What if you had bought the house in 2002? Or 1995? Suddenly a very different picture.
I mean I get it. Houses might be more expensive compared to market returns. But picking some of the worst possible times to have bought houses is just intellectually dishonest.
No - you're completely wrong. Just comparing the actual point when I did buy a house.
If you'd bought a house in the UK in 1995 or 2002, or indeed any other time in the past, your returns have significantly outstripped wages. The ratio of average (mean) house price to average (mean) full time earnings was 2.87 in 1995. It's 5.89 today. In London it's closer to 10. Unlike the US, our average wages have grown significantly ahead of price inflation in that time too. It's harder to do the comparison with the stock market (huge gearing/leverage available to buy a house in the form of mortgages) but for most middle class middle aged people in British almost all of their net worth is in the form of housing.
Some poor chap who bought a house in 2007 probably still has a negative real return on housing, even in the UK and even though "housing prices have massively outstripped inflation."
Again, you're assuming US experience translates to UK. 2007 was indeed a peak and you'd have been significantly down on your house by 2008, but again, by now, you're well ahead.
As a reminder, the original article linked by the OP is giving factual data about the fact that people in their 30s
in the UK have on average half the net wealth of people the same age a decade ago. For anyone living here, that's a statement of the obvious. Things have got harder financially,
on average for young people than they were for people my age.
I was a millionaire at thirty - got lucky with a tech start-up. Somebody who is thirty today could do the same. It's not that there aren't opportunities, or ways to save money. But it's a fact that young people in Britain are poorer on average than people the same age in the recent past.