You just can. Nearly a million people do
The current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF is approaching $6000/month right now. Apartments at $5000 have lines of applicants. My partner and I are paying about half that for our apartment... and we haven't lived here that long.
If we were trying to move here for work now, we absolutely wouldn't be able to afford it.
And the thing about that "two bedroom" is that it probably would have been classified as a one bedroom ~fifteen years ago. Much-to-most of the time, an "N-bedroom" apartment gives you N bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and -if you're lucky- a small amount of closet space. Living room? Study? Get fucked, those are for owners, or folks who started renting 10->20+ years ago.
I actually think Ingleside is pretty doable, but it's a very long commute for the price. I'm not going to live in the Tenderloin, and you're probably not going to either.
I'm counting 7 apartments (arguably 8) outside of those neighborhoods, and half of those don't list the square footage (a 600sqft "two bedroom" is not a two bedroom).
By the way, the Bay is bigger than SF. People commute from Milbrae, Daly City, Richmond into SF every day by train and it takes less than an hour.
>current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF
for a reason. Yes, you can get a cheaper place if you live in a place you don't want to live, but my point is that you don't want to live there. This entire thread is about how tech is moving to NYC, exactly because it's difficult to build a good life in SF. I'm saying, yes the prices have increased to the point where you can't build a good life in SF.
If you want to live in the Tenderloin or a dorm at SF State University... by all means go for it, and good luck to you. I'd much rather pack up and move to NYC than live like that.
This is referring to SF, not "the Bay." SF has a population of "nearly a million." The Bay Area has a population of 8 million.
You are literally describing a place people live and are living in.
Yes. Couples with two incomes and successful careers can build a life here. The question is how normal, single people build a life here.
And that number hasn't budged in decades. It is a completely ossified community. There's the folks who bought their houses 20-30 years ago and stayed put thanks to prop 17, their adult children living with them waiting for them to die, the young single tech workers willing to fork out $3k for a studio or live with roommates, the nepotized $300k+ earning public service employees, and the rest of the non-tech workers resigned to the crime-ridden pockets of the east/south bay that can still be afforded with an entire family's income. That's basically the entire population.