Let me preface by saying I can't necessarily address the relative ease of obtaining an "education" or "gainful employment" aspects of this question to the extent that I can address the ease with which Americans attain homeownership. My field of study and profession focus around monetary policy, homeownership and the influence of the GSEs on community development. Just as a guess I would imagine that both education and gainful employment are easier to obtain in the absolute now than they were in the 1950s because many of the barriers that existed in the 1950s to prevent women and people of color from obtaining education and employment have been removed or substantially reduced. Whether those things were more attainable for white men in the 1950s than now is a good question that I don't know the answer to.
End preface.
Short answer: could "a janitor in the 50s...support a family in a 3 bedroom house?" the answer is yes, back then it was possible. it's also possible right now, depending on where they live, how much they earn, what their credit is like, how much they have in savings, who they work with to get their mortgage, and what government programs are available to assist them. people earning minimum wage purchase homes in this country right now.
Long answer: generally, responsible homeownership is more accessible to US citizens now than it ever has been. Currently, the homeownership rate is 64.8%. This number is a little misleading because it suggests that 64.8% of people own a home; in fact, homeownership rate is defined as the percentage of homes that are owned by their occupant. Numbers won't be 1/1 for several reasons, among them that some people are neither owners nor renters (looking at you, millenials living with their parents and silent generationers living with their kids). You can get a better read on homeownership rates by incorporating the headship rate in your analysis, which evaluates how many households there are in the US compared to how many adults there are. When the headship rate sinks, the amount of people per household increases. If, therefore, the homeownership rate increases but the headship rate decreases, there's a possibility that people have responded to difficult economic times by living together to save money. All that being said, the homeownership rate is a good shorthand for evaluating the proportion of households that own their own home and therefore the relative ease with which an American household can purchase a home.
The homeownership rate peaked in 2005 at 68.9% immediately before the subprime mortgage crisis. Before 2005, homeownership rates had steadily climbed since the 1940s and the advent of federal homeownership policy, especially the FHA and the introduction of government sponsored entities like FNMA (Fannie) and FHLMC (Freddy). I'll discuss the policies and its impact in depth below but for now we can look at historical homeownership rates. The US Census shows that homeownership hovered around the 45% mark between the 1890s and the early 1940s, with bumps upward during the 1920s (47.80%) and bumps downward during the 1930s (43.60%). US homeownership exploded during Truman’s presidency, moving from the middle 40s in the early 1940s to 53.2% in 1945 to 55% in 1950. Homeownership rates increased steadily throughout the 50s, 60s (61.9%) and 70s (64.2%) until 1981, when the homeownership rate decreased for the first time in more than 20 years from 65.6% to 65.4%. The homeownership rate hovered around 64% for the 80s and then steadily increased throughout the 90s (65-66%) and early 2000s (67-68%) to the 2005-2006 peak, at which point a foreclosure crisis brought on by the real estate bubble and the subprime mortgage meltdown drove homeownership rates down for the next 10 years. Recently, the homeownership rate has made a small recovery – up to 64.8% in the last quarter of 2018 vs 63.7% in 2015.
So, why did homeownership rates climb throughout the latter part of the 20th century, and why did they fall for the first two decades of the 21st century? Great question! It’s the one I came here to answer. The answer is upwards of 70 years of policymaking intended to support mortgage banks, improve access to mortgages and lower the price of homeownership.
It’s important first to recognize the differences between modern mortgage lending and mortgage lending of yesteryear. Modern mortgage lending has changed so as to be unrecognizable from the days of the 1920s and 30s, mostly as a result of government pressure to make mortgage loans more accessible to more Americans. Here are some examples:
Mortgage underwriting was non-standard for much of the 1800s and early 1900s. Thrifts (banks that take in deposits and issue mortgages) would set secret internal standards for home loan lending that varied enormously from bank to bank. They varied in acceptable debt-to-income ratios, down payment percentage, loan-to-value ratios, etc. One of the most obvious differences was credit determinations. They all used methods for determining your creditworthiness that we would laugh at today.
Without going into extensive detail because this is getting long already, credit determinations before the 1950s were based as much on payment histories as they were on word-of-mouth, home visits and your demeanor upon meeting the bank representative. It was very much within the realm of possibility that you would be denied credit at a bank because they didn’t like something about you – something someone had said about you, whether you had a nice house, your face, the way you talked, your skin color, your gender, etc.
Speaking of payment histories: you did not have a credit score based on payment history as you do today. Instead, you had an account at a credit bureau. Credit bureaus would send credit representatives to stores that they thought you frequented to obtain data about you and then they would sell that data to banks and insurance companies and various other users of consumer data. To be clear, none of this data was complete or exact. Forget for a minute that credit bureaus were prone to error in finding out where you did all your shopping and focus on the fact that the store owners reporting your credit to the credit representatives did not have 1. a uniform mechanism for keeping track of your credit or 2. any incentive for keeping accurate records about your credit beyond their own purposes. The reports often boiled down to generalizations and not necessarily accurate ones. In short, credit determinations were capricious, incomplete, in exact and only barely quantitative.
