It's probably a combinations of many factors. Here are some theories, and they could play together: - the population has grown a lot. The demand is way higher,

It's probably a combinations of many factors. Here are some theories, and they could play together: - the population has grown a lot. The demand is way higher, but the offer is propotionally smaller. - competition is disapearing. Big companies are buying or killing the small builders more and more. They set the prices. They have overhead. They can lobby or corrupt. - we have more requirements than before. Safety. Going green. Labor laws. This is not free. We are only paying them now because the infra from decades ago was still holding. - complexity has increased. There are more electricity cables, more water and evacuation pipes, internet cables, gaz pipes, etc. - price of material has increased. The demand is global now. 3 billions of Asians need roads too. - administrative burden is higher. This has unexpected costs. Not to mentions insurances and the risk of being sued. - people are not ready to work as much, and for as little money as before. In my grandma's time, there were plenty of people living very simply, in homes with the bare minimum, working 60 hours a week for a ridiculously small pay. They don't show you that in the movies about "the good old times". - we have less skilled people than before in those industries compared to the technical level it needs now. Because of our failing education system, the disapearence of parallel ways of learning (you could become good at a trade without going to college 80 years ago) and the lack of respect we show to manual workers, the ones remaining to do the job are often not that good. But the requirements are higher than before. - we are used to automation. We have machines doing everything for us. Mechanized processes are expensive if not on a mass scale. There are many things that could be made cheaper, but it would require more skill (and painful work conditions) to do them without those tools. Also, while we are getting better at doing hight tech stuff, we are losing knowledge for the mondain tasks. - it compounds. Industries don't exist in a vaccum. They depend of each other. If machine maintenance, food making and traning people also suffer from the all those same problems, it will affect the building industries situation and hence, prices.