The short-term inconvenience pays off in terms of saving money to buy a home and invest rather than pissing away the money on rent and other recurring expenses. Rent is a major rain on savings, especially in high cost of living areas.
Podshare lists rates of $1,000/month in LA (not SF). I don't know what local rents are there, but my guess is that Podshare is below the rates of studio apartments, but at or around the rates of renting one bedroom in a house.
You can get a cheap new car for a lot lower TCO than traveling an equivalent number of miles with Uber. Like, a lot lower, unless your utilization is crazy low. If you travel under 2,000 miles per year or so, Uber might be the best option for you.
We could absolutely afford the mortgage, even if we both lost our jobs and had to find lower pay replacements. We were conservative in every calculation. We put 20% down etc.
Buying a new home is where we tripped up. Right when the economy was starting to crash we bought another house (wife was pregnant) and put our first home up for sale. At the time of course, no one new what was ahead of us "recession" wise.
Obviously in hindsight it was a mistake, but at the time homes were selling like hotcakes and we didn't worry. Prices were also still climbing quickly and we worried that in a few years we'd be priced out of the market.
However, it's worth noting that our first home's value has still not reached it's peak (what we paid) so if we stayed there, we'd still have negative equity. Luck, timing etc. etc.
The takeaway for my wife and I was that it's better to be fiscally conservative, or enormously fiscally aggressive but nothing in between. We crossed that line every so slightly and paid a huge price.