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Key Takeaways Six‑figure tech salaries are increasingly inadequate to afford a comfortable lifestyle in San Francisco.
The surge of wealth from AI companies has created a new elite that outbids other tech workers.
One software startup worker, Katrine Razniak, was unable to find a one-bedroom apartment in the area despite making $180,000 a year.
Katrine Razniak, 27, earns $180,000 a year working as the lead of a team of account managers at the software company Rippling. She has recently faced an uphill battle trying to find a one-bedroom apartment in her area, The New York Times reported.
Razniak lives in San Francisco, where the average monthly rent for an apartment is about $3,827, according to CoStar data. That makes San Francisco the most expensive city in the U.S. to live in, surpassing New York City in recent months.
Razniak and her partner, Adam Woodbury, make a combined $365,000 income — but six-figure salaries are not enough to secure an apartment in San Francisco. The couple searched for a place to live this spring, targeting a one-bedroom apartment for under $5,000 a month. They visited 30 apartments across three months, but found that the properties were too expensive and intensely competitive to secure.
For example, one apartment priced at $5,200 a month had 30 names on the sign-up sheet within an hour of its open house. The couple eventually gave up and ended their housing search.
“I don’t feel completely hopeless, but I don’t think I can stay in S.F.,” Razniak told the Times. She currently lives in an apartment in San Francisco, which she shares with two roommates for $1,650 a month. Meanwhile, Woodbury recently relocated to Carnelian Bay on Lake Tahoe, about three and a half hours away from San Francisco by car.
AI has changed the search for housing
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