Let’s say you’re the median American SWE getting paid $80k a year. You’re saying you wouldn’t move to SFBA for less than $800k/yr in total compensation? I find that hard to imagine.

I can see what it costs. Getting $800k/yr means a house of about $1,600,000 should be affordable, but that gets you trash. Getting a "house" that PHYSICALLY TOUCHES the neighbor's house will go for more than that in a semi-tolerable San Francisco neighborhood. That is substandard living conditions.

$1.6m will get you 2,200 square feet of sweet, sweet detached single family living in Pacifica, Berkeley, or Marin. Double an $80k annual income will get you a 640 square foot home with $250/square foot land and construction costs, so not a particularly high end or spacious place.

Briefly looking at redfin shows that my 500kish house would be 3.5 millionish in Mountain View. Similar in SF but it's a lot harder to find a directly comparable house. That's a 14k monthly difference in the mortgage. Equivalent to 240k annually after taking taxes into account.

Using that number means I'm roughly at par with a FAANG salary given my level. But it's not like the FAANG engineer is setting fire to that 240k. Depending on where you are in your amortization schedule 20-80ish % of your payment goes to principle. And my 500k house is probably going to be worth 800k in 10 years while the bay area house would be 4.5-5 million. When you take that into account I'm probably at 70% of an equivalent FAANG position.

The more important thing to look at here is risk. FAANG salaries and bay area real estate prices are out of whack with the fundamentals. If you get in and out without the bubble bursting you're sitting pretty. If it bursts or even has a 10% correction the FAANG engineer is way behind.

One can rent a perfectly decent home in Cupertino with 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms for under $4,500 [1]. Price to rent ratios are very high for most SFH properties, so renting is often the right move. This will allow families to send their kids to public schools ranked among the best private schools in the nation for free, without any charter or magnet lotteries. I don't think rent for any comparable home in, say, Austin is more than $2,000/mo cheaper, or $40,000 before tax. That's a much narrower gap to justify than most of the hyperbole in this thread and especially narrow if both partners are working: job opportunities in the Bay Area are strong for almost all kinds of professions.

[1] https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/cupertino-3-bedroom-3...

God forbid you live in a townhouse. How do people survive in such poverty??

How do you afford housing wherever you make $80k? Unless literally everything comparable costs 10x in SF, there's no logical way you can say 10x is the mark at which SF wages are pegged at.

In accounting, this is an idea known as operating leverage.