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