a salary above average I'm still nowhere near being able to live comfortably in the best areas This makes sense to me. An "above average" salary should make i

a salary above average I'm still nowhere near being able to live comfortably in the best areas This makes sense to me. An "above average" salary should make it possible for you to live in "above average" areas; to live in the "best" areas should require the "best" salaries. Obviously it's a bit more complicated than this, since different people have different rankings of locations and some people will choose to live in "worse" areas so that they can keep more of their income for other purposes; but in the limiting case where there is public consensus on which areas are "better" and everybody lives in the "best" area they can afford, percentiles of income will exactly match percentiles of housing location. I find people in Vancouver who are confused by this concept on a regular basis. Vancouver has 900,000 households but only has space for 300,000 detached houses; as long as detached houses are viewed as being superior to other forms of housing, there's no way the median household will ever be able to afford a detached house.