Mina, you can also look at the cost of clothing, food, transportation, etc. Americans spend a lower percentage of their income for all these categories except housing.
One other interesting point:
Some people argue that inflation is understated, because of the way the "basket of goods" changes over time with substitutions. Like if people used to eat more beef than they do now, then beef is weighted less in the price index today than it was in the past, and so a rising beef price won't drive higher inflation rates as much as it would if the 'basket of goods' had been held constant. But, that cuts both ways.... and arguably cuts harder the other way. The CPI calculation also substitutes vastly superior products today for inferior ones of the past.
Consider a typical car. For inflation calculation purposes, a typical car from 1982 is treated as if it were equivalent to a typical car today, and their prices are compared to see how much costs have gone up. But they're not at all equivalent. Cars today have standard features that were considered luxuries in 1982 (power windows), and luxury features that weren't available at any price in 1982 (GPS).
Even in terms of raw performance, they're vastly different. Like take a 1982 Corvette. It had a 0-60 time of 8.1 seconds:
https://www.corvsport.com/corvette-0-60-mph-times/
You could do better with 2 liter, 4-cylinder Honda Civic today:
https://www.fernandezhonda.com/0-60-2021-honda-civic/
So, if not for substitutions, you'd be comparing today's entry-level economy boxes to high-end sports cars of the early 1980's, and inflation of cars would look much lower.
Or for an even more extreme example, consider electronics. In 1982, 8.4 megabytes of external electronic storage cost $4,495. Currently, at Walmart, you can buy 4TB of external hard drive storage for $89.
https://bramanswanderings.com/2014/09/25/1982-computer-prices/
https://www.walmart.com/browse/electronics/hard-drives-storage/3944_3951_1073804_514537
So, how much would you need to spend at 1982's per-byte rate to get yourself 4TB? It would set you back about
$2.1 BILLION. That storage you can get for $89 at Walmart today would have cost you the equivalent of a small nation's GDP in 1982. And yet even that doesn't capture the superiority of today's product, since 4TB of storage in 1982 would have taken acres of servers burning huge amounts of energy and taking minutes to find and retrieve any piece of info, whereas that 4TB drive today is something you can fit in your pocket and power for next to nothing, with near-instant retrieval times. Yet the inflation calculation doesn't factor in how much more expensive such things would have been in the past. It just treats that external hard drive from 1982 as equivalent to the one today, and calculates the deflation on that basis, just as it treats a compact car of 1982 as the equivalent to one today, even though today's is vastly superior.
That applies to housing, too. As already shown above, square footage for modern homes is way up, relative to what they were in 1982. And quality is up generally, with modern homes generally having better insulation, more conveniences, higher-quality fixtures and appointments (e.g., tile in place of vinyl, granite in place of formica), and so on. But the "housing price indices" tend to treat a median home today as if it were identical to a median home in 1982, so that you can just compare their costs to find housing price inflation, rather than comparing a median home today to the higher-end house of 1982 that was roughly equivalent in terms of size and quality.
