Do the average salary in the cities support these prices?
Average property taxes?
This epic bubble will end with crushing losses
I can't speak for an "average" salary in the Seattle area, but if you work for Amazon or Microsoft, you are likely doing VERY well.
Good luck being an average shlub who wants a house in Redmond, though.
I'm a physician living in the south suburbs.
I do OK, but I couldn't dream of living somewhere like Bellevue.
The houses you'd *want* to live in run around a million per.
I can't afford that.
Heck, I remember being in Kirkland and seeing a rickety, OLD waterfront house going for that.
It's been torn down now, and a beautiful home is there.
Probably worth TWO million.
Location, location, location.
Most of the people whom I know in the Los Angeles area, have either roommates or room-renters in order to make ends meet.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that situation is common in many of these cities.
There's a reason why home prices are so high in San Francisco. The answer is availability of jobs. Not just that, but high paying jobs. There's been a building boom of tech buildings, cranes dot the landscape. Been going on the last couple decades, bringing in thousands of tech workers. Many of these people earn 6-figure salaries. We've seen home prices go up ten per cent a year over that last five years. Crazy. Homes that go up for sale quickly post sold signs, with some buyers paying cash. For million dollar homes. Me and my wife are currently remodeling her mom's home in SF. Her siblings have been bugging us to sell it (because they are greedy wanting to borrow against a future inheritance). We have stalled it, because the money is necessary for her mom's expenses in assisted living. Anyway, if we had sold five years earlier we would have been out a half-million in potential profits. It's gone up that much in five years.