German rents are relatively reasonable:

"The price of Monthly rent for a 45 m2 (480 Sqft) furnished studio in NORMAL area in Leipzig is €352" i.e. slightly over $5,000 per year.

[Source https://www.expatistan.com/price/studio-rent-normal-area/lei...]

Wow, that's super cheap! Here in Grand Rapids, MI, USA (generally considered a low cost of living area) an unfurnished apartment in not great parts of town is on the order of $800/mo, plus about $150/mo in utilities, depending on how cold you can tolerate in winter and how hot in summer, i.e. double the price.

Now, actual studio apartments command a premium here, and anything that small is hard to find, you'll more likely find an 80m2/800 sqft converted space in the basement of someone's house for that price. Also, housing is cheaper the farther you go from downtown, and I'm not sure how good public transit is in Leipzig, but it's pretty car-centric here. We have a bus system, but that basically means an extra hour anywhere you want to go, which is a massive pain when you're already working 2 30-hour-per-week jobs.

Not sure about Leipzig (not the OP here) but in a sort of comparable (ish, Leipzig is much larger but also in the east of Germany) place elsewhere in Germany I paid about the same like 20 years ago. I had the choice of 2 bus routes to get to university (one was a special university Express bus running between the two campus locations) and I could walk to one in about 10 minutes, the other around 20 minutes. Town of about 150000 ppl and 15000 students.

In general public transport in cities in Germany is good. You may have pockets of town where you can't get from one side to the other without going to the center first but if you're in a reasonably small city even that doesn't take you forever. And if you have to cross town you can do it easily because the transit system is not only made for rush hour traffic to the center in the morning and out in the evening. You can go either direction at all times, even on weekends. Not all jobs are downtown either (though many are). You have offices all over the place too. In Frankfurt for example I would take the train (5min walk) to central station (maybe 20 min ride) then take the "S-Bahn" out to the other end (another 10 min or so) of the center to an office building right in the middle of lots of apartment buildings (3-4 storey max).

Depends on how and where you live.

Goes fron $300-$1000 a month for a shared flat to a single flat.

I'm actually really skeptical on city affordability. I could barely do this in my home town let alone any city I can think of.