Ultimately it doesnt change the fact of affordability unless one can also find homes w/o indoor plumbing to make up for inflation.

But, affordability isn't represented well by inflation, either. Median family income in 1950 was equivalent to $45k today; the actual number is $100k.

A big part of the issue is that workers stopped benefitting from productivity growth in the mid-1990s. That's what's really made the housing crisis particularly sharp.

Distributing the benefits of increased productivity to the workers was never part of the capitalist motto. That was what socialism was for.

That's why Europe is falling behind the US at tech innovations. People aren't gonna put in the risk, the grind and the hours if they'll get the same living standards as a unionized tram driver.

One example is my grandparents' home was built in the 1930s. It's a small home but in a good location and they said when they were younger it was worth ~200,000$ (I don't know the exact decade they were talking about here but from context it was somewhere in the 50s to 70s). The literal exact same house is now worth around 3,000,000$. The house now needs a lot of work (it actually decreases the value of the land) but the price is still 15x higher.

If this is true, and using 1960 as our middle of the road, then this isn't exactly "egregious". 200k in 1960 is 2.1M today just accounting for inflation. If we use 1950 it's 2.6M and if we use 1970 it's 1.6M. Now sure the house needs work, but I also. bet the area even if it was "good" when they built it in the 1930's how many more people are living in the same location now all vying for the same plots of land? People often gawk at what their parents or their grand parents paid for their houses, but rarely consider what living there would have been like 30 or 60 years ago. I have some relatives that bought a house outside a developing area about 30 years ago that's probably seen an easy 3-4x increase in value (of which only 2x would be accounted for with inflation. But the difference between then and now is that when they bought that home, it was 1 of 6 on a street in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and undeveloped land. There was a single main road that ran through "town" about 5 minutes away that had 2 gas stations, and 3 fast food stores and a grocery store. For anything else you were driving 20-40 minutes into the nearest city (or around). They commuted every day 45 minutes into the city. Today that same area is bursting with new homes, there's now 2 exits / entrances onto the highway within 10 minutes of their house, the main street is jam packed with businesses and filled with strip malls and shopping centers with multiple grocery stores, and a good chunk of the main "national brands" you might expect (Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart, Gamestop etc). And just about anything they don't have along that main street and it's adjoining centers can be found 15 minutes away in the shopping centers and neighborhoods that sprung up between them and the city. In short, the house they live in today is in the sort of place some folks looking to move into a thriving and growing area would want to move into, and the house they bought 30 years ago was in the sort of backwoods sticks that such people would be avoiding as "too remote".

Also, your example of your grandparent's home is long tail. Some places have seen skyrocketing prices that have everything to do with the location (and zoning restrictions limiting stock of housing in area). Example would be Santa Monica. Lots of coastal towns in California. But median, not mean. Think about all the one-room shacks that used to exist. You don't see them anymore because ... why would someone keep them around now? The homes that survive are the ones that retained enough value to make it worthwhile to keep up/restore.

Here in southwest Virginia, an empty lot near town might be about $40k. A house built on that will have multiples of that value.

They pay cash, too, which many sellers like.