SAN FRANCISCO — Katrine Razniak, 27, arrived in San Francisco in 2022 to work as a recruiter at LinkedIn, with a salary of US$70,000 per year. Her annual compensation jumped to $180,000 when she joined software company Rippling, where she led a team of account managers. His partner, Adam Woodbury, 39, moved to the city in 2021 and earns $185,000 as a software engineer.
Today, even those six-figure salaries don’t seem enough in San Francisco.
When Razniak and Woodbury tried to find a one-bedroom apartment this semester for less than $5,000 a month, they couldn’t. They visited around 30 properties in three months, but they were all too expensive and too competitive. In one $5,200-per-month ad, for example, they discovered that 30 people had put their names on the list of interested parties in less than an hour after the open house.
They ended the search. But, even if they had found a property, the question remained: would a city where grocery shopping and dinner with friends have become a cause for financial concern still be a place where they could build their future?
“I don’t feel completely hopeless, but I don’t think I can stay in SF,” Razniak said. Woodbury added: “At some point, there was a slow transition where we both realized that it just stopped making sense.”
Razniak and Woodbury are not in trouble by any conventional measure. But with a wave of artificial intelligence-related wealth about to wash over San Francisco, even young tech professionals who arrived in the city chasing the Silicon Valley dream are starting to feel like an affordable future is increasingly out of reach.
Continues after advertising
That’s because as AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — both based in San Francisco and valued at nearly $1 trillion — prepare to go public, an artificial intelligence elite has emerged with the power to outspend other tech workers. The two companies, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently went public, could create more than 20 new billionaires among current and former employees, according to an analysis by private markets research firm Sacra.
“I feel a little like I’m not good enough to live here because I don’t work at an AI company,” Woodbury said, even though his salary puts him in roughly the top 20 percent of households in the United States, according to Census Bureau data.
Woodbury recently moved to Carnelian Bay in California’s Lake Tahoe region, where the cost is lower. Razniak remains in an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which he shares with two roommates and for which he pays $1,650 a month. The two are making their long-distance relationship work.
Continues after advertising
San Francisco has long faced accessibility problems, but the issue has taken on a new dimension with the mass arrival of AI workers attracted by OpenAI, Anthropic and other startups. The city’s overall cost of living is 65.6% above the national average, according to the most recent data from the Council for Community and Economic Research’s Cost of Living Index.
Housing leads the way. The median price of a home in San Francisco surpassed $1.7 million in April, according to a Redfin report, well above the national median of around $450,000. And in recent months, the city’s average apartment rent has surpassed that of New York, becoming the most expensive in the United States at $3,827 per month, according to real estate data firm CoStar.
“It’s a pressure cooker, and it heats up very quickly,” said Nigel Hughes, a senior researcher at CoStar. The vacancy rate in some of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods — including the Marina District, Pacific Heights and South of Market — has dropped to about 3%, down from about 13% in 2020, according to CoStar data. The construction of new properties slowed down.
Continues after advertising
The rise in property prices is aggravated by other factors. Utility costs are about 41% higher in San Francisco than the national average; transportation costs around 43% more; and supermarkets have prices approximately 19% higher than those in the rest of the country, according to the Cost of Living Index.
And it’s increasingly difficult to keep up with the standards of neighbors — or, in this case, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. Median annual pay in San Francisco was $196,365 last year, up from $153,359 in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Ted Egan, chief economist for the city of San Francisco, said that high-income people have always evaluated whether it was worth accepting the trade-offs imposed by the city or moving to a place with a yard and garage. What has changed now, according to him, is the scale. When Uber went public in 2019, its market value was around US$82 billion.
Continues after advertising
“OpenAI and Anthropic are valued at more than ten times that,” Egan said.
Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement that his administration is working to reduce costs through greater access to child care, a new zoning plan for family housing and transportation improvements. He did not specifically address the plight of those earning six-figure salaries.
(O New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the use of journalistic content in AI systems. The companies deny the accusations.)
Jolie Gan, 23, moved to San Francisco in January after completing a Fulbright scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Today, she has two jobs: she works at venture capital manager Andreessen Horowitz and writes for Core Memory, a technology and science publication, earning an income of around US$250,000 per year. She and her roommate have already moved three times in two months — in one case, leaving a property misleadingly advertised as having two bedrooms; in another, they emerged from a building with black mold and rats.
With $250,000 a year and no student debt, Gan said he can get by, including saving for retirement. Still, he said he sees the pressure on friends who earn less than US$200,000, for whom rent, bills and groceries consume practically all of their income.
Gan said she is determined to stay in San Francisco for the next few years because of the career opportunities, the city’s energy and the community she has built there.
“As absurd as this housing situation is, and as expensive as everything gets, I still think these intangibles are worth it to me,” he said.
Razniak and Woodbury began thinking about Seattle. The life Razniak imagines there is one she can’t see herself affording in San Francisco, even with a combined income that would be extraordinary almost anywhere else in the country.
“We want a house, we want a garage, we want space to store things,” she said. “And that just doesn’t seem like something achievable here.”
c.2026 The New York Times Company
