On Wednesday, Kate Vershov Downing, a corporate lawyer for an enterprise cloud company called ServiceNow, resigned from the Palo Alto Planning and Transport Commission. The reason, she said, was that she and her husband — a software engineer — could no longer afford to live there.



“We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month,” Downing wrote in a post on Medium. “If we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year — an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable.”



Like dozens of her friends have already done, Downing will be relocating outside of the Bay Area — a financial decision a new report says is becoming a trend.

“Twenty six percent of software engineers in San Francisco are searching for jobs out of state,” said Indeed’s Paul D'Arcy, who presented this research to San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday afternoon. D’Arcy said that, specifically, they’re looking in Seattle, Portland, Austin and Denver — cities that have emerged as tech hubs, but where salaries go a little further.