That's the flip answer. The real answer is that many, many people put about 2/3 of their takehome pay into housing, usually rental. About 65% of San Francisco residents rent, and you can imagine how nervous most of them are now that landlords are fleeing their mortgages and the banks are foreclosing. In my experience, people who buy houses in California--especially the Bay Area--are able to do it one of three ways:

1) Inherit a pile of money. That's my ex-boyfriend. He got a trust fund that amounted to $150K and put it all into a house in Berkeley.

2) Get stock options and sell them. This accounts for three friends' houses.

3) Get really goddamn lucky, time the real estate crashes (because they're cyclic; I lived through three of them), and be able to borrow money from family members. This would be my parents back in the early '70s.

Everyone else is basically SOL until the next earthquake--and then *everyone* is SOL.

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And yeah, there are a lot of places that are categorically bad to live in. However, the freeway system is not an ideal place to spend 6 hours each day on either. If you're from the East Coast, you may have some basic assumptions about public transportation, and you should probably ditch them.

All told? $63K a year in SoCal is a joke. Please, for your sake, don't take that job.

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In Berkeley, you can cross one street (Sacramento) and have housing prices jump $200K. Turns out that's because prior to about 1969, the only place blacks could buy property was below Sacramento Ave. In Berkeley, capital of liberalism.

It's not actually that different from the neighborhood example you cite from back east; the main difference is that parts of CA are much closer together, and so where you'd have a more spread-out ghetto situation, you now have a denser neighborhood situation. San Francisco is only 7 square miles, but there are ethnic neighborhoods people literally never left more than once or twice a year back in the '30s (think Chinatown before it became a tourist trap).

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Most people in the rest of the country see $63K as the sort of salary that could buy a house, put away some for retirement, and pay off a new car. Those things are not remotely possible in SoCal on $63K.

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I don't know much about San Fran, as the Bay could be another state to those of us hugging the border.

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