Middle class didn’t mean a big McMansion or desirable area. It meant a modest house in a small lot in a boring suburb of someplace like Detroit where you’d work for Ford or something.

Our ideas of what kind of house we should have is really distorted. It’s like pickup trucks. What was considered an everyday pickup 40 years ago was 1/3rd the size of the behemoths available today, and of course today’s trucks cost $80,000 compared to the $6,500 of something like a ‘85 Toyota Pickup ($20k in today dollars).