> But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much. I agree with your analysis, and would also add that the increasing concentration of good jobs

> But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much. I agree with your analysis, and would also add that the increasing concentration of good jobs in expensive cities exacerbates this. When the best jobs are all in places where owning a home costs $500k+, it shouldn't be a surprise that people place a higher weight on their salary. My own experience exemplifies this. I'm from the Phoenix area, where housing is relatively cheap. But when I graduated college, the only engineering jobs in the area were at Godaddy, boring old-school internal IT shops, or a couple of small consultancies. None of these seemed like they would make for a very rewarding career, so I applied in SF and NYC and took the first job that took me out of Phoenix. I got a more rewarding career out of it, but also got into a very challenging housing market.