Two incomes let a household bid more, and more buying power pushes prices up. The timing in that theory is off, though. The share of dual-income households has been roughly flat, even slightly down, over the last couple of decades. The big surge came earlier, mainly through the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. So it's less a current force and more a one-time structural shift that already happened. When you ask why home prices sit so high relative to incomes, two long-run drivers do most of the work: - That earlier multi-decade rise in dual-income households, which lifted household income even in periods when individual wages lagged. - The roughly forty-year decline in interest rates, from the mid-to-high teens in the early 1980s down to below 3% at the pandemic low. This one is probably the larger of the two. Both were enormous one-time tailwinds that are unlikely to repeat at that scale. Going from 15% to 3% does far more for affordability than any further modest move could, the same way adding a second earner did more than a theoretical third earner ever would. That's the honest reason prices are where they are, and it's why we don't assume those two tailwinds come back to keep bailing out affordability.