Indeed, we can choose any metric we like really, as evidenced by the current reality where most people can't afford a house but we still claim that "the economy" is "doing well"
People can afford "more house" than ever - if we look at things like square foot of housing per capita, then people in USA currently can afford almost twice as much housing space as 50 years ago in 1970s.
Yes, this is another great demonstration of how we can tell any story we want with choice of metric. I'm referring to the binary variable of home ownership, whereas your measure probably either excludes non-homeowners entirely, is only referring to the total amount of extant housing with no reference to who owns it, or counts renters the same as homeowners, painting a very different picture.
For example, I would rather live in a country where every adult can afford 1000 sqft than one where just Jeff Bezos can afford 300000000000000000 sqft and no one else can afford any (neither of these are the current world, obviously), but the latter does better on mean square-footage affordance
I'd argue is that the key aspect of housing is how much living space do people actually get to use, as that is the thing which impacts their quality of life and lifestyle; the second slightly less important aspect is how much people are paying for that (e.g. share of income left for other things), but after those two things are accounted for, the aspect of rent vs mortgage is more of a technical nuance of how that "barter of work hours for living space" is arranged.
Of course, the mean does ignore equality and variance - but while it's hard for me to find good statistics on that (perhaps census data has that analysis?), I'm quite convinced that if we'd look at the metrics of "mean square foot per capita for the x-th income quintile", we would also see that it has significantly increased since 1970s for the lowest income groups as well.
In practice the so-called "technical nuance" has huge impacts on what spaces can be used for and what guarantees can be made about the permanence of these arrangements. These factors matter considerably more to most people than the marginal value of a few hundred square feet
I have read most of these comments and found them useless. By way of background, I have lived in 16 towns, five states and two countries. Early in the Russian-Ukraine war, I watched a video about housing in rural Ukraine. It was a learning experience. If you draw a rectangle horizontally on a piece of paper, you have the basic first floor. Draw another horizontal line down a bit from the top line and about 60% of the horizontal distance. This is the kitchen counter. Above it are open shelves for dishes, pots and pans etc. In the space left of the counter was a large cabinet for storing food stuff. Coming down the left wall were coat hooks a shelf for hats and a bench for sitting on and storing boots underneath. In the middle of the room was a Stamtisch or as my family described it - a Trible table - just a plank table and in our case it could seat 20 people. In the Ukraine what I saw were benches, not chairs. At the right most part of the room was THE bathroom and space for a washing machine and dryer. In the main part of the room behind one row of benches w on a cushioned surface was a cleverly built place to sit - but not exactly. The seat slid forward toward the Stammtisch and the back would come with it - anchored at several positions by a pin. Come night and the whole thing slid forward to form a bed for four people with two at one end and two at the other end. Beneath this room (which had a 6" concrete floor) was the storage room. And below that room was the root cellar where perishables like potatoes, eggs, fruit, and sausage hanging from the ceiling and urns for pickles and sauerkraut or other foodstuff that could be preserved in brine. This room also served as a bomb shelter. There was a very large cookstove on the main floor with closable gates in the ceiling to the attic. The children slept there and the space was accessed by a metal staircase. From the videographer's work you could hear the laughter. The heat was provided (on the first floor) by what I have seen in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont was a Russian stove fed by any manner of fuels. They still make these stoves in the US and Finland. They are very efficient. The walls of these houses that I saw, after the bombing in Ukraine were of brick and mortar with the outside/inside plastered and for the most part roofs gone but much of the walls and horizontal surfaces heavily damaged but still standing.
I oft think about what my ancestors lived in when they arrived on these shores in the first quarter of the 16th century. I don't think they were unhappy. The house I grew up in, when we moved in, had gas lighting, a coal fired furnace, cooking stove and huge (to me) a coal fired round tub of some 48" for washing clothes. The five of us children washed dishes and removed the ash from the furnace, stove and wash tub. The house had a 48" thick stone foundation tapering to 18" at the second floor. In subsequent years, owners have made some nice changes. But kept the original design of the house.
Doing well relative to the previous financial period. Well compared to my parents generation or their parents generation not so much. better than my greatgrandparents generation though as the great depression makes now look like utopia. It all a matter of what your scale for comparison is.
Again, the answer you get out of the exercise of delineating "financial periods" depends a lot on how you choose to define them. I'd say for example that good candidates for "previous financial periods" could be pre-covid, pre-2008, pre-dotcom, pre-neoliberalism, or pre-ww2. Some political commentators may prefer to use presidential administration changeovers to make their various points. Since you mention it, it's worth noting that economic conditions immediately preceding the great depression have some key similarities to some of the problems we're having now (a lot of investor fuckery, monopolies, and just outright scams, a lot of adults in a condition of economic precarity, rising global geopolitical instability, etc) though obviously there are also differences.
There are many quality-of-life metrics we could choose too. For example, if you value going out on the town, the decline of so-called "third places" may be a major drop in quality of life, and if you value watching TV, the proliferation of streaming services could be the best thing that's ever happened
