Fair points, but how can housing be more "affordable" if the only way the numbers work is to shift from a one-earner to a two-earner family?  You are right that the subject of the NYT article is not the shift to two-income families, but the article is about housing affordability.  The data cited are built on the size of the family's income--and that has undergone a profound change because of the addition of a second worker.  

I don't think it is possible to talk about meaningfully about affordability without acknowledging that two earners now struggle to buy what one earner bought a generation ago.  That economic fact of life is hard on couples and almost impossible for single-parent families or those couples who want to keep someone at home with the children.  For them, homes are nowhere near as affordable as they were twenty or thirty years ago.  

My father used to track these changes by what job level people had in his office when they bought a house.  In the sixties, new grads got married, bought a house, had a baby and the wife stayed home.  Also, another variable was that the wife would work until they saved up a down payment for a house (living on husband's salary, saving hers).  Now people can't afford houses until they are in a management position, and usually wait until it is time for the kids to go to school.

The rising house sizes is a bit of a sidetrack - developers are building bigger houses to maximize profits.  Two new houses were built on an underdeveloped lot on my street. They are easily quadruple the square footage of our house.  The new neighbors are now bitching about their heating costs. 

The Times tends to be 6 to 9 months behind any real estate trend.  When I first started in real estate in 1980 I had this discussion with my accountant.  It was his view that his generation could relatively easily afford the $10,000 to $20,000 homes of the 1950s but that those graduating college in the late 70s or early 80s could not so readily afford the equivalent house.  

The point about two income families is interesting but doesn't the entire middle class  life style from college costs to the latest televisions require two income families?

This stuff about more house than before is not born out by housing trends in the NY Merto Area.

Please read the article we are talking about.  One emphasis is that NYC and LA and DC are not typical for the US as a whole.  Yes housing is inflated in NYC.  Move to Buffalo, you'll spend less than 10% of your earnings on housing, rather than 40% in NYC.

My father used to track these changes by what job level people had in his office when they bought a house.  In the sixties, new grads got married, bought a house, had a baby and the wife stayed home.  Also, another variable was that the wife would work until they saved up a down payment for a house (living on husband's salary, saving hers).

Ask your Dad how many of those people he watched got their 20% down payment from their parents.

My parents got married in 1955 and weren't able to buy a house until 1970 because their parents didn't "help out" with the down payment like with most of their friends. They lived in a Midwestern city, had 5 kids, my father had a white collar government job (which required that he live within the city line rather than commute from a cheaper area) where after being the first in his family to go to college (on GI bill,) he was paid a bit less than many of his relation with blue collar union jobs, and my mother never worked.

My Dad would try to get that down payment working like a dog on 2nd jobs (Manpower manual day labor, selling real estate--I hand-addressed the mass mailings for him from the reverse phone books as a grade schooler) They went to open houses on Sundays for years but could never get a down payment together, the extra 2nd job money always went for the dental bills or repairing that used car or for the parochial school tuition because he thought it would help his kids get ahead.

For good or bad, the new 80-10-10 financing has allowed many more like them to own their own home sooner.

And on the New York City arguments on this thread:

Do not confuse Manhattan and the rest of NYC. Manhattan has virtually no middle class in it except those with inherited rent control.

I live in the Bronx and have recently been forced to learn about the real estate market here up close and personal. Single family homes in many of the neighborhoods here are $350,000-$500,000 and are easily afforded by working class immigrants. Many buy 2 or 3 family homes to increase their personal wealth through equity and rent to other immigrants. My neighborhood is filled with immigrants that own their own homes, from like 50 countries. For good or bad, they all jump on the new kinds of financing, they believe in it, to them that's "American opportunity."

If you want to understand New York City real estate, read the New York Times Sunday real estate section, not the Business Section econo-analyst-speak on it, which usually is only addressing housing between 96th street and Wall Street in Manhattan, the world of the international wealthy who have driven up the market by buying pied-a-terres that are not their homes. The Real Estate section, it's an excellent product, I highly recommend it. It tells much more truth about the market than the business writers do. By reading the columns in the weekly "Thinking of Living In?" series, which are all available on line permanently, you can learn what New York City is really like and how people live within the city limits, and in the 70 miles surrounding it, what the neighborhoods are like, what they cost, what they offer, and how you commute from them; you'll learn that "New York City" is like 100 different cities and people of all income levels live and or work within or around it, a little bit like a microcosm of the real estate market nationwide.

There is no lack of affordable housing near New York City and there never has been; there are only people who don't want to commute much or who look down their noses at living anywhere but the isle of Manhattan. The mass transit here and the urban development has made it so.

Sorry I can't leave it alone.  Every new example I think of and google the statistics, seems that Americans are consuming more and more every year.  For instance restaurant meals relentlessly eat up a larger portion of food dollars every year.  (Hardly anyone ate out in the 1950's.)  Travel and vacation spending continues to increase.  I'm trying to think of non-necessities, that would be cut first in economic hardship.

It implies the standard of living in the US continues to increase.  Not for everyone, that's for sure.  Economic life has always been tough for the single parent.  In the past the single parent would not have considered home ownership an option at all (no stats on that one, I made it up).

I think that part of the problem with putting the current real estate market into any sort of economic context is that housing the current housing bubble really is inflationary but it's not measured as inflation.  If you own a home at the moment, good for you... the drawback is, of course, a larger local property tax bill, but the advantage is the opportunity to borrow against you home, if you want or need to.

