Using average housing prices is a poor proxy since both the average size and quality of homes have increased, while the US real estate market has had a very par

Using average housing prices is a poor proxy since both the average size and quality of homes have increased, while the US real estate market has had a very particular evolution, unrepresentative for the overall inflation. It was a bad choice on my part, I was trying to give an intuitive current wealth reference, not track housing trends over decades. An inflation adjusted wage of $5000 in 1960 represents $42.500 in 2018, which is in line with the often repeated tidbit that real wages of blue collar workers have stagnated for decades. Therefore, what you are describing is a world with similar real wages to those of today, and with real estate cheaper by a factor 2-3x, inflation and quality adjusted. That is indeed easy to imagine. What I am describing is a world where real wages are 4-5 times larger. Yes, those wealth increases could be trapped by a ballooning real estate market, where a single bedroom semi is worth $2 million at current purchasing parity, making it very similar to your world. Or something else could happen entirely, that is almost impossible to predict.