Wealth isn't just access to servants and lavish meals, it's access to anything other people want but can't afford. A house in San Francisco is such a thing, even if it doesn't have carved ivory statues and a moat.
This suggests possibly massive disruption in wealth structure once augmented reality puts remote interaction on par with local interaction. If your day-to-day expenses are significantly more decoupled from your income how will spending patterns in the top 5% change? Would luxury spending increase, or perhaps individuals would be able to invest more and retire earlier?
Second, absolutely yes. This has been the dream of telecommuting for, what, a decade? But rather than increasing discretionary income, remember that perfect telecommuting brings with it increased competition, which drives down compensation. So you would probably not see 2014 San Francisco tech salaries being paid to all those remote workers. A real part of today's high SV salaries is simple cost-of-living adjustment that would be unnecessary with remote hires in Nowhere, USA.
Well, yeah, there are lots of wealthy people in California. It seems like you're saying "it's so normal to be wealthy in California, so they aren't really wealthy". Sure, maybe you aren't relatively wealthy compared to your neighbours, but that doesn't change the fact that you're wealthier than 99% of the world.
> you can have that net worth and just be getting by
Only if you define "just getting by" by "having a normal lifestyle compared to your peers". But then most of the people in any range will be "getting by", by definition, including the 0.1%.
There's no need to confuse
"these people are wealthy" (for some arbitrary but quite reasonable definition of "wealthy")
with
"these people are privileged" or "these people should feel guilty" (both of which involves all sorts of value judgement)
That said, it is much more common to exclude the net asset value of your primary residence in a 'net wealth' computation as it isn't nearly as useful to compare 'rich homeless people' as it is to compare people who are wealthy beyond simple home ownership.
It would be interesting to see the map where primary residences were excluded. (and the numbers, which is to say how much wealth outside of your home you need to qualify as the "rich".) And once you've done that, consider excluding $250K * kids as 'college money'[1]. Then you start to realize that "rich" means different things to different people.
[1] That assumes a lot of course, but still median 4 year tuition * kids might be useful too.
Are these rich people? If you live in Boston, New York or California you can have that net worth and just be getting by. It doesn't feel like you live a life of priveledge, or you have some kind of power over the world that other responsible employed adults don't have. It's hard to feel like that sort of wealth is really a social ill.