When you look at real wages vs cost of living and the trend line is down and showing no signs of ever going back up, the question will I be able to afford the resources to survive and have a family, will my kids be able to afford a home, that's the growing uncertainty.
This is widely believed, but not true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N.
There is a real issue that housing is unreasonably expensive in many areas, which we could fix via the innovative strategy of not making it illegal to build housing.
What are you looking at? Economic data shows real wages have trended up over the last 40 years, at least in the United States. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Here's the actual data broken out for a variety of locations (I see someone else found the whole country): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release?rid=439
The data don't support the story you are telling, at least not on a 17 year time scale. Most places including LA and New York actually show the opposite. Real wages are rising faster than cost of living in the long term just about everywhere in the US.
I understand the argument, and housing is a problem, but there just isn't much to support the doom and gloom narrative if you don't use cherry picked data from opeds. I suspect that a lot of people have distorted views about what they should be able to afford.