80K 30 years ago is is 175K today, probaby more if you think about purchasing power.

you were upper middle class dude.

but also where you live matters. 6 figures is nothing in a major city. it's a lot in a rural area or minor city. six figures in nyc/sf/boston/seattle is a necessity for a studio apartment. if you make like 60-80K you need roommates.

my dad made like 25K a year so we had to live 2-2.5 hours from a major city in order to afford a basic life. when he retired at 66 he was only making 50K a year in 2004, and we still lived 1.5 hours from a major city even though we had 'upgraded' from the crappy rural town to a exurb.

Big keyword there is Union it helped even people not in the union. Graph union membership to avg income from 1970 onwards and its crystal clear.

People who have not looked for apartments or houses right now have no idea what the true cost is. We just moved and to rent a house in our old neighborhood (1700sqft, 2 car garage, nice suburb but build in the 80s, near the freeway) is $2100/month. The first apartment I rented out of college is now $1500/month and it was a 1 bedroom 650sqft. Not luxury or anything, a normal inner city apartment.

Before my dad retired, he ran his own business. Nothing big, just him and a couple of others, but enough to afford a decent sized house, two cars, and a comfortable lifestyle.

A few years ago, he and I were talking about how the CoL has gone crazy since the early 2000s and he looked up the apartment he rented while he was in college in the 80s. It's still there, a small studio apartment in the city near the college. In his own words, he said that the cost to rent that apartment a couple of years ago was more than he made running his own business.

Where I live - wages have always been shitty but it was a low cost of living city (we literally had the lowest grocery prices in the nation and housing market was "depressed". You could and can always get a job of some sort here, and because costs were low a roommate or two got you through with money to go to shows on the weekend or have a car. And a cat!

Housing and food now are average for the nation but wages are still lower here than average.

My NET pay after taxes and benefits and 401k is not twice the average rent for a one bedroom apartment here now. And you used to be able to rent houses so cheap, there were slumlords and people who owned a couple of houses and rented one out. No more. A house costs more than my whole monthly net to rent, before electricity or water, just the rent.

We bought a house for 5x what my old shithole of a house did cost (and there are none of those left, they get flipped or torn down for luxury housing) and even that amount would be cheap for it now, and we love it, but yeah we struggle with the cost to pay for it and maintain it. That's a choice, yes, and we know it, but in a very limited set of choices.

All that is being built is high end expensive housing but there are not many people here earning enough for that.