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Originally Posted by opendoor
There are a few reasons why both can be true:
1) That chart doesn't include the era I was talking about in that post ('60s and '70s). By the '80s high interest rates and housing bubbles made housing pretty unaffordable before real prices retreated later in the decade. I don't think anyone would want to trade places with someone in the early '80s when housing was just as unaffordable, but you were talking about the '60s when things were extremely affordable and people with menial jobs could afford detached houses in cities.
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The people who had menial jobs in the 60s may have been able to afford a detached home, but in every other respect they lived in what we would regard today as poverty.
The 70s were not a great period economically. Runaway inflation, the energy shock, stagflation, high unemployment. The postwar boom was over by ‘71. So really, this golden period that we still look to as a touchstone lasted only 20 years, and it ended more than 50 years ago.
The Canadians who enjoyed the fruits of that golden era in adulthood are now all dead or in their 80s. For the rest of us - Boomers, GenX, Millennials, GenZ - it’s all just a matter of when in our adult lives we’re dealt economic gut-punches. The Economist (avert your eyes rube) recently posted an article arguing GenX were the big generational losers, as their first decade in the workforce had such a weak economy that many never caught up.