The reason I brought this up is purely from a retirees quality of life perspective. It is hard to have such discussions with folk who do not enjoy the same standard of living as that of their more affluent friends.
I used "class" purely as it was used in most all of the articles I read today to differentiate between net worth levels.
Where am I going with this? Well in our area/general neighborhood, you need about $400-$600k to "buy" a home in a nice well run lower crime neighborhood within walking distance of the beach. The COL would require you to have about $45k pa. after tax to support a decent lifestyle. there are also multi $m homes too, but you can get a nice comfortable retirement location for the above. We consider ourselves to have an above average standard of living (for Florida).
Across the River, the homes go down to $200 - $350k. The crime is a little higher not much to note, is 10 - 15 - 20 miles from the beach, and the communities are a lot more varied. some homes are scruffier than others and there is not as much incentive to keep your lawn mown and home well maintained. Please do not get me wrong here, they at NOT bad areas, they are just not what we would consider for our own personal optimum retirement locations. They have more commercial activity very near the residential areas and as such have a lot more traffic.
Our personal preference is to live in our preferred location, and not be forever looking where the grass is greener. In order to afford such, ones net worth needs to be within the general classification of "Upper Middle Class", based on the data I reviewed.