Katrine Razniak, 27, arrived in San Francisco in 2022 as a recruiter at LinkedIn, earning $70,000 a year. Her annual salary soared to $180,000 when she joined the software company Rippling to lead a team of account managers. Her partner, Adam Woodbury, 39, moved to the city in 2021 and earns $185,000 as a software engineer.

27岁的卡特琳·拉兹尼亚克于2022年作为领英的招聘人员来到旧金山，年薪为7万美元。加入软件公司Rippling并领导一个客户经理团队后，她的年薪飙升至18万美元。她的伴侣、39岁的亚当·伍德伯里于2021年搬到这座城市，作为一名软件工程师收入为18.5万美元。

These days, even those six-figure salaries are no longer enough in San Francisco.

如今，在旧金山，即使是六位数的薪水也不再足够了。

When Ms. Razniak and Mr. Woodbury tried to find a one-bedroom apartment for under $5,000 a month this spring, they struck out. They looked at around 30 properties over three months, but all were too expensive and too in demand. At one listing for $5,200 a month, they found 30 people had added their names to a sign-up sheet within an hour of the open house.

当拉兹尼亚克和伍德伯里今年春天试图寻找一间月租5000美元以下的一居室公寓时，他们碰壁了。他们在三个月里看了大约30处房产，但所有房子都太贵且太抢手。在一处月租5200美元的房源，他们发现在开放日开始不到一个小时内，就有30人将自己的名字写在了预约看房表上。

They ended the search. But even if they had found a place, a question lingered: whether a city where groceries and dinner with friends had become sources of financial concern was somewhere they could build a future.

他们结束了寻找。但就算他们找到了住处，一个疑问依然挥之不去：在一个连买食品杂货和与朋友聚餐都能引起财务顾虑的城市，他们是否真的还能构筑未来？

“I don’t feel completely hopeless, but I don’t think I can stay in S.F.,” Ms. Razniak said. Mr. Woodbury added, “At some point, there was a slow transition where we both realized it just didn’t make any sense.”

“我倒不觉得完全绝望，但我觉得我无法留在旧金山了，”拉兹尼亚克说。伍德伯里补充道：“在某个节点，发生了一次缓慢的转变，我们两个都意识到这根本没有任何意义了。”

Ms. Razniak and Mr. Woodbury are not struggling by any conventional measure. But as a wave of artificial intelligence wealth is set to deluge San Francisco, even young tech workers who came to the city chasing the Silicon Valley dream have started to say an affordable future feels increasingly out of reach.

按照任何传统标准来看，拉兹尼亚克和伍德伯里都算不上生活拮据。但随着一波人工智能财富即将席卷旧金山，即使是来到这座城市追逐硅谷梦想的年轻科技工薪族也开始表示，一个负担得起的未来感觉正变得越来越遥不可及。

That’s because as the A.I. companies OpenAI and Anthropic — both with headquarters in San Francisco and valued at nearly $1 trillion — prepare to go public, an A.I. elite has emerged that can outspend other tech workers. The two companies, along with Elon Musk’s newly public SpaceX, could mint more than 20 new billionaires among current and former employees, according to an analysis by Sacra, a private markets research firm.

这是因为，随着总部均设在旧金山、估值接近1万亿美元的人工智能公司OpenAI和Anthropic准备上市，一个能够压倒其他科技工薪族消费的人工智能精英阶层已经出现。根据私募市场研究公司Sacra的分析，这两家公司以及埃隆·马斯克新上市的SpaceX可能会在现任和前任雇员中造就20多位新亿万富翁。

“I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an A.I. company,” Mr. Woodbury said, even though his salary puts him roughly in the top 20 percent of American households, according to Census Bureau data.

“我觉得自己现在有点配不上住在这里了，因为我不在人工智能公司工作，”伍德伯里说，尽管根据普查局的数据，他的薪水大约使他跻身于美国前20%的高收入家庭之列。

Mr. Woodbury recently moved to Carnelian Bay, on Lake Tahoe, Calif., which is less expensive. Ms. Razniak remains in an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which she shares with two roommates and for which she pays $1,650 a month. They’re making the long-distance relationship work.

