I think it's very plain that holding a minimum wage job implies a tenuous ability to house and feed oneself in much of the country. It is not a complex thesis.

I'm glad you were able to get by on the cheap in an unspecified midwestern city, but that doesn't change the picture for tens of millions of other people

He's arguing that this statement is false:

> The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-cities-factsheet

"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950."

Demographic shifts are weird, man.

I'm part of this big shift - I moved from a rural town in flyover country, to a giant metro area in flyover country. That metro area is most of the population of my state. It's sobering - you add up all the little rural towns and the number of people there just doesn't add up to much. That wasn't true, in the past. And it's like this in almost every state. We all moved to the city because all the farming jobs and factory jobs dried up.

I’m not seeing where ‘urban area’ is defined in that document. I imagine it includes basically any town or city. The original issue was NYC/LA/SF vs. the rest of the country, not urban vs. rural. Plenty of college towns, for example, likely qualify as urban yet are extremely affordable.

It's worth noting that the Bay area, the entire metropolitan area, is about the size of Detroit. It's about a quarter the size of Los Angeles or New York.

It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.