Walnut Creek is about 40m away from SF on Bart. So door-to-door that'd be about an hour commute. Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown. The rent there would be about $1800 for a 1BDR.

EDIT: As noted by the sibling post, the reason it is cheap is because Walnut Creek does not have very many tech jobs. Also, the peculiar thing about the Bay Area is that about 15 years or so the tech industry oscillates its epicenter between San Francisco and the South Bay. From Walnut Creek you can reach San Francisco in an hour, but if you have clients/partners/HQ etc in South Bay it is one bad commute.

I think part of the issue is that a lot of places outside of SF are places where people want to live and work (who also make lots of money). Lots of people want to live in Palo Alto, Oakland, Mountain View, etc so the prices don't really go down that much as you move further out.

For someone with no experience with SF and just looking at a map: a huge amount of the East Bay is closer time-wise to the busiest weekday BART station, Montgomery, than the western part of SF.

Even in the Sunset and the Richmond, 1 bedroom rents are still expensive. I poked around Craigslist recently and found plenty in the $2500 range. If you go across the bay, it's a little better. And, if you can deal with BART turning into a pumpkin at midnight, you might enjoy your work commute more.

Edit: this post assumes you take a job in SF. But, big companies are building more and more office campuses on the peninsula, away from reasonable public transit options. If I recall correctly, office rents in the city are actually on the rise, considerably, and it is driving larger employers out of the city under the guise of "putting our employees together to collaborate better."

2k for a studio in Dublin, east bay area about 1 hour via Bay Area Rapid Transit, assuming you can walk to work because BART is extremely limited for a mass transit system. 3k for a two-bedroom, so probably split the difference for a 1-bed. It wouldn't be so bad if we had better mass transit, there are only a handful of stops in SF and if you have to take a bus from there your commute time probably doubles to 2 hours. Buses suck.

$4500-$5000/mo 3-4 bedroom single family house in San Mateo. Perfect, safe location right in between San Francisco and San Jose, close to good schools, close to Caltrain station, close to major highways - 92, 101 and 280.

About 40-45 minutes from SF and San Jose time wise regardless of time of the day.

That’s where the premiums comes from

The Bay Area is particularly problematic in this regard. There are quite a few cities—Boston I’m most familiar with—where you go an hour out and prices are pretty reasonable. Not Rust Belt reasonable but reasonable. Not so much in the Bay Area.

$1800 is probably your floor. You'd need to get to the east bay and do something like Oakland, Berkeley, or something beyond the hills like WC.

$3,689.99