First, you conveniently ignore my second link which points out that housing prices, across
all houses, not the cherry picked most expensive subset you picked, when adjusted correctly, have been pretty flat. Care to address that? It's been well known that housing prices, per sq ft, inflation adjusted, has not risen according to the pop belief that you share. Here's another easy way to see it - median home prices since 1950, inflation adjusted, have not even doubled since 1950 [1]. Median home sizes each decade since 1920 [2] show that house size have far more than doubled. 1950 was 980 sq ft. 1970 was 1500. 2014 was 2657 (latest on their chart). It sure look like if you picked a 1950 house you'd be paying, well, 1950 rates, doesn't it?
Some numbers from each: Feb 1954 house price $206,717 inflation adjusted. April 2023, $392,780 (the largest value). House sizes: 1950 was 983 ft^2. 2014 was 2657 ft^2 (feel free to chase down sizes for now if you like). 1950 was ~$210/ft^2. 2023 likely ~$147/ft^2.
Care to check the math? Sure seems like housing has not increased (well, it actually decreased significantly by this check) when correctly measured.
Houses cost more now because people want more, and also because they make more than in 1950, inflation adjusted.
Next, new houses in most of the country are built on new residential land as cities expand. Where do you think that land comes from? Farmland. Farmland provides a price floor on new housing, as developers buy it up and add subdivisions.
As to your oddly chosen subset of land: your list is not inflation adjusted. It's also the top 100 metro areas, not the median of house prices in the US. Of course you can pick smaller and smaller subsets to get the answer you want.
The median house in 1950 was under 1/4 acre. From the table below on price per acre, it sure would seem land is not the major factor in house costs.
So, can you provide the correct stat or not? Don't pick the highest cost subset of land. Don't pick non inflation adjusted values. And make it the median of all housing.
Here, I'll help. Here is median price per acre of land with housing on it in the US, by state [3]. It also has the median price per acre, including farmland. Use Excel, check the correlation. If you are to do it, you can also population weight these, add median house cost per state (easy to find), etc.
It's pretty clear the cost of a house is not majority the land, except perhaps in a few really dense, extreme outliers like NYC and SF.
No wonder you believe the highest component of house cost is land. You have not presented actual numbers, only picked the subsets that you like.
Try again. Also, please address the now 3 links I presented about housing costs when size adjusted.
[1] https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
[2] https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...
[3] https://www.inmyarea.com/moving/buying-land-analysis