After visiting another developer friend in San Francisco last summer I concluded that it would be very difficult for me to move to the Bay Area and maintain the

After visiting another developer friend in San Francisco last summer I concluded that it would be very difficult for me to move to the Bay Area and maintain the overall cost and quality of living that I currently have in NYC. It seems to me that these kinds of analyses invariably either use or are significantly skewed by the Manhattan cost of living. But my personal (and admittedly inexhaustive) conclusion was that NYC provides much better possibilities of having a low cost of living while remaining reasonably close to Manhattan than it appeared was possible in the Bay Area.