Yeah, for a lot of people it's more about trajectory than the numbers. Even going up doesn't necessarily mean anything with inflation. And it's very hard to find essentials like housing here if you don't have a lot of money. I'm not very educated on the details of all this, but something about using long term mortgages as investment vehicles seems to be screwing with the market.
I don't really understand why a low end house costs something like $100,000 but a top of the line phone costs $1,000. The education, infrastructure, and materials required to make a house are all generally speaking a lot easier to come by than all of what's required for a phone. I know you can factory build phones and you need labor for a house, but you can factory build most of what a home is made of, too, and it's not like there isn't a lot of labor involved in all kinds of parts of a phone's journey (design, marketing, manufacturing, transportation, sales). I guess most of it has to do with land being finite and all the parts that make up a house? But something about that argument doesn't sit quite right with me either. It's very weird that a basic shelter, which is something people have been building themselves for thousands of years without any of the sophisticated tools we have now, is 100x more expensive than buying one of the most sophisticated, hard to design and manufacture things yet devised by man. I know houses have heating, cooling, plumbing, electricity, etc and aren't as simple as they used to be, but the price difference still seems wonky.
For a while I fantasized about building an obscenely simple house and living like a monk to save money and see how minimal I could get. I've done some camping and feel like I'd be happy living in a tent with a YMCA membership. But that's really not an option. There's no where to put up a tent or even a very modest little shack without paying tens of thousands of dollars for a strip of land to put it on, and you're never going to find much other than apartment buildings close to most of the places the work is. So even without the social stigma of living in a tent, you can't really do it.
I'm not saying life for the average person in Africa is better, and I generally agree with the sentiment that most Americans under-appreciate all the comforts of modern life.
But what's frustrating about the whole thing is there's not really a way to opt-out, and the entry price here for "being a normal part of society" seems to require most middle or lower class people to go into debt. It's a wonky, unnatural set up.