In San Francisco’s AI era, even $180,000 tech salaries aren’t enough anymore

“I thought if I made $200,000, I could basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and switched to shenanigans and reality-TV nights.

Professional demand for affordable housing has exploded. This month, Varsha Madapoosi, 25, who lives in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood and works in financial technology, posted two open rooms in a four-bedroom, one-bathroom house she’s renting — for about $1,200 and $1,500 a month — in a private Facebook group, attached a Google form and kept it open 24 hours.

She immediately received 88 responses. By contrast, one open room for about $1,400 last July drew 28 reports over four days.

“I’ve never seen a reaction like this,” Ms Madapoosi said.

Jolie Gan, 23, moved to San Francisco in January after completing a Fulbright scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now he has two jobs: working at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and writing for Core Memory, a technology and science publication, earning about $250,000 a year. She and her roommate had already moved three times in two months — in one case, leaving an apartment that was mistakenly labeled as a two-bedroom; other times they left a building with black mold and rats.

With $250,000 a year and no student loan debt, Ms. Gan said she felt she could handle it, even saving for retirement. But she said she’s seen the pressure on friends making under $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries use up almost everything that comes in.