With a 30 year mortgage at 7%, you could buy an $840,000 house for $5,588 a month.
You probably couldn’t buy you a rat infested one room apartment in Manhattan for that, but in most of the rest of the country that would buy a pretty nice house.
A 2 bedroom shithole in Brooklyn is about $900,000 mortgage + a fee every month for common area maintenance which STARTS at about $600.00 a month!!