The $1.5 trillion in outstanding student debt touches the lives of 44 million Americans in all corners of the country.

But what’s it like to manage your student loans in a place that’s become a symbol of the challenges — from the skyrocketing cost of living to rising inequality — that can come with quick and huge influxes of wealth?

A new report paints a picture. And it’s not pretty.

Between 2003 and 2018, the share of adults with student debt in the Bay Area has nearly doubled, jumping from 6.2% to 12.2% and collectively these 735,000 borrowers owe $26.6 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment. And coping with the city’s average balance of $36,243 can be especially challenging in one of, if not the, most expensive place to live in the country.

For a single person starting out on their own in the San Francisco metro area it takes roughly $69,000 to afford basic expenses, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “Once you pay your mortgage and put food on the table and get to and from work you don’t have a whole lot left over to pay your debt,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI.

‘Accelerating the racial wealth gap’

But perhaps more troubling than the sheer volume of debt and the way it interacts with the region’s high cost of living is the disparate effect it’s having on different types of borrowers. In the lowest-income neighborhoods of the region, just 37% of borrowers are actually making a dent in reducing their loan balances, the study found, compared to 53.8% of borrowers in higher-income neighborhoods. One in five borrowers in low-income neighborhoods is 90 or more days delinquent on their debt and three-quarters of those borrowers are in default.

In neighborhoods with the highest percentage of black and Hispanic residents, 19.9% of borrowers are at least 90 days delinquent on their student loans compared to 6.7% in the neighborhoods with the smallest share of black and Hispanic residents.

“Student loan debt is accelerating the racial wealth gap in San Francisco, across the Bay Area and nationally,” José Cisneros, San Francisco’s Treasurer said in a statement accompanying the report. “These findings are stark, upsetting, and impossible to ignore.”

The trends in the Bay Area mirror the national student debt crisis, where the impact of student loans is felt most acutely by low-income borrowers and borrowers of color. But as the report notes, the challenging economics of living in the region mean that student debt may exacerbate already troubling trends.

For example, the region’s poorest residents saw their incomes grow just 15% between 1970 and 2015, while the richest households saw their incomes rise 42%, the researchers at the San Francisco Fed and the Treasurer’s office found. At the same time, the cost of living has become so expensive that a family of four with one school-aged child and one preschooler living in San Francisco needs to earn $123,442 a year to meet basic expenses — 28% of families in the city live below that standard.

“Student debt burden is especially concerning in the Bay Area, where incomes have not kept pace with the skyrocketing cost of living, and income inequality has increased significantly over the past several decades,” the Fed researchers wrote in the report. “Stagnant wage growth has made it hard for low-income families in the Bay Area to cope with rising expenses.”

Some counties have high levels of debt but low levels of education

And it’s these families for whom it appears the student debt they borrowed never paid off. For example, Solano County has the highest prevalence of student loan borrowers in the region at 15% but also has the lowest rate of borrowers with a bachelor’s degree at 21.7%, the report found.

Similarly, nearly one in five Bay Area borrowers who are in default on their student loans owe less than $5,000. A relatively low student loan balance is often a sign that the borrower didn’t complete school or earned a degree with little value in the labor market.

See also:San Francisco is paying people $10 a month to save money

Of course, there are borrowers in the Bay Area for whom an investment of student debt in themselves paid off, perhaps in the form of one of those famously lucrative and perk-filled jobs at a tech company. In the city of San Francisco, student loan debt and educational attainment are among the highest in the region; 15% of residents have debt and 55.8% completed at least a bachelor’s degree.

The most expensive housing market in the country

But even for these borrowers for whom student debt may be manageable, it likely exacerbates the challenges they face getting a foothold economically into the region, said Jeff Tucker, an analyst on the economics research team at Zillow, which tracks home and rental prices across the country.

“It’s broadly speaking the most expensive housing market in the country,” Tucker said of the region. “Most people considering buying in the Bay Area are already stretched to the breaking point with their budgets.” And any student loan debt might make it more difficult for them to qualify for a mortgage or save up for a down payment.

Renters are also feeling the squeeze. The median rent in San Francisco is $3,450, according to Zillow, compared to $1,474 nationally. That means residents of San Francisco need to be making at least six-figures for their rent to be considered affordable, Tucker said. Those with incomes below that threshold may struggle to afford housing, let alone their student debt.

The challenges that borrowers in the region face managing their student debt and basic living expenses — whether they benefited from their education or not — add to the growing body of evidence that our nation’s student debt is more than just an individual, personal financial problem, Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said at a press conference announcing the study’s findings Tuesday.

“Today’s research takes a huge step toward showing the true impact of the student debt crisis right here in the Bay Area, including the toll that this burden is taking on our neighbors, our community,” he said. “We need to acknowledge where the collective weight of the burden we have pushed onto millions is tearing at the already-frayed fabric of our society.”