In San Francisco, Even $180k Salaries Are No Longer Enough
TLDR:
A couple earning $360k ($240k post tax) struggles to find a <$5k 1BR in SF and do not feel comfortable living there long term given the VHCOL.
Excerpts:
“I don’t feel completely hopeless, but I don’t think I can stay in S.F.,” Ms. Razniak said. Mr. Woodbury added, “At some point, there was a slow transition where we both realized it just didn’t make any sense.”
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Despite more than doubling her salary since she arrived, Ms. Razniak said she felt neither wealthy nor that she was living paycheck to paycheck. Instead, it’s something in between: a low-level vigilance about money that she had expected, by now, to have left behind.
“I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights.
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Ms. Razniak and Mr. Woodbury have started thinking about Seattle. The life Ms. Razniak imagines there is one she cannot picture affording in San Francisco, even on a combined income that would be remarkable almost anywhere else in the country.
“We want a house, we want a garage, we want storage,” she said. “And that just doesn’t feel attainable here.”
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It certainly seems like the cost to buy in SF has spiked in recent months (at least anecdotally) so I can understand the anxiety around affording a home. At the same time, spending 25% of post tax income on 1BR rent seems totally reasonable. Maybe they really are just caught in the awkward middle?
Edit: Supposing we take her ambitions literally, how much does a house with a garage cost in SF and how affordable would it be with their income?