200k/yr for an 800k loan should be fine. You'd have a 60-65k/yr mortgage. Your DTI would be under 36% so lenders would be okay with it, and you might have like 100k in total living expenses so plenty of savings buffer.

1M can buy a house in a very nice suburb in an excellent school district.

It can’t in Silicon Valley. Maybe in Tacoma or the very outer burbs of nyc. I don’t get the point living that far out though. You’re just in suburban hell at that point and stuck with working remote or a megacommute.

Either way, over half your net income is going to housing and that’s on the lower bound of what I gave. You probably won’t have a nice house. Maybe a starter home. May as well move to rural Indiana at that point.

In a good area of "suburban hell" you can find things like clean streets with lots of greenery, a 2% poverty rate, public schools with an average SAT score at the 91 percentile and 71% AP enrollment, over 80% of households with married couples and almost 50% with kids. $1M can buy you a 4000 sq ft house on 1 acre.

Working remote is the point. You can live somewhere nice for families instead of a big city. Just don't live in places like California.

where would this area be located on a map?

The specific place I have in mind is in Tennessee. I know there are some nice suburbs in Arizona as well. I'm sure there are more all over the country.

not enough to house significant influx from urban areas without become one itself

Well yeah it's a tautology that you can't have a significant number of people with 90 %ile schools for example. Fortunately, it seems that a decent number of people like the above poster consider such areas to be "hell", lots of people can't work remote, and the general sense I've gotten is that the nice areas that are more attainable for the upper middle class (high six figure-low seven figure as opposed to mid seven figure homes) tend to be in red states, which acts as a repellent for a lot of the would-be competition.

huh? just because you're not in SF or Seattle or Boston doesn't mean you're in a "much more remote area"

You can absolutely buy a decent house in a nice city for $750K on a total household income under $150K. Without having inherited anything.

Source: me. 2 young kids. Not living in SF, obviously.

I live in the Florida. My employer at the time changed to RTO and offered to pay for relocation. I was making just shy of $400k. I resigned. I now make a little over $200k still WFH. My mortgage is $2k a month. Good size house with a pool and yard in a really nice gated community. I have no car payments, no student loans, and no credit card debt. My partner's income isn't even in six figures.

We live in a top-rated school district, although our kids are homeschooled, and will likely go private for high school. We live well-below our means.

I think it's just location, location, location.

Didn’t think $400k/yr jobs were even an option in Florida. Maybe one of the few companies that moved to Miami over Covid I guess?

Makes more sense. You weren’t near any of the traditional tech cities. So, cost of living was always going to be low. Your mortgage is less than what it costs for a studio apartment in most tech centers.

Let me clarify, my 400k job was HQ'ed in California. I worked remotely in Florida. But they changed to a RTO policy and offered relocation assistance. I refused to move to Cali so I resigned.

The company I work for now is HQ'ed in Atlanta, GA. But I still WFH.

That makes more sense. You never had the HCOL to begin with and so you never really had to suffer a serious setback in lifestyle due to taking a 50% cut.

For me and most others I know, I’m only living in these expensive areas - so taking that kind of pay cut requires something extraordinary to sustain a decent quality of life.