A House Cost 164 Ounces of Gold in 1913. Now It Costs 91.

In 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was created, a median American home cost about $3,395. Today that same median home costs around $420,000. That's a 124-fold increase. If you follow housing news, you already know the feeling — it's the reason young families feel priced out, the reason "housing crisis" headlines never stop, the reason entire generations believe homeownership is slipping away from them.

But there's another way to measure the same house. In 1913, gold traded at $20.67 per ounce. A median home cost roughly 164 ounces of gold. In 2026, with gold near $4,600 per ounce, that same median home costs about 91 ounces.

Read that again. Measured in gold, a house costs roughly half what it did 113 years ago — despite being twice the size and dramatically better in every way.

So which is it — did houses get 124 times more expensive, or did they barely move? The answer depends entirely on what you measure with. And that difference might be the most important thing about money that nobody taught you in school.

The raw numbers

Before we interpret anything, let's lay out the data. The table below shows the median American home price at three points in history: 1913 (the year the Fed was born), 1970 (peak Bretton Woods era), and 2026 (today). Each price is shown in dollars, in ounces of gold, and in ounces of silver. The numbers come from the US Census Bureau, the London Bullion Market Association, and the US Treasury's official gold price history.

Year	Median Home (USD)	Gold / oz	Home in Gold (oz)	Home in Silver (oz)
1913	$3,395	$20.67	164	~5,650
1970	$23,000	$35.00	657	~13,000
2026	$420,000	~$4,600	~91	~8,700

In dollars, the story is a straight line upward: $3,395 to $23,000 to $420,000. Each generation pays dramatically more than the last. This is the only version of the story that mainstream economics tells — rising home prices, rising costs, rising anxiety.

In gold, the shape is completely different. It's an inverted U: 164 ounces, then a spike to 657 ounces, then down to 91. The beginning and end are not identical, but the direction is clear: homes have gotten cheaper in gold, not more expensive. The question that should immediately jump out at you is: what happened in the middle? Why did homes appear to cost four times as much gold in 1970 as they did in 1913 or 2026?

That spike isn't what it looks like. And understanding why changes everything about how you think about prices, savings, and what a dollar actually is. We'll get there. But first, a fair objection.

What a "median house" actually was

The obvious pushback is that you can't compare a 1913 house to a 2026 house. They're completely different products. And that's true — which actually makes the gold-ounce stability more remarkable, not less.

A median home in 1913 was roughly 1,100 square feet. It had no central heating — you heated with coal or wood stoves. Indoor plumbing was still a luxury in much of the country; outhouses were normal in rural areas and common even in small cities. Electricity was available in some urban homes but far from universal. Air conditioning didn't exist. You could order an entire house from the Sears catalog for a few hundred dollars, shipped in pieces by railcar, and build it yourself or with a few neighbors. A single income — often a modest one — covered the cost.

By 1970, the median home had grown to about 1,500 square feet. It had indoor plumbing, central heat, and electricity as standard. Most had one bathroom, though two were becoming common in newer construction. The postwar building boom had delivered millions of tract homes — modest, uniform, but solid. The GI Bill and FHA loans had democratized homeownership. A single median income could still comfortably carry a mortgage, with money left over.

Today's median home is roughly 2,200 square feet. It has two or more bathrooms, central air conditioning, an attached garage, a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, and broadband wiring. Construction standards include insulation, double-pane windows, and modern electrical panels that would have been unimaginable in 1913. And yet for most families it now takes two incomes to afford the monthly payment.

Here's the point: the 2026 home is dramatically better than the 1913 home by every objective measure — twice the size, infinitely better amenities, safer construction. And it costs roughly half as many ounces of gold. If you'd frozen 164 ounces of gold in a vault in 1913, your great-grandchildren would only need about 91 of those ounces to buy a home today that would have looked like science fiction to your ancestors. They'd have 73 ounces left over.

Gold didn't just keep pace with housing. It kept pace with housing while housing got dramatically better. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when your unit of measurement doesn't lose value over time.

The 1970 anomaly: why the middle of the U is a mirage

If gold preserved purchasing power so well from 1913 to 2026, why does 1970 look so different? Why did a median home appear to cost 657 ounces — four times the 1913 figure?

The answer is that in 1970, the price of gold was a lie.

In 1944, the major Western economies signed the Bretton Woods Agreement. The deal was simple: the US dollar would be pegged to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce, and every other major currency would be pegged to the dollar. This made the dollar "as good as gold" by government decree. Foreign central banks could exchange their dollars for physical gold from the US Treasury at that fixed rate, and for a while they did.

But the arrangement contained a fatal flaw. The US government kept creating more dollars — to fund the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Great Society programs, NASA, and the general expansion of the federal government. More dollars chasing the same amount of gold meant the $35 peg was becoming increasingly fictional. By the mid-1960s, there were far more dollars in circulation overseas than the US had gold to back them. Private markets in Zurich and London were already pricing gold above $35, and central banks were quietly lining up to redeem their dollars before the vault emptied.

