How do I respond and counter my boomer family who say it was just as difficult to buy a house when they did, as it is today?

I've done a bit of research for you here. I bought my first house in 1980 at a cost of £18,000. it was, however, a fixer up and needed rewiring, central heating, a new kitchen and bathroom. So let's say it's value when done would be around £23,000 max. (I sold in in 1983 for £30k) That house today (as far as I can tell) would go for a mind boggling £230,000. We put down a deposit of £1,800 leaving a mortgage of £16,200. I was lucky in that I had a good income at the time of around £5,500 and my wife was earning something like £3,000. Interest rates at the time were generally between 10-12.5% (they did go up as high as 15% but that was later in the 80s). There was also tax relief of 50% of the standard rate on the first £30,000 of a mortgage - don't get that any more!!! So I was paying £145 per month in interest, plus the capital repayment. Now, for the same house. you would need a down payment of £23,000 giving you a mortgage of £207,000. Interest rates are around 4.5-5% so even at the lower rate you're looking at a monthly payment of £776 per month. Meanwhile wages have increased by about 450% since 1980 so our joint income of £8,500 is now around £38,250. Our mortgage cost us 20% of our gross income (it was actually about 25% of the net). Your mortgage will be 24% of the gross. That doesn't allow for the increase in the cost of the capital repayment and, of course, the biggest difficulty is finding £23,000. I've always felt that the struggle of the present generation was somewhat equivalent to the struggle we had but it is, in fact, some 20% worse. Having said that, someone who first entered the market in, say, 1984 would have had a worse time than we did as house prices sky rocketed during the early 1980s. We also had very high inflation which meant that the struggle became easier quite quickly as wages rose but the mortgage payment remained about the same. In short, house price have risen at twice the rate of wages but interest rates are now much lower.