[markshead]

I own a home in a very rural part of the US, but do a lot of work with people in large cities. I was talking with some people in NYC about our 5 bedroom home that we bought for $120,000 and how most of the houses for sale in our town are about half that price. The people from NYC couldn't imagine such a thing. One said, "So does that mean that no one needs to take out a loan to buy their home?" I explained that the people in my town weren't making NY level wages either.

The idea that there were parts of the US where you could buy a house for $60k was just as foreign as the idea of someone making $25k per year. They simply had no frame of reference for what wages and cost of living look like in places that weren't big cities.