He could also just be in an area that was decently outside a major metro area when he bought his house, and urban sprawl and real estate speculation has massively raised the value of his property.

When my parents bought my childhood home in the 80s, the road ended about a mile down from the house and they had to park at the lake and carry things up. There's a hunting preserve just on the other side of the train tracks to the north, and when I was growing up, farms with cows, horses, and a shitload of corn.

These days, I don't know anyone I grew up with who can afford to live there any more, as it's become yet another commuter town in the country for the higher paid employees in the nearest major city. When they sold the house, I'm pretty sure it had to be knocked down completely (we had squirrels in the walls, and the previous owner had done a hack job on the electrical wiring to convert it from a summer cottage to a full-time residence) yet a half acre of land and a house you couldn't legally sell for occupation was still close to $500,000.

I can actually rent a two bedroom apartment in NYC for less than it would cost me to rent a studio in my home town, which has no public transport, and it was a two mile walk to the nearest gas station, one way.

It's kind of messed up that entire communities can be destroyed, through nothing they actually did and developments they had no way of predicting 40 years ago.