Real estate markets are local. This analysis only works if you do it for every local metro region and then aggregate. What you'd find is "jobs or affordable hou

Real estate markets are local. This analysis only works if you do it for every local metro region and then aggregate. What you'd find is "jobs or affordable housing, pick one." Metro areas with hot job markets have inflated massively, while metro areas with bad job markets have seen little real estate inflation or even deflation. The end result is that you can't get ahead. Good jobs mean you're just shoveling it all into real estate. This is actually a well established economic principle known as the "law of rent." I've wondered if maybe the middle class explosion of the mid century was driven by the automobile since it allowed cities to physically expand. This allowed people to temporarily escape the law of rent. But now we've hit the limit of that, so the law of rent has re-asserted itself.