So when you see "gold at $35/oz" in 1970, that wasn't a market price. It was a government-administered fiction — a ceiling that was cracking under the weight of monetary reality. The real purchasing power of an ounce of gold was much higher than $35 implied. If gold had been trading freely in 1970 at something closer to its true market value — perhaps $80 to $120 per ounce, based on the London free-market premium — then a median home would have cost roughly 200 to 290 ounces. Still elevated, but nowhere near the distorted 657 that the official price suggests.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon made what he called a "temporary" suspension of dollar-to-gold convertibility. He closed the gold window. Foreign central banks could no longer trade their dollars for gold at any fixed rate. The peg was gone. The temporary suspension, of course, became permanent.

What followed was an eruption. Gold went from $35 in 1971 to $180 by 1974. After a brief pullback, it surged to $850 by January 1980 — a 24-fold increase in under nine years. This wasn't gold suddenly becoming more valuable. It was the market finally being allowed to express what the dollar had actually done to itself over the previous three decades. All that hidden inflation, all those printed dollars, all that debasement that the $35 peg had been concealing — it all came out at once.

The 1970 figure of 657 ounces doesn't tell you that houses were expensive in gold. It tells you that gold's price was being suppressed. Once the suppression ended, the gold-to-housing ratio returned to its historical range within a generation. The inverted U isn't a market signal. It's an artifact of price controls — and a lesson in what happens when governments try to fix the price of money.

What the dollar hid

Numbers on a page are abstract. Let's make this concrete with an example that might keep you up at night.

In 1913, a 20% down payment on a median home was $679. At $20.67 per ounce, that was about 33 ounces of gold — roughly the size of two small bars that would fit in your palm. Imagine a young couple in 1913 setting aside $679 for a down payment. Now imagine they had a choice: save it as dollars, or save it as gold.

If they saved it in dollars, their descendants would still have $679 in 2026. That's not even a month's rent in most American cities. It's not a down payment on anything. The dollars survived, but their purchasing power was destroyed — reduced by over 97%.

If they saved it in gold — those same 33 ounces — their descendants would have gold worth approximately $151,800 in 2026. That's about 36% of today's median home price of $420,000. The down payment does even better than in 1913. Across 113 years, through two World Wars, a Great Depression, stagflation, the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and a global pandemic, the gold not only held its purchasing power but actually increased it.

This isn't a cherry-picked trick that only works over a 113-year horizon. Run the same exercise from 1950: 33 ounces at $34.72 equals $1,146 saved. In 2026, those 33 ounces are still worth $86,460. Run it from 1980, even starting at the peak of $850/oz when gold looked "expensive": 33 ounces cost $28,050 then, worth $86,460 now. In each case, gold roughly preserved the ability to make a meaningful down payment on a home. Dollars, in each case, did not.

The pattern holds because it isn't really about gold going up. Gold is an element. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't innovate or earn dividends. An ounce of gold in 1913 is the same ounce of gold in 2026 — same weight, same purity, same inert yellow metal. What changed was the dollar it was being measured against.

Gold didn't go up. The dollar collapsed. Houses didn't go up. The dollar collapsed.

Every chart that shows "rising home prices" or "rising gold prices" is actually showing the same thing from different angles: the declining purchasing power of the US dollar. The house is the house. The gold is the gold. The measuring stick is the part that shrank.

What it means now

This isn't a pitch to go buy gold. It's something more fundamental than that.

Every dollar you save is denominated in something. For most people, that something is the US dollar by default — not because they chose it, but because nobody told them there was a choice to make. Your savings account, your checking account, your paycheck, your emergency fund — it's all in dollars. You're not making a conscious decision. You're inheriting one.

But it is a decision, and it carries a specific bet: that the Federal Reserve will maintain the purchasing power of the dollar over the period you plan to hold it. That's a bet on institutional discipline across administrations, across political cycles, across wars, and across crises — every one of which creates overwhelming pressure to print more money. History suggests that bet has paid off in the short run (the dollar works fine for your grocery bill this month) and failed badly over any longer horizon. The Fed's own stated target is 2% annual inflation, which they frame as stability. Compounded over a working life of 40 years, 2% inflation destroys 55% of your purchasing power. That's the best case. Actual inflation has frequently run higher.

Alternatives exist: gold, silver, productive land, useful skills, strong relationships, and yes, bitcoin — each with different tradeoffs, different levels of volatility, and different kinds of risk. The point isn't that one of these is the right answer. The point is that the dollar isn't the neutral default it pretends to be. It's a choice. And once you see the data — once you see that a house now costs 91 ounces of gold instead of 164, that a down payment in gold works and multiplies over 113 years, that the "housing crisis" might really be a dollar crisis — it's hard to unsee it.

You're already saving in something. The only question is whether you've chosen it consciously.

This is the first essay in The Great Remember's series on prices, purchasing power, and the history of money. Next up: how the price of food tells the same story. See all essays →