Big city != HCOL The Dallas metro area is larger than the SF metro area (and so are the individual cities), but Dallas's COL is half as much as SF's. Edit: Fo

Big city != HCOL The Dallas metro area is larger than the SF metro area (and so are the individual cities), but Dallas's COL is half as much as SF's. Edit: For that matter, just to ward off the (valid) point that the SF metro area doesn't include most of SV, the Dallas metro area is larger than the SF and SJ metro areas combined. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara have 6,172,302 people combined as of the 2010 Census, while Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington has 6,426,214 people.