And those low population areas carry low paying jobs, which are proportional to high population areas. Yes, we have a housing problem. For the average person on an average local income, a house is unaffordable. If you look back at the 70s, 80s, and 90s, houses cost many times more (before and after adjustment for local average income) now, regardless of where you look.

The key measure to compare everything is disposable income rather than inflation-adjusted this or that.

Disposable income of the 70s was a tiny fraction, many orders of magnitude smaller than the disposable income of 2024.

In addition, houses in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are not comparable to houses today. Modern houses and cars should cost a lot more because they offer a lot more.

All I am saying here is that the picture is a lot more complicated and nuanced and needs a more detailed evaluation than a simplistic scaling factor into the past.

Well, it is average locally earned disposable income compared to local housing cost, as a percentage. And in that case, houses are ridiculously expensive now. Most of my prior generation relatives purchased homes in the 70s in their early 20s while working minimum wage jobs as single income households. They were forklift drivers and steel workers, required no education, yet somehow a house was cheaper than 2 years income. I think you need to question your understanding a little more thoroughly. Also look at how ridiculously cheap the average rent was... if you don't own, you rent, and rent was something like half of a paycheck, making saving for a house much easier.

Look up disposable income over the years, and you'll soon see that that "glory" era of the 70s may have been less rosy than you think

The cheap housing of that era (even discounting the lead paint and asbestos-based insulation) might not be something you would want to live in today.

Housing is more expensive because people value it more than in the past.

They might value it more because housing is much better than in the past. That could be a simple explanation to what we observe.

Right. And (although perhaps not including SF and NYC), there are plenty of HCoL cities that you can travel 60-90 minutes from and there is pretty affordable (houses for a few hundred $K), even if not dirt-cheap, housing available. That's may not be really rural or parts of the Midwest cheap but it's not $1M+ for a condo either.

ADDED: And a lot of the jobs associated with those cities are actually a fair distance outside the cities anyway.

How many of those locations would need development? How economically viable is developing them?