Can confirm, this is where I’ve spent four years trying to buy a starter (2BR/2BA) home in on a single income. The biggest problem in older markets is that most housing stock is of appalling quality, requiring another five to six figures of work to get into a modern, habitable shape - unless you do the work yourself, which most can’t while they also hold down a FTE gig and deal with the return of urban commuting.
It’s bad.