Comment by api

That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.

Short version of the history:

Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."

These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.

This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.

The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.

I post this every chance I get:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...