It is? I've lived in both Cambridge and SF and I thought the rental prices in the city were about the same. My apartment in San Francisco is cheaper than my apartment in Cambridge.
Maybe it is cheaper to buy in Cambridge/Boston?
It definitely seems cheaper to buy a place in Boston's burbs than it is in Silicon Valley, Marin, the Peninsula or the East Bay. A friend bought a gigantic McMansion out by Concord for $600K. A house that size 15 miles out of SF or San Jose would be $2-10 million depending on the town.
Can't do that anymore. Everything in Concord is over a million now. Same with Lexington & Carlisle. Bedford still has a few in the $600K range (our next-door neighbors bought their house for $615K, and the house across the street sold for $630K), but the bulk of the houses here are over a million too.
I'm amazed by the home price appreciation here. When I was a kid, in elementary & middle school, a cheap house was $60K, a pretty decent one was $200K, and you were rich if you had one that cost $400K. Now, $400K is the minimum to get anything in town, a decent house is $600K, and a McMansion is about $1.3M.
I can't till the housing market reverts to normal prices and all the people who drove it up get shredded. Manhattan has been slow to come around, but when it does, I'm expecting pure beauty.
That being said, I have been to SF a few times, I love it, and we plan to move there once we are making enough money that it doesn't have a significant impact on our bottom line.