http://infographics.economist.com/2015/uscitieshpi_11_2015/?n=21011894/2014/02/daily-chart-18&w=595
It really depends on the area. The challenge is that the places that millennials are moving to/prefer have median income to house prices ratios of 5-8x with rent prices to match. The magic number for the US for yearly income to house price has been 2.2x yearly income. Most finance guides advise in pricing a home at 3x salary.
The places that are affordable probably tend towards not having much in opportunity. 95% of a min wage job but higher living costs is better than 20% chance of a min wage job and lower living costs. It's worse when there is no reliable support system such as parents/family to live with while starting out.
The challenge of millennials today is also partly due to rising costs, particularly education and housing. My teacher who went to school in the 70-80s spoke about working minimum wage for $2.25 to pay his $2k/yr state tuition and cover housing. Today, Penn State is at $15k/yr with a minimum wage of $7-8? He worked ~1000 hours to cover state tuition where today, one has to work ~2000 hours to cover state tuition. As a math teacher, he lamented the ratios faced by his graduating classes.
Sure an extra 1000 hours/year for 4 years amounts to about 2-3 additional years worth of hours (counting interest costs of financing education) after graduating in order to be at the same place one was a several decades ago. What's happened isn't so much that a singular price point (education/housing) has outgrown min wage/median income, it's that it has been a death by a thousand cuts where almost everything has outgrown minimum wage. All those things add up very quickly. textbook prices, automobile prices, food, furniture, clothing, entertainment, energy, commodities, etc.
Add to that certain luxuries-then, have become necessary or severely inconvenient not to have in order to not be a hermit. Mostly smartphone, smartphone plans, internet, automobile, auto insurance being a big part of it. Even being frugal, a prepaid smartphone plan and internet add $80-100-200/mo to a budget. The cheapest "new" well-negotiated cars still lease for $100/mo, 0-down.
I've seen workers who don't drive and only work at malls in order to leverage public transport for not being able to afford a car. The challenge is that an opportunity for a better job tends to be automatically disqualified by not having reliable personal transport.
Part of the price increases has been a systemic problem where demand has been artificially increased thus raising prices and interest charges also raising the cost of ownership of a given item.
With the banks being able to leverage trillions in loans, they can come out of it quite handsomely.
I'm among the lucky few with a tremendous amount of privilege of upper-middle income parents and their support with results to show for it, but unfortunately, I also see the system that enslaves the masses of people. Even the median household income of 50-60k is "livable", but it's still a rat race if one has to take on a load of debt (education) to get there.