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Comment by kiklion | Hacker News Reader

People tend to underestimate the cost of living in a high demand place.

You could make top 10% incomes globally, but if you are living in a top 1% location then you are being priced out by the 9% of the population making more than you.

If you want to live with a certain lifestyle of cars/vacations/personal services etc then you can’t be spending up on the other parts of your budget like housing location.

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Yeah, there's a telling degree of overlap between the "The American Dream is dead crowd" and the "I refuse to live anywhere but an expensive coastal city" crowd. Not to say that the latter can't be caused by the former, but it indicates a frustration with a particular experience that isn't really fully representative of what the "American Dream" is supposed to offer. Notably, for all of their complaining the actual emigration rate of this population seems to be very low.

While not unique, the Bay Area is also something of an outlier in that it's hard to drive out of extremely high housing prices from not only SF but the South Bay generally.

I live 60-90 minutes outside of the Boston metro and, while were I am isn't many areas of the Midwest cheap, it's pretty affordable. Except for one short stint, I've never had to commute into the city, so living in the city would be a lifestyle choice which has historically not been one that a lot of middle class families made--even when a lot of urban CoL was lower.

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