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Comment by davemp | Hacker News Reader

> A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home.

Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.

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I grew up in the 1960's. We lived in a suburb of Detroit where my father was a mechanical engineer who worked on drive trains and suspensions for Cadillac. My mom was a homemaker. We had one car. The house where the six of us lived was 1/3 the size of the one just my wife and I live in today. We had a black and white TV that got the network broadcasts, a single dial phone, a washer, a dryer, a stove, a toaster and a small refrigerator. My mom had a plug-in steam iron. My dad did the lawn with a push rotary mower and trimmed the sidewalks with hand clippers. We kids had bikes and board games. I did not know anybody with air conditioning. The most luxurious things we had were time, leisure and the outdoors that nobody minded us losing ourselves in for hours at a time. This isn't nostalgia by the way. I wouldn't go back. But if you could, somehow, you'd be shocked at how much less of nearly everything material there was.

Levittown-style homes for returning WWII veterans were poor quality -- "little boxes all made of ticky-tack" as the song goes, but even high quality homes of the midcentury were still tiny -- the average size of a US house in 1960 was 1,289 sq ft -- basically apartment sized. And typically only had one bathroom

https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...

"little boxes all made of ticky-tack"

That song is about Daly City,[1] where some of the original houses still are pink, green, blue, and yellow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes

Only 12-15% of the country had AC in 1963.

And even if you "had AC" it typically wasn't central AC. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s our only AC was a window unit in my parents' bedroom. On hot summer nights we would go and sleep on their floor.

Residential units? Or does that include businesses too? Cause 12-15% for residential units sounds high for 1963.

Air conditioning was extremely uncommon in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the 80s. I didn't personally know a single family that had a/c until the 90s. The only places that were air conditioned in my neighborhood in the 80s were businesses. I'm sure it was more common in the South.

That's more like the top decile than the average. The top decile in any era has it pretty good.

Most of the "life is too expensive today" complaints are some flavor of: Grandpa was a 90th percentile income earner and I am a 50th percentile income earner, so even though my life is objectively much better than Grandpa's in many ways (childhood vaccination, clean air, seatbelts, etc) the loss of status is much more salient than the gains in material well-being.

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