Can you believe that the most expensive place in the US to buy a house and still be able to live comfortably is not actually New York City?

Guess what? New York City doesn't even make the top five. 

The most expensive place in the country to live out your grandiose ideals of the American dream is actually San Francisco, California.

You're probably thinking that's pretty impossible, but finder.com calculated the salary requirements to purchase a home and still live comfortably, meaning you can still cover daily expenditures and pay off debt not related to mortgages. 

San Francisco earned the not-so-coveted most expensive city to afford a home, with the average house costing $1,119,500 requiring a yearly salary of $180,600. 

The rest of the list were quite far behind, with San Jose coming in second with a home value of $805,000 and a required salary of $129,864, and LA with an average home value of $559,400 and required salary of $90,244.

New York City came in sixth place, with an average home value of $605,000 and required salary of $84,791. 

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NYC, San Francisco, San Jose, LA, San Diego, and Seattle make the top ten in part because of the high home values in the city. 

How does that affect the required salary? In order to get mortgages, the required salary would have to be higher to cover the payments, average debt, and average expenditures.

You're probably still stuck on the fact that finder.com, using city home values from Zillow, priced average homes in NYC at a mere $605,000. We, like Elite Daily, are pretty sure this number is far below the actual average. 

Then again, if you really think about it, the average price for a single family home in NYC is much lower than most of the hype you hear about on a day-to-day basis. 

Understandably, The New York Times states that the average home price in Manhattan has reached $1.87 million. 

That's true, but they're including apartments and condos in that number, where people simply own the interior of their apartment, not the structure and property itself. Zillow, it seems, has only included single family homes and the actual property that it sits on. 

If you really think about it, it would seem a bit counterintuitive for a home to cost less when you own the property it sits on, but with the ample amount of luxury high rise condos enticing foreign buyers and transplants to pay an exorbitant amount of money for the view, it makes sense. 

After all, those people are paying for location and amenities. You don't see a single-family home in the middle of Manhattan, but you see a heck of a lot of high-rises. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately, however you'd like to look at it), those high-rises wouldn't stand up to a San Francisco earthquake, and thus, most of their infrastructures pale in height comparison to NYC's. 

These numbers make much more sense when you take into consideration the blocks of row houses (think Full House). 

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Regardless, it's still pretty darn expensive to purchase a home in either city. If you want to live comfortably with a salary of $43,265, you may want to check out Jackson, MS, where the home value is only $62,800.  

If you want to check out the whole list of 78 cities, analyzed by finder.com, check it out here. 

Check out There Are Amazing Apartments Under $1,000/Month in Long Island City. 

[via Elite Daily] [Feature Image Courtesy Finder]