Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2026/08/Median-Lot-Sizes-by-Region...

If you're buying a $700k house there are only a few parts of the country where your statement is true, and frankly much of that comes down to a few cities and metro areas. The idea that people buying a house in rural NC today and 30 years ago are somehow facing radically different (inflation adjusted) lot prices doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

But again, if you want to look at houses in the 1970's then you have to remember that the US population has risen by 150,000,000 since then... the land is the same size. The cities that everyone wants to live and work in are mostly the same with some changes in the Pacific coast of course. You're also competing with far more people who have relatively more money to spend, including a willingness to go into serious debt, to live their "dream".