This 27-Year-Old Makes $180,000 a Year. She Can’t Afford a One-Bedroom Apartment in Her City.

Katrine Razniak, 27, earns $180,000 a year working as the lead of a team of account managers at the software company Rippling. She has recently faced an uphill battle trying to find a one-bedroom apartment in her area, The New York Times reported. 

Razniak lives in San Francisco, where the average monthly rent for an apartment is about $3,827, according to CoStar data. That makes San Francisco the most expensive city in the U.S. to live in, surpassing New York City in recent months. 

Razniak and her partner, Adam Woodbury, make a combined $365,000 income — but six-figure salaries are not enough to secure an apartment in San Francisco. The couple searched for a place to live this spring, targeting a one-bedroom apartment for under $5,000 a month. They visited 30 apartments across three months, but found that the properties were too expensive and intensely competitive to secure. 

For example, one apartment priced at $5,200 a month had 30 names on the sign-up sheet within an hour of its open house. The couple eventually gave up and ended their housing search. 

“I don’t feel completely hopeless, but I don’t think I can stay in S.F.,” Razniak told the Times. She currently lives in an apartment in San Francisco, which she shares with two roommates for $1,650 a month. Meanwhile, Woodbury recently relocated to Carnelian Bay on Lake Tahoe, about three and a half hours away from San Francisco by car. 

AI has changed the search for housing

Razniak and Woodbury are doing well by most measures. They hold coveted roles in the tech industry and earn salaries that place them in the top 20% of U.S. households, according to Census Bureau data.

Yet in San Francisco, the ground beneath those advantages is shifting. As rents climb, the security they thought a tech job would guarantee has begun to feel fragile. The Silicon Valley dream they are chasing may no longer include a truly affordable life. 

The pressure is intensifying because AI has created a new level of compensation. As AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, both headquartered in San Francisco, move toward public offerings, they are spawning an elite tier of workers and investors whose wealth dwarfs that of even well-paid engineers and product managers. 

These are people whose compensation packages and equity stakes give them the ability to bid far above normal tech salaries for housing. 

Alongside Elon Musk’s newly public SpaceX, these three firms could create more than 20 new billionaires from their current and former employees alone, according to an analysis from Sacra, a private markets research firm. 

“I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an AI company,” Woodbury told the Times. 

According to a Redfin report, San Francisco’s median home price was $1.7 million in April, far more than the national median of $450,000. The average annual pay in the area was $196,365 last year, up from $153,359 in 2020, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.