A $1.8mm 30 year fixed rate mortgage is about $12k per month at today’s rates. That wouldn’t include taxes and insurance, just the principal and interest.
It also doesn't include that a $1.8MM mortgage usually implies a $2.25MM house that you just put down $450k on.
The median price of American homes is $400k. In California it's $860k. In the Bay Area it's $1.5MM. You can get a house in the Bay Area for under $1.8MM, but you need a $360k down payment, and you will likely face a tradeoff between good schools, safe neighborhoods, being within walking distance of anything, and having a nice sized house. Outside of NYC, these numbers are the upper echelon. If you disagree, you have very expensive taste masquerading as requirements.
On that point about home sizes, Americans are frequently surprised how much less space Europeans are fine living in.
You are confusing 6k and 12k mortgages: the former is to buy a modest house today in most decent areas in the US. The latter is to buy a modest house in Bay Area, where a large fraction of hacker news users reside.
A “modest” house to me is a median house: around 2k sqft, run-of-the-mill construction, cheap materials, 8 feet ceilings, <10k sqft lot.
