We’ve all done it. Drive by a house you owned a decade ago. For sale sign on the lawn. You slow, look at the realtor’s number, call it on your cell, ask the price, and guffaw. What idiot, you wonder, would pay that much for it? Then you wish you were selling it again.

Without a doubt, housing prices in cities like Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver have inflated excessively. In fact, to the point where homes are severely unaffordable according to international standards. As this blog tries to remind, asset values never rise without end. Prices always find their mean. All booms end badly. And this market’s overdue for correction.

But how about a longer comparison. Say, a generation or two?

How does an average family’s buying power today compare with that of a family six or seven decades ago? Are the same houses more or less affordable than they used to be? And, if not, how and why are prices continuing to rise?

A day ago I received a delightful note from a woman in Toronto who apparently hangs around here this viral hellhole. “Instead of wasting our precious time slamming our head against the wall, we’ve rented a fabulous big apartment which we got at a steal as it was a renters market and negotiated hard,” she reports. “We have trips planned this year to South America, Vegas, the UK and Iceland. I’m probably taking my Mom on a cruise as well to celebrate her retirement.  Better that we are off making memories with loved ones and doing what we love than lining a banker’s pocket. Seriously, your blog was exactly the wake-up call I needed. It freed me from the emotional and very real financial chains I would have put around myself.”

But she goes on to say something more profound, recounting one of those moments which should make us reflect on what we have done to modern life:

“I saw my grandparents old house on Gladstone Avenue in Toronto was for sale. It’s the house my Mom was born in.  I wasn’t considering buying it, but I did for one brief moment feel a bit of “what if …. ”   It was listed for $429,000 – 3 bedrooms and from the pics, very poky living in it. It sold for $531,000.

“My grandparents were people of modest means and this was their first house. My grandad worked for CP rail and my grandmother worked at home to raise their small family.

“Flash forward 60 years and their dual-income, well-paid, debt free grandchild can’t afford their poky west Toronto semi. Well, actually the bank would give me the money, but that is not affording it.”

It’s hard to see how anyone’s better off when homes are unattainable or debts stretched through an entire adult lifetime. In the last 12 months, Toronto prices have increased 19%. Wages have risen 0%. Household debt’s surged dramatically. Mortgages have crested.

You can walk down Gladstone and touch the same bricks, be shaded by the same trees, as families did a generation ago.

And if you listen closely, you might hear a distant echo of the middle class.