伍德伯里最近搬到了加利福尼亚州太浩湖的卡内利安湾，那里的生活成本较低。拉兹尼亚克则留在旧金山海特-阿什伯里街区的一间公寓里，与两名室友合租，每月支付1650美元。他们正在维系着这段异地关系。

San Francisco has long wrestled with affordability, but the issue has been magnified as OpenAI, Anthropic and other start-ups have attracted a flood of A.I. workers. The overall cost of living in the city sits 65.6 percent higher than the national average, according to the latest data from the Cost of Living Index by the Council for Community and Economic Research.

长久以来，旧金山一直在与生活成本高昂的问题作斗争，但随着OpenAI、Anthropic和其他初创公司吸引了大量人工智能从业者涌入，问题愈发严重。根据社区与经济研究理事会的生活成本指数最新数据，该市的总体生活成本比全美平均水平高出65.6%。

Housing leads the markup. San Francisco’s median home price topped $1.7 million in April, according to a report by Redfin, far above the national median of around $450,000. And in the last few months, the city’s average apartment rent surpassed New York City’s to be the nation’s most expensive, reaching $3,827 a month, according to the real estate data firm CoStar.

住房高居溢价榜首。根据Redfin的一份报告，旧金山4月的房屋价格中位数突破了170万美元，远高于约45万美元的全美中位数。而根据房地产数据公司CoStar的数据，在过去的几个月里，该市的平均公寓租金超越了纽约市，成为全美最贵，达到了每月3827美元。

旧金山4月的房屋价格中位数突破了170万美元，当地的平均公寓租金目前也高居全美榜首。

“It’s a pressure cooker, and it’s heated up really fast,” said Nigel Hughes, a senior researcher at CoStar. The apartment vacancy rate in some of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods — including the Marina District, Pacific Heights and South of Market — has fallen to roughly 3 percent, down from about 13 percent in 2020, according to CoStar data. New construction has stalled.

“这是一个压力锅，而且升温非常快，”CoStar的高级研究员奈杰尔·休斯说。CoStar的数据显示，在该市一些最抢手的街区（包括马丽娜区、太平洋高地和市场南部社区），公寓空置率已从2020年的约13%降至了大约3%。新建筑的施工已经陷入停滞。

Rising property prices are compounded by other factors. Utilities cost about 41 percent more in San Francisco than the national base line, transportation runs roughly 43 percent higher and groceries cost about 19 percent more than in the rest of the country, according to the Cost of Living Index.

攀升的房产价格又与其它因素交织在一起。根据生活成本指数，旧金山的公共事业费用比全美基准高出约41%，交通费用高出约43%，杂货食品开销则比全美其他地区高出约19%。

And it is increasingly hard to keep up with the Joneses — or in this case, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic. The mean annual pay in San Francisco was $196,365 last year, up from $153,359 in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

而且，与周围人攀比正变得越来越困难——在这种情况下，攀比的对象是OpenAI的首席执行官萨姆·奥尔特曼和Anthropic的首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代这样的人。根据劳工统计局的数据，旧金山去年的年平均薪资为196365美元，高于2020年的153359美元。

Ted Egan, the City of San Francisco’s chief economist, said high earners had always weighed whether to accept the city’s trade-offs or leave for somewhere with a yard and garage. What’s new is the scale, he said. When Uber went public in 2019, its valuation was about $82 billion.

旧金山市首席经济学家泰德·伊根表示，高收入者总是在权衡是接受这座城市的得失，还是搬去有院子和车库的地方。他说，如今的新变化在于规模。当优步(Uber)在2019年上市时，其估值约为820亿美元。

“OpenAI and Anthropic are estimated to be more than 10 times that,” Mr. Egan said.

“而OpenAI和Anthropic的估值预计是这个数字的10多倍，”伊根说。

Daniel Lurie, the mayor, said in a statement that his administration was working to reduce costs through access to child care, a new family housing zoning plan and transit improvements. He did not specifically address the concerns of six-figure earners.

市长丹尼尔·卢里在一份声明中表示，他的行政当局正致力于通过提供托儿服务、全新的家庭住房规划法案以及改善交通来降低成本。他没有具体针对六位数收入者的担忧做出回应。

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)

（《纽约时报》已对OpenAI和微软提起诉讼，指控其在人工智能系统相关的新闻内容上侵犯版权。这些公司均否认了指控。）

For Ms. Razniak, the cost of existing in San Francisco has become its own drain. Her monthly budget has increased by about $1,000 more than previous years for what she describes as roughly the same life.

