Really difficult to answer this. I’d say on average, costs other than housing in NYC are 1.25-1.5x those of San Diego.
“Normal” housing in Manhattan (i.e. not condos bought by magnates and Russian heiresses) is probably 3-6x as expensive per sq ft than San Diego, depending on whether you rent or buy, but most people don’t have as much square footage, simple as that.
Housing in convenient/nice parts of NJ is actually about the same as San Diego as far as monthly nut if you buy. Higher taxes in general (with a few exceptions that I won’t advertise to vultures here 🙂 ), but lower purchase price per sq ft.
$400k would probably mean $250k take home after taxes. You could do pretty nicely with this, the more if you bought housing 20 years ago when it was cheap and have it mostly paid off by this point. Those are stagehands in the sense of senior management, not errand boys after all — they’re probably been there a while 🙂
If those people bought a brownstone in what used to be a bad area of Brooklyn for a few hundred thou 20 years ago, it may be worth north of a mill now, and they’ll still be paying $200/mo in property tax (property tax for houses in the city is actually super cheap).
I’m not sure if this really answers anyone’s question, because the NY area is so damn diverse that it all depends where exactly one chooses to live. And moving a mile in one direction or another can result in a significant difference in costs.
Upper East Side — it’s actually cheaper than some trendier areas of Manhattan these days. It’s never been trendy, it has only one subway line (changing ca. 2015-6) and it’s considered a bit of an older area. And there’s a big difference between what’s west of Park Ave and what’s east of 2nd or 3rd Ave as well.
