A one bedroom apartment is perhaps the most unfavorable comparison (the housing stock is predominantly SFHs, so bedrooms in a shared home are a lot more plentif

A one bedroom apartment is perhaps the most unfavorable comparison (the housing stock is predominantly SFHs, so bedrooms in a shared home are a lot more plentiful than one bedrooms, which are usually in apartments), yet I see multiple listings for $2,200/mo in Redwood City, a fairly central part of the Bay. You don’t have to live in San Francisco, FYI, and even still your particularly dystopian portrait seems off the mark from my lived experience. And your COVID point makes no sense: the Bay Area has come out relatively better off in the pandemic than most other places. A similar apartment in Austin would be around $1,300/mo. Is $10,000/yr really the difference between middling and “quite high” expectations for quality of life? How do you price access to a far more competitive market for your labor? Is it the state taxes, then, which push you over the edge?