对拉兹尼亚克来说，在旧金山维持生存的成本本身已变成了一种消耗。为了维持在她看来大致相同的生活，她目前的月度预算比往年增加了大约1000美元。

Despite more than doubling her salary since she arrived, Ms. Razniak said she felt neither wealthy nor that she was living paycheck to paycheck. Instead, it’s something in between: a low-level vigilance about money that she had expected, by now, to have left behind.

尽管自她到达以来收入增加了一倍多，但拉兹尼亚克表示，她既不觉得自己富有，也不觉得自己是在过着月光族的生活。相反，是介于两者之间的一种状态：一种对金钱的低度焦虑，而她本以为，自己如今早就应该摆脱这种焦虑了。

“I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights.

“我以为当我赚到20万美元的时候，我基本上就可以完全不用担心钱了，”她说，并且她和朋友们去年就停止了去餐馆就餐，转而改成了自带菜肴的聚餐和看真人秀电视之夜。

Demand from professionals for affordable housing has exploded. This month, Varsha Madapoosi, 25, who lives in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood and works in financial technology, posted two open rooms in the four-bedroom, one-bathroom home she rents — going for around $1,200 and $1,500 a month — to a private Facebook group, attaching a Google form and leaving it open for 24 hours.

职场人士对经济适用房的需求出现了爆炸式增长。本月，25岁的瓦尔莎·马达普西将她租住的四室一卫住宅中的两个空房间（月租分别约为1200美元和1500美元）发布到了一个私密Facebook群组里，并附上了一个谷歌表单，开放接收申请24小时。她住在下太平洋高地街区，从事金融科技工作。

She received 88 responses immediately. In contrast, a single open room for about $1,400 drew 28 messages over four days last July.

她立即收到了88份回复。相比之下，去年7月一个约1400美元的单间房源在四天内仅吸引了28条信息。

“I have never seen this kind of response,” Ms. Madapoosi said.

“我从未见过这么多的回复，”马达普西说。

Jolie Gan, 23, moved to San Francisco in January after completing a Fulbright fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She now has two jobs: working at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and writing for Core Memory, a technology and science publication, earning about $250,000 a year. She and her roommate have already moved three times in two months — in one case, they left an apartment that was misrepresented as a two-bedroom; another time, they departed a building that had black mold and rats.

23岁的朱莉·甘今年1月结束了在麻省理工学院的富布赖特奖学金项目后搬到了旧金山。她现在打着两份工：在风险投资公司安德里森·霍罗威茨(Andreessen Horowitz)工作，并为科技与科学刊物《核心记忆》(Core Memory)撰稿，年收入约25万美元。她和室友在两个月内已经搬了三次家——有一次，他们离开了一间被虚假宣传为两居室的公寓；还有一次，他们搬离了一栋有黑霉菌和老鼠的大楼。

At $250,000 a year, and with no student loan debt, Ms. Gan said she felt she could manage, even saving for retirement. But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.

拿着25万美元年薪且没有学生贷款债务的甘表示，她觉得还可以应对，甚至还能为退休存钱。但她说，她看到了那些收入在20万美元以下的年轻朋友们所承受的压力，对他们来说，房租、公共事业费和食品杂货开销几乎吞噬了所有的进账。

Ms. Gan said she was determined to stay in San Francisco for the next several years because of the career opportunities, the energy of the city and the community she had built.

甘说，由于职业机会、城市的活力以及她所建立的社群，她下定决心要在接下来的几年里留在旧金山。

“As silly as this housing situation is, and as expensive as it gets, I think that all these intangibles are still worth it for me,” she said.

“尽管这个住房状况很荒谬，而且生活成本变得越来越贵，但我认为所有这些无形的东西对我来说仍然是值得的，”她说。

Ms. Razniak and Mr. Woodbury have started thinking about Seattle. The life Ms. Razniak imagines there is one she cannot picture affording in San Francisco, even on a combined income that would be remarkable almost anywhere else in the country.

拉兹尼亚克和伍德伯里已经开始考虑西雅图了。拉兹尼亚克在脑海中勾勒的那种西雅图生活，是她无法想象自己在旧金山能负担得起的，即使他们两人的合并收入在全美其他任何地方都堪称卓越。

“We want a house, we want a garage, we want storage,” she said. “And that just doesn’t feel attainable here.”

“我们想要一栋房子，我们想要车库，我们想要储物空间，”她说。“而这一切在这里感觉根本无法企及。”