Even a six figure tech salary is not enough to comfortably afford San Francisco anymore, as the AI boom pours workers and money into a city that has nowhere near enough housing to absorb them, according to Fortune. OpenAI and Anthropic have each leased roughly 1 million square feet of office space in the city, making OpenAI its second largest office tenant and Anthropic its fourth largest, and both companies are hiring fast enough that housing supply cannot keep pace.
The numbers show the strain. Average asking rents in the San Francisco metro area have climbed more than $1,000 year over year to $4,600 a month, overtaking New York as the country's most expensive rental market. Median home prices reached about $1.72 million in June, with single family home prices up 17 percent over the past year, while the vacancy rate has fallen to roughly 3.7 percent, intensifying competition for whatever does come open.
Even well paid tech workers are feeling squeezed. Alan Wang, a Meta software engineer earning nearly $200,000 a year, told Fortune that even with a big tech salary it is very unrealistic to stay in the city this year. He pays $2,100 a month for half of a $4,600 rental he splits with a roommate, and his lease just renewed with a 9.9 percent increase.
Driving much of the pressure is a new class of AI equity wealth. Redfin estimated that current and former OpenAI employees could theoretically hold $135 billion in post tax equity combined, with Anthropic employees holding another $63 billion, purchasing power Fortune describes as equivalent to roughly a third of the entire metro area's housing stock value. That kind of buying power is showing up directly in bidding wars, with buyers offering $1 million over asking price and renters proposing advance rent payments or even company shares to secure a lease.
Supply constraints make the imbalance worse. San Francisco County covers just 46.7 square miles, the smallest of any county in California, yet houses more than 826,000 residents, and decades of restrictive zoning have concentrated most new construction in eastern neighborhoods. The city passed its Family Zoning Plan in December 2025 and is pursuing office to housing conversions given a 34.4 percent office vacancy rate, but those measures will take years to meaningfully change a market where demand from AI wealth is already reshaping the city in real time.