Yeah you can, because the vast majority of products are built and priced for the middle class, including
> Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich
Food, which is why we have vast areas in the USA where it is impossible to buy groceries without driving 40 minutes or more, which means fresh food is basically out of the question, which is fine anyway because those people probably can't afford anything but over-processed calorie dense foods that store well. Because again: producing food is not done because people need food, it is done because it is profitable. Or in the case of food deserts, it is not done because it is substantially less profitable.
And Americans being rich on a global scale doesn't mean shit when median expenses for said "rich" Americans are getting more expensive all the time. Cars are basically entirely a poor tax on Americans, so yes, we all drive enormous and ridiculous vehicles, but those same vehicles are also slowly driving us all into fucking poverty because a century ago, the car companies killed any decent public transit in the vast majority of cities, and people like Robert Moses used building highways as a way to fuck over black people on a scale not seen since the abolishing of slavery.
Our houses are certainly nicer than most people's too, which is why we're spending upwards of 1/3-1/2 of the money we make on them, oftentimes not even earning equity in the process: half the money you make, just dumped in a damn hole, never to be seen again. And each time the housing market crashes more of the supply ends up in the hands of banks and hedge funds, ensuring it'll be just as expensive in the future for us to pay to live in. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, almost like everything is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
You could live a comfortable lifestyle on an American full-time minimum wage in the Republic of Vanuatu, that's fucking irrelevant to everyone because no one who makes that wage lives there.
> And Americans being rich on a global scale doesn't mean shit when median expenses for said "rich" Americans are getting more expensive all the time.
This is a political choice.
Can you name where these reasonably densely inhabited areas are? That's difficult to believe.
Sure, there are vast areas in the USA where grocery stores are far away, because vast areas of the USA are nearly empty from inhabitants. But can you name a few towns with reasonable population where they have to drive >40 minutes to the grocery store?
It's equally as profitable to cook steaks for the poor. The margin on the steak is the same, regardless of the wealth of the buyer.
This is not true for apartments. The renter holds the apartment hostage for the length of the lease, so the behavior of the renter determines the margin. Someone who leaves the apartment as it was is high margin, someone who trashes the apartment can leave you with negative margin. Even for the entire apartment building.
Reality is that people who are rich are often required to be functional, you don't get to keep the $400k/year job if your suit smells like cat urine from the 19 cats in the apartment whose litter box you never change. If you slam back 5 or 6 cases of beer every weekend starting Thursday at 3pm, and toss the empty cans and boxes in the living room until they pile to the ceiling such that you can't get to the bathroom and so you just start shitting in the corner or the kitchen sink... likewise, you tend not to remain wealthy.
Renting to a poor person allows for alot more dysfunction, and it can cost you. You can't discriminate blatantly though, but raising the price filters them out pretty well.
Poor people who don't trash apartments must not only be the majority, but a gigantic majority, of course. But there's no way to tell one of those from the assholes who do trash apartments. And landlords aren't in the fairness business anyway, so they don't care.
You’re arguing a steakhouse in rural West Virginia is as lucrative as on in New York’s financial district?
You could make this argument for any product. Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich. That doesn’t mean nobody poor has ever eaten.
About one percent of Americans are poor on a global scale [1]. Unaffordability of housing is a political choice. It is driven by an alliance between cynical and ignorant interests.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...