Qualified to speak to a specific market, perhaps, but I'd still much prefer broad claims like this to be based in actual data over anecdotes.

If you want to speak to real averages, glancing at a few articles, it seems like the average mortgage payment last year was somewhere around $2300, or $27,600 per year. Take conventional wisdom that housing costs should be limited to around a third of your gross wages, and that puts you with the average house demanding roughly a $92,000 salary. Still high, but more based in reality. Media always hugely overemphasizes urban markets because that's where they're based out of. Looking at my shitty small hometown right now, I'm seeing homes listed for around $150,000, which would come to about $900 a month at today's interest rates and require around $36,000 a year to afford.

Of course, you'd then live in a tiny conservative hell hole, but that's beyond the point. The true averages for the country are not quite as bad as you'd think if you're only looking at major cities. To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a good state of affairs. The problem is that there are not nearly enough homes in places where people want to live, so they're very scarce relative to demand and owners can demand huge prices.

Wanna fix it? Petition your local government to advocate for policies that increase housing supply. Insane zoning regulation is a huge one. To throw one example at you, the highly desirable city of Somerville, MA, did a thorough examination of all its lots to see how many actually complied with its current zoning code, since many buildings had been grandfathered in.

Of 80,000 lots, all but 22 of them were in violation and would be illegal to build today.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/1/4/what-happened-when-this-charming-town-found-out-its-actually-illegal