Note: Some of the modern, exact credit bureaus are survivors of this age. For instance, Equifax was founded in 1899 and followed these practices for most of the first half of the 20th century.
[Kinda scary looking at the comment thread at the time I set out to answer this, there are dozens of removed comments and none left standing other than by the mods. But... I'll give it a try. I think this might be my first answer here [Edit: actually, my second!], so I expect to make a newbie mistake and be deleted too, which is fine: it means I learned something about the rules]
Now, the Rule against speculation is a hard one to avoid, here. We can show anecdotes of janitors with houses, but that breaks other rules. The only other way I can see is to look at hard facts and figures, and that may lead to accusations of speculation, in the manner those figures are applied. For example, I need to make a number of assumptions in order to answer this. I'll try to call out those I notice myself making.
ASSUMPTION 1: I am going to make the assumption that this question is about the United States specifically. This is because it makes little sense as a worldwide question, as this is not a claim that could be made about the whole world; and because those who ask about other nations, tend to specify. It is also because I am lazy, and narrowing the question this way makes my life easier.
It feels like this question can be broken down into a number of easier questions:
1) What did a janitor earn in the 1950's?
The wage of Janitorial staff in the 1950s varied by gender, location, industry and more. To answer both questions, then, I must compare like with like. That means I must either cherrypick the same region for both questions, or take a national average of janitorial wages, and the national average of costs. Both approaches leave something to be desired.
If I pick a specific region where the answer to the question is "yes", that doesn't answer the wider question for the whole US.
If I take the average, but living costs are far higher in those areas that have janitors than those that do not, then I might get a "yes" answer from the averages, even if most janitors live in areas where it is not true. For example, if janitorial wages are focused in urban areas, but rural areas had far lower cost of living, then this would be the case.
I think the latter is probably the best option, though, which leads us to:
ASSUMPTION 2: Janitorial wages varied in proportion to the local cost of living across the US in the 50s.
ASSUMPTION 3: Janitorial jobs were distributed homogeneously across the US, so that the national cost of living is a reasonable metric to compare to.
https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1950-1959#occupation has a very good list of occupational wages for the 1950s. Of particular interest is https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_1188_1956.pdf - the US Dept of Labor's "Wages and Related Benefits: 17 Labor markets".
This defines: " JANITOR, PORTER, OR CLEANER (Sweeper; charwoman; janitress) Cleans and keeps in an orderly condition factory working areas and washrooms, or premises of an office, apartment house, or commercial or other establishment. Duties involve a combination of the following: Sweeping, mopping or scrubbing, and polishing floors; removing chips, trash, and other refuse; dusting equipment, furniture, or fixtures; polishing metal fixtures or trimmings; providing supplies and minor maintenance services; cleaning lavatories, showers, and restrooms. Workers who specialize in window washing are excluded."
ASSUMPTION 4: The above definition of Janitor is correct for the question.
This document is also delightful in that it shows wages of the other occupations specifically *compared to janitors* - they picked the janitors as their base level of pay "because they are employed in most establishments and in greater number than most of the other jobs studied. Because of their position near the bottom of the wage scale, the percentage differentials between them and higher paying jobs can be readily obtained by subtracting 100 from the percentages shown in the tables."
Note that this confirms an implication of the claim the OP is testing, in that janitors are "near the bottom of the wage scale".
This document shows us there is a reasonably wide variance in Janitorial wages: at the lowest, a woman janitor in the retail industry in New Orleans could earn $0.50/hr, while at the highest, a male janitor in the finance industry in Chicago could earn $1.94/hr.
There are records for both men and women. Women are lower. I'm too lazy to handle those numbers. Which leads me to:
ASSUMPTION 5: The question is asking if the claim "a janitor in the 50s could support a family in a 3 bedroom house" can be true. Is it not asking whether all janitors could do so. To answer the question, we need only show that it was not uncommon for janitors to be able to do so. This means we can ignore the lower figures for women, as even if the statement were false for women, it would still be true in general.
In that case, the data we're interested in is the line "Janitors, porters, and cleaners (men)" from "Table A-9. Plant occupations (all industries) (Average hourly earnings for selected occupations studied in 6 broad industry divisions)", which "Excludes premium pay for overtime and for work on weekends, holidays, and late shifts."
ASSUMPTION 6: Janitors work 40 hours for 50 weeks a year, and get no overtime or bonuses.
BUT... this money was taxed. Fortunately, taxes are one of those things that the government keeps fabulous records on: https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal.pdf tells us that in 1955, anyone earning Janitor-level wages was paying 20%, as a flat rate up to $4k/year. [continued below]