If you get an SF offer and are comparing it to normal US cities (not NY), just chop 40% off.
This will give you an idea: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=moving+from++San+Franc...
So you compromise -- you split a bedroom with a roommate, or you convert your living area into a bedroom, or you live in a pre-1969 rent-controlled unit and have the people who used to live in those apartments throwing rocks at you on your way to work. Or you live somewhere in north/east bay and deal with a two hour driving commute.
You lose all of the tax breaks and everything else that people get who have your same take home pay at a lower net income (e.g. student loan tax deduction). Also, you have to deal with ignorant people like yourself that look at salary numbers in a vacuum and assume the person talking is over-privileged.
One of my younger friends moved out to the bay at a 90k salary and he cannot afford to live by himself in a one bedroom apartment in the south bay, let alone SF. Consider that, he can't afford a shitty one bedroom apartment in a suburb.
People get by in SF with much less than the numbers that are being quoted here. I'm not saying you shouldn't complain, I'm saying be reasonable about your problems.
That's preposterous. Even with significant payments like student loans, that's easily done on 90k. Typical rent in SB is 2k a month. A good deal on a 1 bedroom place is something like 1200.
Yes, downtown SF is ridiculous. All those stories about tiny places for 4k a month are more-or-less true. Even then, people often find much better deals, but I'll happily concede that the situation is out of hand there. The rest of the bay, though? Pshh. Sure it's not cheap, but it's nothing like people try to make it out.
I'm sure I could move to a third world country and have an even lower cost of living. As though it were otherwise equivalent to living in a top US city.
Maybe in the future my attitude will change, but as of right now you literally could not pay me enough to move to the SF / MTV area.
I'm not sure the density of craft cocktails bars and farm-to-table restaurants, or the fact that it never gets too hot makes up for the drawbacks.
Complaints about the rent and transit are obviously legitimate, though you may be overestimating the quality of transit in most other cities.
Other cities either have similarly insane rent and much better transit (NYC), or similarly bad transit and much cheaper rent (basically everywhere else).
Personally, I like the people here - both counter cultural, and also scientific. Very friendly to us aspy-leaning folks. A place where someone can say "I quit my job and am doing {teaching yoga, making the aforementioned craft cocktails, etc}" without judgement. A place where, quite literally, the core of our technological world is being invented. The weather is a bonus, and the accessibility to the great American west.
So yea, quit knocking my town!
That said, I definitely get your comments. Aspects of the Silicon Valley mindset can get to be a bit much after a while. Much of the actual valley is suburban sprawl with awful traffic and I find SF itself something of a mixed bag even if it has a lot of positives.
Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Austin, Minneapolis, and Boston are more affordable than the Bay Area, and generally considered to be good places to live. (I won't say anything either way about St. Louis, because I don't know anything about it. I was there about 12 years ago and will probably be there this year for Strange Loop, but that's it.) There isn't a lack of affordable, good places to live in the U.S. There isn't even a lack of affordable, good places to live in cities: Chicago is still the Second City, culturally. L.A. is just a company town for the entertainment industry and way too spread out.
New York is expensive but actually worth it in terms of urban amenity (unlike SF). There really isn't anywhere in the U.S. that has that urban density, so if that's what you want, NYC provides it. San Francisco, on the other hand, wouldn't be on the map except for the VC industry. It has more of a one-dimensional economy than Los Angeles.