The average salary for a software engineer in the San Francisco area is about $124,000, according to Glassdoor. Someone making that much would still have to spend about half their income to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, where the median rent is almost $3,700, according to Zillow.
Some tech workers have found a cheap solution: Forget getting an apartment entirely and simply move into a converted van in the parking lot at work.
There have been many accounts over the last few years about tech employees setting up shop in vans outside their places of work, as Business Insider previously reported. A whole community of RV-dwellers lived outside Google's headquarters, leveraging the company's amenities to make life in the parking lot work.