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Notes -
That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago. My mother who grew up in the Midwest never laid eyes on a burrito until she was at least in her 20s. My father grew up in the SF bay area, so he likely ate them from a young age, but he's in a small minority. And even he didn't have access to sushi or other such "exotic" food we take for granted today.
But my point is that I think you are probably doing better than your parents and you are simply failing to recognize it (or if not you personally, then at least the average member of your cohort). Your kids are 4 to a bedroom, but you admit that is because you are simply prioritizing your spending differently. You are spending more on things like food and healthcare and in exchange receiving much higher quality food and healthcare than your father's generation did. My burrito question is emblematic of this fact. And you can't just handwave away modern cars and phones and TVs and the internet and everything else your father didn't have. You are objectively choosing to spend money to get more and better stuff in other areas of your life for yourself and your children, and in exchange you are settling for slightly worse housing. You and your family are objectively better off overall.
I completely agree we need to address affordability, because it's good to do that regardless of whether people are doing better than their parents or not. There are a bunch of simple things we can do to accomplish that, but they largely lack political support: deregulate housing and make it much easier to build, get rid of tariffs, lower taxes and government spending.
I think either the '+' is doing more work than it should there, or you mean something more like 50+ years -- I grew up in the 80s in very-small-town Canada, and frozen burritos were literally available at the corner store. They were terrible ofc, to the extent that a strong case could be made against them even belonging in the category -- but people certainly knew what burritos were.
I can't imagine the Midwest being so very different as not to have its own terrible burrito factory at the time?
I can't swear that the first time I saw soft tacos in the grocery store was before 1990, but I'm pretty sure they were a thing -- maybe they'd be called "wraps" in the 80s, but it was hardly an exotic concept.
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Where did I admit that?
No this isn't what is happening. I can compare exactly my father's new constuction price to his income in the early 90s and the price of a house of similar sqft today in the same zipcode against my income and the ratios are very different.
Again. telling people that there aren't actually affordability issues because you know better than them about how they're just wasteful with money is a braindead strategy, but sure keep trying to make it.
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