It's always amazing to me that people will write these long articles and then do things like compare real median income (adjusted to account for the price of ho

It's always amazing to me that people will write these long articles and then do things like compare real median income (adjusted to account for the price of housing) with nominal rent prices. For context, here's nominal rent vs. nominal income, both indexed to 1985. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18r0r https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18r0r EDIT: Some criticisms of the charts the author uses: 1) The Case Schiller chart is in I guess "units"? The underlying data is an index to 2000, so saying it dropped '50' (going from 180% of 2000 to 130% of 2000) is for the most part meaningless. The farther you get from the year 2000, the bigger the numbers will look. 2) The investor purchases thing is just a noisy first derivative of the interest rate chart. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18r18 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18r18) 3) Population doesn't occupy houses, households do and those have grown faster than housing units. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18r1T https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18r1T) 4) See above 5) There's a lot of complex policy debate about whether or not we are in secular demand crisis, but the MBS chart is all about lowering interest rates to increase demand. I agree that has unintended consequences, but the author seems to forget that builders pay interest rates too.