There's a chart making the rounds that plots SF home prices against SF tech salaries since 2000, and it tells a story that anyone living here already feels in their bones: the gap between what tech workers earn and what homes cost has been widening for over two decades — and it hit its most absurd peak in 2021.
Let that sink in. The best-paid workers in the highest-paying industry in America still can't keep pace with housing costs in the city where they work. If six-figure software engineers are getting squeezed out, what does that say about everyone else?
The 2021 peak is particularly telling. That was the year of zero-percent interest rates, remote-work housing mania, and an absolute flood of cheap money into real estate. Home prices went parabolic while tech salaries — which had been climbing steadily — simply couldn't match the trajectory. The result was the largest recorded gap between earning power and buying power for SF's most economically privileged workforce.
This isn't just a tech problem. It's a policy problem. San Francisco has spent decades layering permitting requirements, environmental reviews, and bureaucratic obstacles on top of every housing project that dares to break ground. The result is a city that produces a fraction of the housing it needs while demand — driven by a globally competitive economy — continues to surge.
As one Bay Area commuter put it when discussing the tradeoffs of SF life: "A 10% paycut would be worth it to me" just to avoid the grind. And that math increasingly checks out. Why fight for a home in a city that fights against building them when you can live better for less almost anywhere else?
The free market isn't the villain here. The villain is a regulatory apparatus that treats every new housing unit like a threat rather than what it actually is: relief. Until San Francisco gets serious about cutting red tape and letting builders build, this chart will keep diverging — and the city will keep hemorrhaging the very people it claims to want.
You shouldn't need a $300K total comp package to afford a one-bedroom. And yet, here we are.
