> That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable.
I think my fellow millennials are overlooking something in our complaints about housing prices, which is that the positional status of neighborhoods doesn't stay constant. There's a good chance that the neighborhood you fondly remember growing up in was much less desirable in relative terms than it is today.
My wife and I, for example, bought a house 10 years ago. In that time, the value has easily doubled, growing far faster than wages or inflation. But it's also a completely different product today. 10 years ago, we were young parents willing to make a lot of compromises to get a house on the water. Pre-COVID, the commute was 1:15 minutes each way, 5 days a week. The house next door was a tear-down with a tree growing in the living room. The other houses on the street were small cottages from the 1920s. Today, half of them have been torn down, rebuilt, and filled with more affluent neighbors.
If my kids grow up and say, "I have a professional job, why can't I afford a house like you guys did?" A big part of the answer is: we couldn't have afforded to live in their neighborhood at your age. We bought our house in a completely different neighborhood.