This is another chapter in the Before Time series of articles (here’s the last one) written by those who experienced those times for the sake of the edification of those who are too young to have experienced them and so have no knowledge of how things were, once.

My parents bought their first house in 1969 – in Stamford, CT. It was a split level in a nice suburban neighborhood, sitting on about a half-acre of land. They paid about $33,000 for it, equivalent in today’s devalued currency to about $300,000. I decided to check what the old house would cost today.

First, though, how about what it costs to not be evicted from it, today. Planned Chaos Ludwig von Mises Best Price: $1.99 Buy New $9.95 (as of 07:55 UTC - Details)

According to the latest public records data I could find, the annual property tax on the old house is currently $10,530. In other words, three years of property taxes on the old house in our time amounts to as much as my parents paid for the house back in the Before Time of 1969. In inflated-equivalent currency, it would come to about $2k per year, if my parents had been obliged to pay this rent (on top of their mortgage) with 1969 money. In five years’ time, they’d have had to pay a third again in rent – which is what “property taxes’ amount to – than they paid for the house.

As in the whole thing.

But they didn’t have to pay that much because it was 1969 – the Before Time – and both the taxes on the house and the house were affordable in those times.

Neither are today.

You have just read about the taxes on the house. How about the cost of house, itself? In these times, that is.

According to the latest Redfin estimate, the old house would list for $1.3 million if it were put on the market today. If that’s how much the house cost in 1969, my parents would have had to come up with about $150,000 in 1969 dollars, a or somewhere in between four and fives time as much as they had to come up with when they actually bought the house in ’69.

Which they were able to do because the house didn’t cost 4-5 times as much then as it does now.

Fast forward about 27 years to the time when I bought my first house, in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

It was possible for me to buy a house because it was still possible at the time – the 1990s – to buy a small house in the DC suburbs for around $170,000 or so. More finely, because it was possible for a young person to save up the 10 percent down payment that’s generally necessary to qualify for a home loan. In my case, this amounted to about $17,000. Not a small sum but also not an impossible sum. Save about $2,500 per year for about six years and you had enough to put down on the $170k house and that’s exactly what I did. The 5-Ingredient Cookb... Kelly, Benjamin Best Price: $4.98 Buy New $10.89 (as of 09:07 UTC - Details)

Because I could.

I looked up my first house on Redfin and discovered that if it were to be put on the market today, the asking price would be in the vicinity of $630k. That is an increase (unadjusted for devaluation) of $460k – nearly half a milion dollars – over about 28 years. Adjusted, it is a real-money (well, buying power of money) difference of about $300k, now vs. then.

Ten percent down today would mean $63,000 – an all-but-impossible sum for anyone who isn’t already the owner of a home (who can tap the inflated equity of their home to swing the down payment on a new home) to come up with on their own. It would take saving $10k for six years or $5k for 20, by which time a person in their 20s would be well into their 40s.

And then you’d have to pay the mortgage on a $630k first house. Plus the rent styled “property taxes.”

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