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.