Is housing really three times more expensive relative to family income than it was in the early 1960s?

I’m a big admirer Stephanie Coontz’s work, and I’m working off a paraphrase of it here (gift link) for which she isn’t responsible of course, but I do want to point to a kind of loosey-goosey statistical exaggeration that you see a lot of in regard to the issue of the cost of housing, and what could be called the politics of the “traditional breadwinner” family:

The 1950s to ’70s was the fullest expression of the fragile-domestic-woman, strong-breadwinner-male marriage in the United States. Coontz explains that this was made possible by the rapid economic growth of the post-World War II era that guaranteed that most families could sustain a modest yet stable life on one salary and by a series of laws and norms that kept women trapped in marriages whether they wanted to be in them or not. Divorce was hard to come by and made you a pariah, homosexuality was criminalized, child and spousal abuse were mostly ignored, and many women — who married at the age of 20, on average — did not have access to good careers or their own sources of credit.

I agree with Coontz that part of what people are appropriately nostalgic for is the first piece: In 1960 the median price of a home was around twice as much as the median annual income; now it’s closer to six times as much. It was simply easier to support a family, and she notes that financial stress makes marriage formation far more difficult.

The background data here tend to be less than totally consistent across measurements, but the median price of a home in 1963 (oldest data in this graph) per FRED was $18,000 — second quarter of the year as housing prices are seasonal — while the Census Bureau says median family income was $6,167, which is a ratio of just under three to one. The same data sources say the ratio for these figures in 2024 was $414,500 to $107,500, which is a ration of just under four to one. So that’s a 33% increase in the cost of single family housing relative to family income, rather than a 200% increase.

Part of what happens here is that people end up comparing family income at point X to household, or even worse individual, income at point Y. As we’ve discussed quite a bit at LGM, the price of housing is a very real problem in the US today, especially on a regional basis, and it’s true there were a few more single income families in the 1960s than there are today — labor force participation rates for adult women were around 40%, as compared to around 60% today — but some of the arguments around this topic greatly exaggerate the actual changes over time (Again not saying Coontz did this as I’m relying on somebody else’s characterization of her arguments). ETA: The LFPR for adult men went from 83% in 1960 to 68% in 2024, so the whole “every family had one breadwinner and that was a man” narrative is just totally absurd on its face, statistically speaking. The OVERALL labor force participation rate barely changed between 1960 and 2024 (59.5% to 62.3%), although the gender distribution changed drastically. In other words, the whole “it now takes two incomes to pay for what used to take one” narrative is wildly exaggerated.

Coontz’s larger point in her work on this subject is that the “single ‘breadwinner’ could afford a nice home for HIS family back in the day” was always a highly idealized exaggeration, and the real housing to income numbers actually are far more favorable to this very important observation than the exaggerated ones that get thrown around, often by left-leaning commenters who are inadvertently throwing fuel on a reactionary cultural fire. Or, as commenter Karen often points out, given the often barely below the surface reactionary gender politics of many a leftist red-brown alliance bro, maybe not so inadvertently.