Sounds like a pretty smart young lady with good financial sense!
Housing in some areas has become so expensive that lending and renting income standards are being completely warped just to enable more people to keep a roof over their heads. Some places are seeing people being allowed to spend >50% of their income just on housing, because otherwise there just wouldn’t be any.
A lot of this comes down to a lack of housing; particularly higher density housing in places that really need it. Perhaps one benefit of all this social distancing and working from home policy shifts is that people will be able to move out of the hottest job markets and work remotely for the jobs where that’s possible. That would go a long way to spreading out demand. And that’s all this is at the end of the day: supply and demand. There’s not enough supply and way too much demand, so prices go through the roof until the market is unsustainably high.
The average home in the Denver market is now over 600k. She could afford a nice condo but would rather save her money and pay off her student loans. I’m not complaining I like having her around