But, for renters and prospective property owners, even given that you have to put less down to get a mortgage than ever before, the current market is inflation to the extent that's rarely seen.  Think about it this way, we've had press about a "real estate bubble" for three years now.  That means that buying in is expensive.  That's great for current owners but it isn't so great for people trying to switch from renting to owning.

This current real estate bubble has bolstered our entire economy and I won't suggest that the current owners don't deserve their returns, but it doesn't speak well for the aspirant classes or the people trying to move up.

This is basically unrecorded inflation, I think, and inflation is bad for the economy as a whole.  Look at it this way... in 2000, before the tech/telecom bubble burst, inflation in the stock market wasn't included in our national inflation figures.  Heck, our national figures showed low inflation and growth forever, driven by a market that had peaked.  Real estate is different than stocks and, chances are, there won't be so dramatic a bubble burst in real estate, if only because real estate is nowhere near as liquid as shares in a company you've never heard of, and yet... nothing goes up forever.  That stat about 20% down for a house dropping to 3%?  That6's evidence that prices have risen to the point where buyers can't pay.  That's not good news. 

"I am open to your viewpoint, that the shift to the two-earner family has been driven by need.  It certainly is for some people.  And it certainly is the conventional wisdom.  However pending real data I don't believe it's true for most people.  I believe that the shift to the two-earner family has been driven by 1) opportunity and 2) want."

I think this is true. A study by the economists Juhn and Murphy found that the biggest increase of women in the workforce can be traced back to an increasing number of wives of well-to-do men pushing into the labor force. Among women whose husbands earned hourly wages in the bottom fifth of the distribution, the growth in labor market participation slowed down in contrast to the overall trend. They concluded that economic necessity was not the predominant factor that caused women to enter the labor force in the past quarter century.

Also, in surveys, an increasing number of women say they freely choose to work outside the home and they prefer it to being a homemaker. 50 percent of women said so in 1999, in contrast to 35 in 1974. 

I've always felt (to over simplify a bit) that when women joined the work force in greater numbers that this just meant that there were twice as many people bidding for essentially the same amount of work.

With twice the labor pool one can expect the value of an individual to go down to half. As I said this is a simplification, but it must have had an effect as well as the fact tht women typically earn less (about 70%) then men. This also puts a downward pressure on wage levels.

The other trends keeping down the wage levels for workers are the decline of unions and the rise of immigration. These are both government supported policies.

Warren's point about affordability is fine, and she pinpoints the problem: "A fully-employed male today makes (in inflation-adjusted dollars) about $800 less than his counterpart thirty years ago." But then it seems odd to focus on whether housing costs have done enough to compensate. Heck, neither have food costs or the sorry state of public education that might incur other costs or any number of things, although I realize that housing is everyone's biggest expense, or at least it will be until the lack of universal health care and declining pension benefits really hit home.

And the comments, too, seem to me to go to far to accentuate that odd shift in topic over to costs ("need") or dumb consumers ("want," too many gadgets) or even the upside of progress in women's rights ("opportunity"). All interesting, but so much is left out. No question that the income and benefits gap between rich and poor keeps growing, especially under Reagan and Bush II, and any discussion that diverts us from America's pro-business, anti-human policies can only do so much to help.

...because so many families are so dependent on having a dual income to make ends meet, they are ill-equipped to deal with a possible loss of one of the incomes - as a result of divorce, illness, job loss, or whatever.

I don't see how two sources of income can possibly make a middle class family less secure.  Were all the single-income, middle-class families well equiped to deal with the loss of that income?

In Flint, MI when the big three auto manufacturers started closing their plants, the answer was pretty emphatically no.

Two income families may not be more secure than a single income family was back in the day, but it's hard to see how they're actually less secure. 

any discussion that diverts us from America's pro-business, anti-human policies can only do so much to help.

I beg to differ. There is plenty wrong with the US today, but there is also plenty right.  The NYT writes plenty of articles about the downside -- they are hardly appologists.  But this particular NYT article in question is about an upside.

It seems eminently reasonable to me to compare the cost of home ownership with the total income of the occupants of that home.  Then lo and behold -- it's been flat, in spite of the alarmist news of the bubble we've been hearing for many years now.  Maybe this equilibrium will end with the advent of higher interest rates.   A worry for the future.

If you only focus on what's wrong, you'll get plenty of cheers on the internet.  But most Americans know they are living in amidst mixed blessings and travails.

The bubble isn't that great for people in the market, either, because profit is only realized when the property is sold or refinanced. For a family that just wants a place to live, the bubble means they can sell their house, but can't afford to buy another one. In our area that's true even if you sell a bigger house to buy a smaller one, because the prices of the smaller houses have increased faster than the income it would take to support the payments, and the cash-out value of the larger home won't make 20% on the smaller, even with the appreciation. It's like jumping off a moving train, then trying to jump back on again -- it doesn't work.

Ooh. One of the great failures of the Women's Movement is the burden it placed on motherhood.  But that's what happens when people get strung along from anything that trickles down from the top. Yeah, the Right used it as a way of divesting wealth from the middle classes of the late twentieth century.  But by that time, Glroia Steinem was giving Feminist Awards to the likes of Cindy Lauper and spreading the word around about those non-existent tunnels at McMartin Preschool.