[cactus2093]

The amount of the US where you can buy a detached single family home with a white picket fence and 2 car garage for significantly under half a million dollars is probably not as much of a majority as you seem to think.

Not everywhere is the bay area, where you'll struggle to find this for under $1.5M. But $500k is not that much for a house these days in a lot of the markets where huge percentages of the population live (from the tri-state area, to Boston, to Seattle, LA, Austin, etc.) and lots of middle class people live in houses valued at more than this.