Comment by steveBK123

As an American these numbers are super depressing, haha. Big city US vs Europe cost of living & wages are almost like an order of magnitude different at this point.

Big house & garden 30min from Manhattan center in practice does not even exist due to the sprawl and poor transit here.

As crazy as this sounds, 65k is the wage paid here now to a doorman/concierge at the type of apartment building an NYC SRE/SWE lives in.

If you want big house & garden that looks like the listings at your link, they are maybe 45-60min commute and 2x the price.

Dining out in NYC ends up like 2X+ as expensive as London/Paris or 4X+ Madrid due to labor/real estate costs. Maybe worse, I just looked up Michelin star 5 course menus in Paris and these are like regular Thursday night 2 course dinner prices in NYC.

So in many ways we collect a much higher gross wage here to then spend it all for a lower quality of life.