Because it's ignorant of basic facts. The median household income in the St. Louis metro area is $55k. It's $79k in the San Francisco metro, which is obviously quite a bit higher.
But you'd need to earn 159k per year in San Francisco to match the spending power of that $55k in St. Louis. And even that wouldn't be nearly enough to reach parity in home purchasing. Housing is 790% more expensive in San Francisco!
I get that it's fun to joke about flyover country, but the numbers are what they are. People simply are not struggling to move out of the house in St. Louis in the same way that they are in the Bay Area, for example.
Which is to say, once again, that there must be other factors at play.
