The brownstone your parents didn’t buy
New York, 1983. Every family has this story. Here is the arithmetic under it.
In 1983 the New York metro was a decade past near-bankruptcy and nobody was sure the city was coming back. A $150,000 brownstone (and there were brownstones at that price) carried along the metro index is worth about $1.45M today, 9.7× in nominal terms.
For scale: HUD’s fair market rent for a two-bedroom in the metro that year was $420 a month. Enter it as your rent in the calculator to see what that rent became and what renting cost over the same years.
Some caveats: a metro index is not one brownstone, 1983 mortgage rates were brutal (over 13%, and the calculator uses that year’s average), and your parents had other things to do with the money.
House figures are estimates for the whole metro market, from the FHFA index. Not financial advice.