San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'
To an outsider that has spent nearly 80% of his time in SF on business travel for the last couple years: the cost of living in SF is unjustifiable. I was offered a position with one of my  clients in SF for roughly double my current income in Houston, TX. After running the numbers with an attempt to maintain similar standards of living and leisure, it was simply impossible to make the math work out in my favor without significant sacrifices on either count. In Houston, I live quite comfortably in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods with money to blow on a luxury car, 2+ extravagant international vacations a year, and decent amount of savings and investments. But in SF, I&#x27;d be uncomfortably close (relative to my Texan standards, anyway) to the &#x27;low income&#x27; line. So I might as well keep on racking up the frequent flier miles, eh?<p>Something&#x27;s gotta give. NIMBYism when it comes to affordable housing, the income disparity between &#x27;techies&#x27; and everyone else in SF, and lack of sufficient investment in effective mass transit are all clearly driving the city into the ground. My teams in SF are constantly bleeding our best talent to places like Denver, Austin, Seattle, etc. because the youngest and brightest employees are realizing that SF is an unsustainable drain on their finances. It&#x27;s not going to stop me from doing business there, but it&#x27;s certainly going to mean that my firm just continues to feed the vicious cycle of wage inflation by attracting talent with higher and higher base salaries.