But either way... doesn't this prove my point? This does not sound like a difficult way to live, _and_ it factors in luxuries (I for one definitely do not spend $10k/year on car ownership).
1 hour on/waiting for BART + ~40 minutes walking between your house and BART + ~20 minutes walking between BART and your job gets pretty close to 2 hours.
Car cost is indeed high, but if you have a kid you'll probably need one and then you have to factor in the cost of childcare... $2k/month?
I realize that single parent households do exist, but we're not covering every case here.
You don't need to spend $10k/year to have a car. This is pretty trivially provable because there are lots of people who own cars who clearly wouldn't be able to do so if that were the case.
Berkeley -> San Mateo is 35 miles one way (17,500 per year)
Berkeley -> San Francisco is 15 miles one way - 7500 per year (at an average speed of 20 mph)
If you can use BART or CalTrain to get to work then you can get those numbers way down, but it's not an option for everyone.
I drive around 40,000km (~25,000 miles) and that's around a 2 hour round trip commute.
Let's say you make $200k/year and manage to put together a $300k down payment and get a $700k mortgage at 3.8%. Here is the breakdown of your annual spending (using 2018 numbers):
$18,500 to 401K
$35,930 in federal income tax
$10,593 in FICA (Social security and medicare)
$13,724 in California income tax
Take home after tax + retirement savings: $121,253 Also, remember that the rules have changed and only $10,000 in state, local, and property tax is deductible against federal income.
Remaining payments:
$39,140 in mortgage payments
$10,500 in property tax
$1,000 in homeowners insurance
$10,000 in car ownership costs (gas, maintenance, insurance, financing or depreciation)
$4,000 in utilities (gas, electricity, water, trash, internet)
$1,000 for phone
That leaves you with $55,613 of "real" annual take home, or $4,634 per month, without counting the cost of food, entertainment, other debt servicing, etc. Certainly not poverty wages, and many people get by with far less, but you'll also spend 2+ hours per day commuting and have a significant fraction of your net worth tied up in a house in an earthquake-prone area.