Housing costs are ridiculous.  You are right about cost of living. I don’t have a way to locate it now but I remember reading an article online about three years ago that in the OC in California, middle class income is around $100,000 a year combined family income.  That would be almost wealthy in some other places.

Showtalk said:

in the OC in California, middle class income is around $100,000 a year combined family income. That would be almost wealthy in some other places.

That kind of income for most people outside of those places of very high cost of living, would be considered wealthy. I know I could do VERY well on that kind of income.

The problem is as incomes rises, costs of living do too.

That is only because most people expand their spending to match their new-found income. If more people would read "The Millionaire Next Door" they'd not gentrify places and drive out the service people and other lower paid occupations from an area.

I agree with you.

and if more people lived well below their means, we wouldn't have the crises from economic downturns. Plus those who *could* gentrify an area instead could live modestly and be far more able to actually help those in dire need compared to what happens now with so many who are "broke, but at a higher level".

Yes. Dave Ramsey is right, and so are you.

Here are some excerpts from an opinion piece (July 28) by Ronald Brownstein about the changing demographics of suburbs which you might find interesting.  The suburbs may indeed be "outdated."  I live in one of the suburban counties mentioned in this piece, a county which voted 51% to 45% for the Democratic candidate in the last presidential election and will probably vote an even higher percentage for the Democratic candidate in 2020 for the reasons discussed in this piece.

President Donald Trump's racially charged warnings to suburban voters about crime and housing face a fundamental headwind: the suburbs themselves are much more racially diverse than even two decades ago [bolding mine --MD].  In contrast to the stereotype of homogeneous communities of White families behind white picket fences, in many of the largest suburban counties around America Whites now compose only about half or less of the population [[bolding mine --MD]].

The suburbanites he is speaking to that would have resonated are now either already deceased or have been dependent on Social Security and pensions for a couple of decades, while the age range that used to make up that group weren't even born back in 1970.

It kind of reminds me of some psychological thriller where an elderly homeless man was trying to get to see his boy again, and bought that baseball glove he'd promised with the $50 winning lottery ticket.

The reality was, that long-lost son had been raised to adulthood by his mother, had moved on and had a family of his own, and the now dry alcoholic had been stuck in the past all those years.

The incongruity of the last ditch effort to repair the past, to have spent most of one's life trying to fix a single insurmountable obstacle against the backdrop of time had marched on, unnoticed, in the intervening decades. If I remember the plot correctly (and I don't even remember the name of the show) the dude was unable to grasp the reality that the 9 year old son he'd promised the baseball glove for his birthday and the entire freeze-frame scene on the backdrop of history was already a moment that was long gone.

Your recollection of the story sounds much like Trump and his efforts to win suburban votes.  He seems unaware that they have changed.  Our parents started the flight to the suburbs following WWII and fled farther out in the 1960s during the emigration known as "white flight."  

Our grandchildren now reside in the racially mixed suburbs with our great grandchildren playing with children with African-American Hispanic, Asian, and African parents.   We're the generation who remembers the changes wrought by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and now we have the pleasure of watching those children play in the streets in front of our houses. 

Trump is trying inflame fears where, as this piece points out, there are none.