It really depends on the equity cost of owning a home. Plenty of people want to live in a location where a home would soak up all or a large percentage of $1M.

There's a whole world besides the Silicon Valley bubble and in most of it homes don't cost nowhere near that much. In my home city in europe a decent couple bedroom flat in middle of the city goes for about $30-50k.

If you want to retire in the land with million dollar houses, well duh you gonna need more than $1M, and I'm sure plenty of people would love to have that. But it's not really a necessity. There's plenty of affordable locations for retirement on $1M budget.

There's also a lot of people like me who would rather avoid those expensive areas. Even if I had that sort of money, I'd rather spend it buying 100 acres or so of land and building an average or slightly above average sized house on it. I'd even have money left over.

In the US, you'd need closer to $2M depending on age. If you retire before reaching Medicare age (65ish) you could be looking at $15k per year in medical bills, probably more if you're married or have bigger issues.