We’ve all seen the memes: “You do not earn a billion dollars. You steal it. Nobody works a billion times harder than a nurse, a teacher or a farmer. That wealth comes from underpaying the people who actually did the work.” The other end of the spectrum is the slogan:...

Five years ago, about eighty American cities had an average starter-home price of $1 million. Today, it’s 242 cities. A starter home runs seven figures in three times as many places today as it did before the pandemic. Zillow published the count recently. Half the...