How do you respond to elderly people who say it was harder to purchase a house in the 60s than it is now?

As someone who was brought up in the sixties, it was a very different time. I haven't tried looking up the numbers. However, buying your own house wasn't very common for the average working person. The norm in many industrial areas was to get yourself onto the council house waiting list in the hope that you could get a place when you got married. If that didn't work, you probably had to stay with parents initially or find some grotty bedsit - which certainly wouldn't have had central heating or double glazing. Single young people were very unlikely to be buying their own place. This started to change in the eighties. I bought myself a one bed Barratt fiat. That was still something of a new thing. I don't" remember it as being easy. Moved in without any furniture, a mattress on the floor and a Baby Belling on the kitchen worktop. To look at affordability, you will need to consider pay rates, income tax rates (the lowest rate was thirty percent), prices (and what you got - no carpets, fitted kitchens, appliances or central heating). Couples would usually be buying on one salary. There were no fixed rate mortgage deals - you went to a building society and paid the variable national rate. You would probably have to show the manager that you had been saving and that you had a good steady job. Against that, you would not have a student loan to pay off. Fewer people were students in the first place. There was tax relief on mortgage interest (though that just put prices up). Now? Plainly prices are very high in places like London. The option of a Council House is largely just not there. However, looking around Scotland, there are lots of new houses going up and being lived in by quite young couples who run two decent cars. Except in dodgy areas, everything looks more prosperous than in the sixties - take a look at pictures of Glasgow housing in that period. Restaurants, bars etc are much more common than then and I see lots of young people using them and spending money. The motorways are full of rather expensive cars. There is an expectation of multiple foreign holidays rather than a week at Butlins So, plainly buying houses is not easy. Young people are funding themselves with big debts for things like student loans that weren't an issue in the sixties. Is life actually more difficult for the average young person? Don't really know. Maybe I'll try and dig out the numbers!