This summer the New York Times profiled a couple in San Francisco looking to rent a new apartment. The article focuses on Katrine, a tech worker making $180k, and her boyfriend Adam, who makes $185k. For three months, Katrine and Adam looked for a new one-bedroom before giving up. According to the NYT, “even those six-figure salaries are no longer enough in San Francisco.”
But how true is this?
When reading about the rental market, an inordinate amount of focus is given to high-income households. The truth is that across the US, rental affordability is largely a problem for low-income households. Most people know this intuitively, which is why the reaction to the NYT article was largely negative. It’s difficult to sympathize with people making a combined income of $365k, which places them comfortably in the top 20% of San Francisco households.
The data for San Francisco shows that affordability is primarily a problem for lower-income households. In 2024, 83.8% of the bottom quintile of renters spent 30% or more of their income on housing. For the next quintile, it’s 66%. Few renters in the top two quintiles are rent-burdened. Clearly six-figure tech salaries are more than enough.
San Francisco’s housing shortage has been a crisis for years and is only getting worse. This year we’ve seen San Francisco’s highest rents on record. In July 2026, the typical newly leased apartment cost $3,714 a month, according to Apartment List data. Zillow’s July 2026 data covering all homes and apartments showed rents at $4,539. Since 2025, rents have been rising 10% or more year-over-year.
One of the most expensive cities in the US is becoming increasingly out of reach for many. This crisis places unnecessary constraints on people across the income distribution, and limits the mobility necessary for a good life. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson put it in Abundance, “We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.” But we should be clear that low-income families are the ones struggling to build a good life in San Francisco, not tech workers.