Comparing the cost of living between 1975 and 2015:

[JDPriestly]

45. It depends on where you live.

And that is what the problem is.

How much money do you have to earn to rent a house in Los Angeles? These are 2014 numbers ( and remember, our population is about $110,116,000.):

As you can imagine, the numbers for Los Angeles are staggering. It would take an annual household income of $97,160 just to get the keys to a median-priced rental home in this market, Zillow says.

Keep in mind that this kind of income would nearly put you in the top one-fifth of income earners in the country.

In L.A, however, it would get you a smack-dab-in-the-middle, $2,429-a-month home.

Zillow's median-rent calculations skew toward single-family homes, its representatives have told us in the past. So this doesn't necessarily apply to average apartments, which tend to run about $1,000 or so less.

. . . .

Put another way, Zillow says, each person in a two-earner family in L.A. would have to make $24.50 an hour, 40 hours a week, in order to afford the rent on a median home in this market.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/it-takes-nearly-100-000-a-year-in-income-to-rent-an-average-la-house-5289964

Remember, a lot of people (like us) move to Los Angeles because this is where the job is, the one we can't do or find anywhere else, and not because we have the money or can even earn enough money to afford to live here in the style in which we might live in some other city or town in America.

I don't think you could find a house anywhere in Los Angeles, and certainly not in Silicon Valley for $270,000. Nor could you buy gasoline for $2.57 or $2.38 in Los Angeles or Silicon Valley or San Francisco, maybe nowhere in California. Milk is also more expensive here.

The median income in Los Angeles varies widely from area (ghetto you could call it because our city is so divided into housing regions by income and to some extent ethnicity and/or race -- we have Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, etc. as well as Bel Air and Beverly Hills) of our city to area (ghetto). In downtown, the median income is $15,003 per year but in Bel Air it is $207,938 per year. Assuming a 40 hour week, 52 weeks of the year, that is 2080 hours a year and in downtown that amounts to $7.47 per hour and in Bel Air that amounts to about $100 per hour. That's median income.

Note that this list does not include the many, many homeless people in Los Angeles. Our city is trying to house all the homeless, but it is a nearly impossible job. So we see tents or carts with sleeping gear stationed under bridges and in other areas of the city. Beggars, and I have even encountered them IN grocery stores. The poverty in Los Angeles is easy to see. Yet look at the list of median wages from which I have drawn the following information.

So there is the rub. Let's look at some areas of Los Angeles and the median income:

Bel-Air, $207,938

Pacific Palisades, $168,008

Brentwood, $112,927

Beverlywood, $105,253

Northridge, $67,906 (There is a University of California there.)

East Los Angeles, $38,621

Koreatown, $30,558

Watts, $25,161

Chinatown, $22,754

http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/income/median/neighborhood/list/

People who know Los Angeles will know what these areas are. You can tell why I use the word "ghettos" about some areas of Los Angeles if you look at the names of some of these areas.

This list is just a sampling of the kind of disparity of wealth that we in big cities are aware of. If you look at this and realize that so many but not all of the middle income areas, the areas that have a median income that is represented as median for the nation as a whole in the OP are further away from the center of town. They are suburbs or out and require that people who work in the centers of the city (and there are several) have to drive to get to work -- drive on very crowded freeways. It is very difficult to live in Los Angeles without a car.

I'd like to add that the prices on food also vary according to the neighborhood in Los Angeles. They can vary greatly. That I suppose is due to the differences in the rents on the spaces of the stores. I live in a less expensive area, and the food here is cheaper in our grocery than it is in the Wilshire/Fairfax area even.

Everything about life and the quality of everything is different from community to community in Los Angeles.

We are a huge city. You can take a bus from downtown to Santa Monica on the coast, but there is no metro-rail at this time, no train. The West side tends to be the expensive side of town, and even the transportation to get there is impractical and time-consuming.

So the numbers in the OP represent the medians and averages across the country, but they do not represent the fundamental truth about our country that IS REPRESENTED by the numbers in Los Angeles. We have tremendous differences according to your class with regard to where you live, what you earn, and what your opportunities are in life if you are a young child.

It's called income disparity. We see it very clearly in cities like Los Angeles and in areas like Silicon Valley. And it is what Bernie Sanders is responding to. It is rather understandable that his message did not resound so well in the Midwest where I think these disparities in wealth are not so extreme and so obvious. But here on the West Coast where the jobs are and the weather is enticing, boy, is it obvious.