How come, when my dad bought a house in the middle of LA in 1971, for $26,000, it represented about 1.5 times his salary as a unionized billing clerk (Teamsters); but, if I wanted to by a comparable house in the bay area today at about 500,000, I would be paying five times my annual salary as a bleeding edge/hi tech/ tech writer?
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Yes. Precisely. Bullseye.
My parents were able to become homeowners with exactly this sort of financial math as the sea upon which their efforts sailed.
But all of my friends, and yours truly, stare in wonder at housing price tags orders of magnitude greater than our incomes (yes, a wee bit of an exaggeration lads and lasses but work with me here - surely you get the picture).
This doesn't smell like the triumph of ever increasing home ownership I'm being sold as if it were a miracle -- like an effective, (and delicious) topical cream for treating poor boudoir performance. It smells like a tower of crap waiting to topple over onto unsuspecting heads.
But I await enlightenment and correction. Oh, and a scotch too.
In that order.
.d.