[lolinder]

Does the median earner when considering the entire country struggle to pay rent? Or is it just the median earner in certain extremely expensive metro areas that happen to get a lot of focus in the media because that's where the journalists live?

The numbers OP cites can be 100% accurate and reflective of reality while it is still also true that people in the Bay Area struggle to pay for housing.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

There is every chance that income is a multi-modal distribution, and thus one should not talk of a single median.

However, the person to whom I was replying used cheap and not-so-cheerful language to suggest that it was possible to talk about this en masse. Assuming that to be reasonable, I replied with an en masse response.

Certainly if you break it down at the county level, I expect you'd find multiple different patterns, and would then be faced with which ones to call "typical" or "indicative".