I’ve lived in small towns in Illinois and Texas, mid-sized in North Carolina, and big cities in Texas and California. That’s enough to know that housing markets

I’ve lived in small towns in Illinois and Texas, mid-sized in North Carolina, and big cities in Texas and California. That’s enough to know that housing markets are wildly divergent across the US, and really can’t be generalized. The author seems to be describing how things are in metro Phoenix. Having not lived there, I’d assume it’s as described. I will say that my experience has been that there’s a paradox: it should be much easier to get by as a poor person in small towns as everything costs a lot less, but paradoxically there’s even less work to do so it’s hard to even come up with the low local costs. In the end, poverty is always relative to the local market.