4000 sqft * $150/sqft is 600K, not 350K.
Still overpriced by quite a bit even with the cost of the land ($350K) and high end finishes though.
I'm sure you don't mean your absolute statement, otherwise I need your address to build my coal powerplant next to.
Some areas are having real struggles with finding construction workers though. We can thank the devaluation of trades training in schools and the ridiculous notion that college is for everyone for that mess.
Being a skilled tradesperson is a great career option for a lot of people, often the same people that end up stuck in retail or some other hellish profession after going to college and maybe even graduating. Their lives would be probably much better in trades, they would earn 4x as much, probably be in better shape, and have a much higher level of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, someone somewhere along the road convinced them that blue collar work was below them.
It’s one of the principles I used when I was raising children: a trade is something you can do anywhere that everyone needs. You own your own tools, you can show up anywhere and provide an essential service irrespective of the economic conditions autonomously and on your own terms.
Professions tend to be much more dependent on complex societal structures and institutions, tend to be more geographically restricted, and tend to be more restrictive to personal choices.
Some vocations can straddle both categories.
With my children, I made sure each of them had the fundamentals of at least one trade that they found interesting by the time they were 16. It has served them well even though they have all ended up pursuing more entrepreneurial and technology or media related fields.
The median (and mean) household income in Fairfield, CT is 10-20% above San Francisco. On a square footage basis prices are substantially lower than SF, though. It's all just supply & demand. (Also, to be clear, the $1.4m was listing price, including land, not cost.)
And in markets like this people working in the trades are often in the game as well. In San Francisco a contractor (plumber, electrician, painter, remodeler) of a certain age might very well own half a dozen properties across the city, with several million in assets. (Why do some still work? The trades still pay like $100/hour minimum!) The boom times were the 1970s to early 2000s, but especially for certain communities (Asian, Russian, Irish--San Francisco still sees a surprisingly steady flow of immigration from Ireland) both the trades and real estate still play a significant role in community wealth.
I have built many houses in my life. There is obscene money involved in the overpricing of homes. Even with contemporary costs, you can build for $150 a square foot. That house cost max 350k to build, unless the builders are morons.
The housing industry has become like the wedding industry. We need to remember that the people on the other side of the table are human beings. We can prosper without taking an extra year of a family’s salary just because we can. Greed is a poverty and we are all poorer for it.