Not in SV. $400k gets you to the lower middle class. That is you probably have a tiny chance of buying some real estate in your lifetime. House and expenses related to maintaining it is a huge chunk of change.
140k is believable, but I think they mean it's per person. If you rent, it's very unlikely you'd be able to buy a 1.2M house on 140k if you started with 0 in savings.
EDIT: To clarify my previous post - I was talking about the household income.
I agree that it might be tough to buy a median house with median income in some areas, however you can easily afford to buy a decent house almost anywhere with $400k income.
Don't kid yourself. Even here in the Bay Area, $400K a year is still upper middle class. You'd be in the top 3% of earners across the nine bay area counties.
Again, you're kidding yourself. Even if you bought a new house today with no existing equity, you could easily afford $11K a month in mortgage. That's a house that's over $2M. And still have $10K a month left for other expenses.
The definition of the middle class would surely depend on the cost of living in the particular area. You can make $30k and live like royalty in the 99% of the world.
$400k income would put you into upper middle class territory.
[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/2/19/18229922/silicon-valley-inde...