No wonder every big Silicon Valley tech company is opening offices in Seattle

The high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Silicon Valley, has been the subject of a lot of conversation. Everybody agrees that we need more housing, but nobody can seem to figure out the best way to get that housing built.

This chart from Statista, based on a Zillow study, shows the problem in stark relief. The typical software engineer working at Apple in Cupertino or Google in Mountain View uses more than half of their after-tax income on housing. In the Seattle suburbs where Microsoft and Google are based, housing costs take up less than one-third of engineers' take home pay.

Statista