Decent 2000 sq ft house, nice upper middle class neighborhood around here is probably $120k-$150k depending on having a basement, etc. Taxes about $1200-$1500/ yr. I don't know how some of you guys afford it, I hate paying that much.

THe price for a Long Island home is also much higher than in CA. A good LI house may be $5,000,000. Here a comp house will go for about $2,500,000, tax per year $50,000. But at least in LI you get some land with it. By the way they don't have houses that small in LI do they? And Queens don'
t count.

I don't think I've seen Upper-Middle class homes at 2000 sf. Maybe on the ocean or lake but that's about it.

We have some very nice older neighborhoods in Wichita that have smaller homes in them. Usually it's a 2000 sq ft main floor ranch, without a basement. With a finished basement you're right, 2000 sq ft isn't a very big house.

Funny, I ran screaming from Naperville after high school and never looked back.

I had a friend in high school who lived in White Eagle. His parents had a 5,000 sq. ft. house and a Mercedes and a BMW in the garage. What you couldn't see from the street was that they were leveraged to the hilt, could only afford to put furniture in the rooms that faced the street, and could barely afford to feed their family. This was in the early 90's, way before the dot-com bust.

I know of many families in the area who ran up $10,000's in credit card debt in the early 2000's to keep up the appearances of their lifestyle even though one--or both--of the parents were out of work.

I like that I can live comfortably and within my means where I am now.