Just saw some wild housing numbers that put things in perspective. Rent nowadays is absolutely brutal compared to what it was back in the 1970s. The median rent in 1970 was around $108 a month, which sounds almost unreal when you think about what people are paying now. Fast forward to late 2023 and we're looking at nearly $2,000 for a typical rental, with one-bedrooms averaging $1,499 and two-bedrooms hitting $1,856.

What really gets me is how much of people's paychecks this eats up. Back in 1970, when adjusted for inflation, the average annual income was about $24,600. Today that number sits around $59,000 for the national average. So incomes roughly doubled, but rent went up like 18 times over. Half of all renters in the U.S. are spending more than 30% of their income just on housing, and over 12 million people are dropping at least half their paycheck on rent alone.

The Harvard folks studying housing say the real shift started in the 1970s recession, which created the first major gap in affordability. Then the Great Recession in the late 2000s basically accelerated everything. Now we're dealing with this affordability crisis where the math just doesn't work for middle-class families anymore. It's not even close to how much was rent in 1970 compared to the situation people face today. The gap keeps widening and there's no sign of it slowing down.