I didn't do a study of real estate valuation. I googled "real estate palo alto" and "real estate pittsburgh" and grabbed the number from the first Google results. (realtor.com)

I can tell you that I live in a small northeastern city, and a 3 or 4 bedroom mid 20th century, single family house is around $130/sqft in a nice neighborhood. In the burbs, it's about $150/sqft. When your mortgage+taxes is <$15k/year, you don't need to make crazy salaries.

I don't know bay area real estate, so looking at Gilroy, CA, which would be a hella commute to SFO, you're looking at $400-450/sqft for 3/4br single family. That's alot of cash.

My friends just moved to Pittsburgh and bought a great house for 108k. This is literally 95% less than a comparable home in Silicon Valley.

and he probably got a backyard with it too. In CA, you don't even get that. Why pay 1 to 2 million dollars in CA for a house when you can't even have a backyard?

I moved to Cali from Illinois. These numbers look correct. A similar, but smaller property was MORE than 10x greater in California.