[leongrado]

Agreed. I recently moved from the Midwest to Boston and the housing and rent prices are giving me major sticker shock. My rent has tripled and looking at the housing prices, looks like they have too. Who's buying these 1 million dollar homes?

[shados]

That's easy. Depending on the interest rate, condo fees, taxes, etc, a 1 million home is about $4500 (less when the interest rates were lower, I think).

If you have a couple of DINKs, it's 2250 per person per month, or about $27000/year. 150k/year per person, about 90-100k/year after tax, and that's well under 30% of your take home pay.

I used round numbers and I'm probably off, but even if you have to tweak the math, it's pretty easy to see where people are coming from.

When I was looking to buy in the area, a bunch of people looking at the open houses were couples with both people sporting their Amazon/Microsoft/Google/whatever backpacks or jackets.