Check out this FRED graph comparing median income growth and new housing price growth: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1yY7 We see that median income growth is flat at 1.8% while price growth of new housing has picked up dramatically from 1.3% in 2011 to 9.9% YoY growth in 2013.
In nominal terms median income has grown $6,000 over the past decade while the price of a new house has jumped up by approximately $70,000. In real terms (adjusted for inflation) real median income has dropped -$4,000 while new house prices have increased by $2,000. [1] I'll leave the calculation of the 10-year % change of real median values as an exercise for the reader.
As a recent grad with a decent job, there is still no way in hell I'm going to be able to afford a mortgage on any decent, middle-class house in a semi-urban area for a very, very long time, unless I want to move to Detroit or a similarly bankrupt/developing part of the US. I'm also speaking from a debt-free perspective: if I had come out of school with $100k+ in student loans, forget about it.
The only kind of jobs that are going to pay for good houses in the future are banking/tech/fortune 500, which have median salaries of ~60k right out of school and a well-compensated track to climb. These jobs are becoming increasingly scarce and hard to obtain, especially with competition from out of country talent.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to see my generation (I'm 22) having an extremely low & delayed demand for purchasing housing, and to eventually see what is happening in Detroit (houses abandoned, rotting away [2]) happen on a smaller scale across the country where there is too much housing supply for too little demand.
And no, prices will not equalize to accommodate lower salaries because real estate always appreciates in the long run...right? The Chinese, Canadians, Mexicans, Indians, and British seem to think so: foreign investments in US real estate totaled $108bn over the past year, or 8% of total existing home-sales dollar volume. Unsurprisingly, they are "spending more money on fewer homes," aka they are driving real estate bubbles in major cities such as NYC and SF. [3]
So we'll see a bunch of late 20, early 30 something's living together, splitting the rent in what would have once been a 4-6 person family house in order to make ends meet/be close to work. Maybe they'll even drive for Uber on the weekends. Welcome to the sharing economy.
[1] The median sales price of a new house in June 2005 was $226,100, which would be $279,000 in 2015 dollars. As of June 2015 the median sales price is $281,800. I used this inflation calculator because FRED didn't have an inflation-adjusted real median sales price graph: http://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=226,100...
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2010/10/detroit-house...
[3] http://realtormag.realtor.org/daily-news/2015/06/18/foreign-...