How’s Your Memory?

Another Memory
“The typical monthly mortgage payment that Bay Area buyers committed themselves to paying last month was $1,491, up from $1,473 in April, and down from $1,533 a year ago. Adjusted for inflation, last month’s payment was 47.0 percent below the typical payment in spring 1989, the peak of the prior real estate cycle. It was 60.8 percent below the current cycle’s peak in July 2007.
”
47% Below 1989

I forgot to connect the above with the “money ‘graphs” from the Bloomberg piece:

The behavior of wealthier households can have an adverse effect on less-wealthy people, Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist, wrote in an e-mail, describing the phenomenon as a “positional arms race.”

“Additional spending by the rich shifts the frame of reference that defines what the near-rich consider necessary or desirable, so they too spend more,” he wrote…“Such expenditure cascades help explain why the median new house built in the U.S. is now about 50 percent larger than its counterpart from 30 years ago, even though the median real wage has risen little since then,” Frank wrote.

Emphasis added.
Of course, when regulators and congress let banksters run wild securitizing mortgages and creating derivatives, the increased availability of credit substitutes (at least it did during the credit bubble) for real household income, allowing “less-wealthy people” to, if not keep up with the Joneses, at least follow them closely behind.

both good points, lol. I think you’re right about consumption of cheap items imported from Asia, but a lot of rooms (going on/by what I’ve seen over the past four years) that are present in newly-built large homes aren’t for storage, they’re much larger closets and bathrooms and bedrooms.
This is from a summary of a story I originally watched on “60 Minutes” in 2005, ‘Living Large’:

Those Joneses are everywhere…building…McMansions or starter castles.

Whatever you want to call them, Bob Toll, whose company builds more than 8,000 houses a year, calls them money in the bank.

The “Hampton” is Toll’s best selling model. How does it compare in square footage with his best selling model of five or six years ago? “Well, five or six years ago the best selling model had about 3,200 feet in it,” Toll says. “And the standard model of this has, I believe, about 4,600 feet.”

Fueling this market for larger homes, Toll says, is the fact that the number of families with an income above $100,000 a year has grown six times faster than the overall U.S. population.

A family of 3.6 people is a typical customer for the Hampton model, which has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, kitchen, a dining room, living room, family room, study, conservatory and a nameless room, simply called a bonus.

Emphasis mine, and of course that was before the credit bubble burst.
It still really comes down to the gilded-age levels of income inequality that we’re going through. The 1% has more money than they know what to productively do with.
I think you’re right that conspicuous consumption is usually at the expense of time, but that’s mostly for families that are income constrained. For these families, they have more money than they know what to profitably do with, and so the engage in large home purchases/remodels/construction because they have copious amounts of both money and time.