

In 1970, median rent was $108 a month, utilities included.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/108-a-month-rent...

It should be noted NYC nearly went bankrupt in the '70s, the Bronx was burning - I wonder if there's any studies that account for the share of the rent increase that's explained by the higher paid jobs, decrease in crime, etc. i.e. all the ways these places have changed materially since the reference point.

How many apartments were $300/m in 1970?

Probably not many. The median rent reported in the census was 108.

Per state breakouts: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...

Very few, 300 USD was considered rather high in my area back then, maybe a house would be 300. That area is now in the top 5 expensive areas to rent.

In the late 80s early 90s I was paying 350 USD for a 2 bedroom.

My parents bought the home we grew up in, which is located middle of Queens/NYC for ~$30k around 1977/8. It sold most recently for $3M. Rents were typically well under $300mo. $150 in not so great areas. That was a high inflation time though.

Today, I live in a small city in a house I bought for about $200k 20 years ago. IIRC, it sold for $80k around 1992. Worth about $450k today. A decent 2BR apartment rents for like $2k here, a nice one >$2700.

Could have all the best reasons in the world,

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