Jul 4, 2026
If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to have some extra cash in your bank, because the housing prices are definitely not gentle on the checking account.
That’s what Katrine Razniak discovered when the 27-year-old moved to the Bay Area in 2022. She was making $70,000 as a LinkedIn recruiter. By the time she joined the software company Rippling in late 2023, her salary had jumped to $180,000.
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Her partner, Adam Woodbury, 39, currently earns $185,000 as a software engineer. He made the move to the city in 2021. Together, their household income sits comfortably in the top tier of American earners. Yet this spring, they still couldn’t find an apartment they could afford.
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The couple toured 30 one-bedroom listings over three months, hunting for something under $5,000 a month. At one $5,200 listing, 30 people had signed up to apply within an hour of the open house.
Alas, they gave up the search.
“I don’t feel completely hopeless, but I don’t think I can stay in S.F.,” the 27-year-old told The New York Times.
Dead-end street
The math behind their frustration is straightforward. San Francisco is bracing for an unprecedented wealth event. OpenAI and Anthropic, both headquartered in the city, are preparing to go public at valuations approaching $1 trillion each.
Anthropic confidentially filed IPO paperwork on June 1 and could beat OpenAI to Wall Street as early as this fall, according to Fortune.
Combined with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, more than 20 former and current employees of these companies could become new billionaires, according to an analysis by Sacra cited by the Times.
One would think that two major tech companies going public on the stock market would have little impact on housing prices. However, their wealth is already impacting the housing market long before shares are traded publicly. That’s because local investors hold millions in paper wealth. An IPO converts that equity into liquid cash.
San Francisco home sales over $5 million soared 69% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, Jay Cheng of the San Francisco Association of Realtors told ABC News. Median home prices for March to May 2026 were up nearly 15% year-over-year — the fastest pace in the country, according to Redfin data.
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One listing on Noe Street has even begun accepting pre-IPO OpenAI or Anthropic stock as a form of payment — a sign of how equity in these companies has become currency in the local real estate market.
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I didn’t have a penny to pay
San Francisco’s cost of living sits 65.6% above the national average, according to the Cost of Living Index from the Council for Community and Economic Research.
In April, the city’s median home price surpassed $1.7 million, nearly four times the national median of around $450,000. The average apartment rent at $3,827 per month is now above New York City’s, making San Fran the most expensive city in the nation, the Times notes.
Vacancy rates in desirable neighborhoods like the Marina District, Pacific Heights and South of Market have collapsed to roughly 3%, down from around 13% in 2020.
“It’s a pressure cooker, and it’s heated up really fast,” Nigel Hughes, senior researcher at CoStar, told the Times.
Mean annual pay in San Francisco hit $196,365 last year, up from $153,359 in 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by the Times. But even that hasn’t kept pace with the widening gap between ordinary tech salaries and AI windfalls.
Ball of confusion
The psychological strain is evident in the city’s workforce, even among people earning well above the national average. Woodbury’s salary puts him roughly in the top 20% of American households, according to Census Bureau data.
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“I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an A.I. company,” he admitted.
Deedy Das, a former engineer and current partner at Menlo Ventures, a major Anthropic investor, described the psychological toll as being stark.
“I mean, overnight I have friends who are worth billions of dollars, and sometimes even they don’t know how to process that,” he told Marketplace.
He said other friends, even those with coveted Big Tech salaries, feel rattled.
“People are like, ‘I felt like I did everything right in my life. I went to Stanford and MIT. I was top of my class, I took the right job … But I don’t know if (it) even has value anymore,’” Das added.
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The phrase “permanent underclass” now circulates in tech circles. It’s the fear that missing this wave of AI wealth means missing the last one that will matter.
Restless Farewell
Some are opting out. Woodbury recently relocated to Carnelian Bay near Lake Tahoe. Razniak remains in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury area with two roommates and pays $1,650 a month. They are now navigating a long-distance relationship while weighing a move to Seattle.
Others are soldiering through, despite the math. Jolie Gan, 23, who makes around $250,000 a year between two jobs, told the Times she can manage. But she sees friends earning under $200,000 consumed by making rent and buying groceries.
Although Razniak doubled her salary in four years, she described feeling neither wealthy nor in crisis — just persistent. There’s a newfound sense of “low-level vigilance about money”.
“I thought when I’d make $200K I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said.
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With a writing and editing career spanning over 15 years, Emma creates and refines content across a broad spectrum of industries, including personal finance, lifestyle, travel, health & wellness, real estate, beauty & fitness and B2B/SaaS/tech.
