No matter how absurd it is, Ive never heard of a 6k per month mortgage, that is absolutely insane.
I live in NYC, on the UWS, in a nice (but not extravagant) 2 bedroom apartment. It’s about 1000 sq feet, and I pay $5k per month in rent. Buying a similar place in my neighborhood would cost me literally double that per month, after putting down $300k or more. My neighborhood has hundreds of thousands of people in it, all paying similar amounts (or much much more). My building has about 60 units, and I live in one of the smaller ones. Almost half of the units rent for $12k-15k per month. This is just one of hundreds of buildings in my neighborhood alone, one of thousands in Manhattan.
Of the ~350 apartments with at least 3 bedrooms for sale right in my neighborhood, only 77 cost less than $3mm. There are 52 for sale for more than $10mm, and those will almost all sell.
The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million
I have a feeling that data is wrong. If it's accurate it's definitely been pushed up by huge outliers on the top end (like £50+M properties in Chelsea and west ken that are zone 2)
I think the median zone 2 terraced house is more like £1m, can't find a statistic but I just bought a £1.5m house in hackney and there were 10 £1-1.3m properties for every £1.7m+
Still, a £1.3m house isn't completely infeasible in London :-).
Also, housing in much of the US is criminally expensive, and some people have unreasonably snobby attitudes about what constitutes a “decent area” in the US. Or maybe he was just making an understated and backhanded joke about the London housing market, which I’ve heard to be similarly absurd.