Silicon Valley
A Twitter employee in his early 40s who earns $160,000 says it is a “pretty bad” income for raising a family in the Bay Area. The biggest cost is his $3,000 rent – which he said was “super cheap” for the area – for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and two kids. He’d like a bigger house but groups of young people are happy to pay up to $2,000 for a single room in a shared house and this makes prices higher for everyone.
“Families cannot afford to live here,” he said. He also said that cafés that welcome families and restaurants are closing and there are “hip coffee shops” instead. Silicon Valley’s most recent tech boom, combined with not enough houses, has caused rents to soar in the last five years. The city’s rents are now the highest in the world.