Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sort of prove the cherry picking argument. Average salary means nothing in a vacuum without cost of living considered. And when it is... Unsurprisingly NYC comes in at the bottom of the list, https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer... Seattle is actually #1
I can’t trust any of these comparisions because it’s difficult to compare apartments across cities. Average apartment costs in new york are meaningless. I know of no one paying 3k per month. Usually it’s between 1k-1.5k, which completely changes this graph.
It's not hard. And they're not. You're friends are paying 1K-1.5 to have a room. In the end if you have to pay as much for a room in city A as a whole apartment or mortgage in city B, you are getting paid less. To expand, both the the average and median price per a room per apartment is readily available and easily calculable. If a 2BD is 4K in city A and most people put 4 people in that apartment that doesn't mean all the sudden that it's the same deal as the same 2BD in city B that only cost $1K a month because most people don't share the space. The share cost is still a function of the actual cost, and easily computable and available in every city. Many people in Seattle split apartments and pay 500-600 per a room. They just aren't forced to because on average per cost of goods they get paid more. If anything Seattle has the calculations set up against it, as it has much much smaller city boundaries than NYC.