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the funny part, I think, is that $45,000 is now low income.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, $45k is certainly poverty.

I was at Stanford for eight years. Never paid a dime. Of course, I was a grad student, and the research contracts that I was working on were worth about $7 million...

Thank you for pointing that out...I was worried as I scrolled through this thread that nobody was seeing the obvious here. Stanford is located in Palo Alto, one of the most expensive cities on the planet, which is itself located in the Bay Area, one of the most expensive regions on the planet. This is an area where a one bedroom studio can run up to $2,000 a month, and finding ANYTHING under $1,200 a month is nothing short of miraculous. What's that you say? Drive in? Even if you move into the most remote corners of the East Bay...like Livermore...you're still going to pay that kind of money. Property doesn't start getting cheaper until you hit the Central Valley, which is two and a half hours away assuming that there's no accidents or road construction to slow you down. You MIGHT be able to find something cheap in the slums of East Palo Alto or Oakland, but you might also get your head blown off for trying.

Janitors make $50k a year in the Bay Area. McDonalds employees make up to $15 an hour in some parts of the region. The average starting wage for most positions there nowadays is in the upper $60k to lower $70k range. If your family only makes $45k a year, you ARE poor by their standards, because you aren't even going to afford the dirt under a cardboard box on that kind of money. Heck, the city of Oakland recently announced a massive new housing development for poor and lower-middle class home buyers in their city, declaring that the housing market had priced the poor completely out. Their bargain basement, low income housing units, with no yard and very few square feet, will sell for $400k to $450k. While that IS cheap for the Bay Area, it really highlights how insane the cost of living is there.