Your housing comment is key - the grind of paying for rent or a mortgage with two incomes really stifles and ability people have to try something.
Even a tenured professor at Columbia, who won the Nobel prize and loves their work and has a wife earning a matching compensation, would have a pretty miserable life if they insisted on mortgaging a large Upper East Side townhouse.
It's the same in Palo Alto from what I've heard.
Unless you know of some source?
Jobs, family etc are around the cities. There is a minimum deposit requirement before you can get a mortgage (at 20% or less it’s hard but possible. Below about 5% no one will lend).
Houses are way overpriced and average quality is low (insulation, heating/cooling, water tightness etc). Paying for a house on a single income is out of reach for huge swathes of the population and would also leave a household vulnerable if the earner was unable to work.
Your ideal of paying for a house with one wage is something left behind in 1950 New Zealand. Jobs, children, lifestyles etc are all dictated by rent and mortgage requirements. It’s depressing how inflated housing costs are.
https://www.qv.co.nz/price-index/
https://www.newzealandshores.com/new-zealand-job-search/sala...
https://www.westpac.co.nz/home-loans-mortgages/first-home/ki...
There just aren't that many unusually desirable neighbourhoods, most are clustered around the average. Obviously, most average families can't actually end up living in neighbourhoods of above average desirability by definition.