Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..
You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time"
I, for one, completely disagree.
We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.
No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.
I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
So it can be done. Even today.
The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.
This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.
It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.
And plenty of people do. I know people who could live at home rent-free and chose apartments anyway because they wanted independence sooner. That's a legitimate preference, but it's still a tradeoff, and pretending the tradeoff doesn't exist because some people don't get the choice at all helps nobody. "Not everyone can do X" is true of literally every piece of financial advice ever given. It doesn't make X bad advice for the people who can.