Just been reading about housing costs over the decades and wow, the rent situation has gotten wild. Back in 1980, how much was rent in 1980? The median monthly rent was around $243, which sounds insane by today's standards. By mid-2022 it had jumped to $1,388 - that's almost a 6x increase in 40+ years.

What really caught my attention is the wage growth didn't come close to keeping up. When you adjust for inflation, the average income in 1980 was roughly $29,300. Fast forward to 2023 and it's around $59,384. So wages basically doubled, but rent increased way more than that. The math just doesn't work for a lot of people.

According to the data I found, rent has been climbing about 9% annually since 1980. That's consistently outpacing salary growth by a huge margin. By 2022, half of all renters were spending over 30% of their income just on housing. Over 12 million people were paying at least half their paycheck on rent. The question 'how much was rent in 1980' might seem like a simple history question, but it really highlights how the affordability crisis developed. The 1970s recession kicked things off, but the gap just kept widening from there.