Man its bad everywhere! On the West Coast of the US, most people are paying more than half of their monthly income on rent, whether that is in San Francisco, Los Angeles or Seattle. It is a world-wide phenom. I’m from SF, and the last apartment we rented before moving south, we were paying $700/month for a lovely 1 bedroom. That was in 1998. Today it would rent for up to 4x that amount.
We are lucky because our mortgage is lower than the average monthly rent for a similarly-size home in my LA Eastside neighborhood. If we had to rent our house out today, it would be no problem renting it for more than $5k USD. Because we purchased our home 10 years ago just after the real estate crash and put down 50%, our monthly mortgage payment is around $1800, but it almost doubles after you add CA property taxes.
I truly sympathize with renters having been one for a long time and my heart bleeds for young couples and first time home-buyers that cannot get their leg in the door, and if they do, they are dangerously over-paying for property at great cost and risk.
I am a dual national American/Italian, and my wife is German. She has her greencard but not her US citizenship. We probably will be moving to Europe in a few years so I am not encouraging her to get her US citizenship.
At times I have thought about giving up my US citizenship, because it does not really afford me that much and is almost a stigma these days given the US’s horrific foreign policy blunders of the last 50 years. Hard to tell all of these different rogue countries apart these days.