Parent's mistake is to maintain the same lifestyle. If you settle for less housing or room mates, you come across ahead.
Beyond that, there's also the issue of schooling. That tends to be a nightmare for people in the Bay Area, due to the districting policies. Many Bay Area parents opt for private schooling, further adding to the expense.
How about, you know, basic empathy? (Unless you have some reason to believe that DCFS has unreasonably high standards here?)
No. I was never advocating for raising children in cramped conditions. Remember, the person I was arguing with lumped family into "other stuff".
I live in Waterloo. I've seen more than one person on HN argue that you should leave as soon as you get your degree here. I don't want to do that. I think Waterloo has some wonderful neighbourhoods for raising children, complete with top notch public schools within walking distance. The real estate prices here are not nearly as bad as Toronto, let alone SF. Even if you could make 3 times as much working in the Bay Area as you could here; I would assert that it's easier to buy a 3BR house here, have 2 kids, get them both into university and keep them healthy the entire time than it would be in SF.
If you used to live in a nice 1BR condo, you could definitely move to SF and spend an extra $20k/year in housing and still come out way ahead.
If you used to live in 3br house with a backyard and garage, you definitely won't be able to maintain that in SF.