I bet a sv employees buying homes in the Vally who will be paying a large % of their salary on a huge mortgage feel poor.

They shouldn't. It's a rich man's privilege to buy an absurdly expensive home. Poor people don't buy expensive homes, if they manage to buy at all.

If you make six figures and are "house poor", it means you're either bad at making financial decisions or you feel the house is worth the sacrifices. Either way you aren't poor and shouldn't feel poor.

so us plebs working in sv / london should just tug forelock and say "thank ee kindly Master Frodo for that bag of potatoes" and not get above ourselves.

The point is you are not poor if you are considering purchasing a 1MM$ property.

I am not poor, but I am not rich enough to get access to 1MM$ mortgages.

There is a difference between a bachelor pad in Bratislava Slovakia and a suite in Trump Tower - yet both are merely "appartments".

Do you remember 2004-2008? Maybe you didn't get to see it first hand, but in the US, it happened.

You really need to define "poor" here. Poor people did NOT take out million dollar mortgages even between the years of 2004 to 2008 in the US.

Please stop the ridiculousness of blaming "poor" people for the recent housing collapse.

I didn't lay any blame. But people got in way way over their heads with banks happy to make giant loans with no reason to care if it could be paid back.

http://thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-g...

I agree with that but you implied poor people were talking out million dollar house loans.

Some one had to take out those NINJA loans it takes two to tango.

Yep... It was "poor", middle class, and rich people who took out those loans.

That's because in most of the world, poor people aren't complete idiots. Luckily, in America's rich urban and suburban areas, a thing called "credit" has been advanced, which performs the nigh-magical function of turning financially capable adults into complete idiots.