I'm going to be bluntly insensitive here: Talia Jane, as far as I can tell, was attempting to live in San Francisco - one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. - on a very low salary. That's not realistic. So there's her responsibility in this - expecting that she (somehow) would be able to survive in that environment. It's a common mistake when you're young - just go $there and it will somehow work out. Go to San Fran and opportunities will fall out of the sky at your feet, your career will be instantly successful and you'll have a loft apartment and 209 friends on Facebook in a month.

That's not how it works.

Yelp has a history of paying low wages and expecting employees to just "want" to work there based purely on the name. Their management is awful. They're terrible to work for - a very little research shows that - and they're worse as a service - it takes even less research to find that out.

She should have done her homework before she up and moved to San Francisco, she should have researched the cost of living there, and she should have researched her employer. So, shame on her, but she's young and will recover easily from this, IF she doesn't make a complete ass if herself in social media about it. She's not winning in that regard.

On the other side of this is yelp. Their management is terrible, their CEO completely unprofessional, and their business practices are monopolistic and deplorable. They've treated her terribly, and there should be some lawsuits.

But it's not one sided, she screwed up, too.

So, to answer your questions: college aged people have to struggle to make it because six figure salaries aren't guaranteed out of the gate for ANYONE. IN HISTORY. My dad: spent 4 years in school, got a bachelors in electrical engineering at a highly sought after school, had patents assigned to him while student, spent 2 years as a student (concurrent with his degree) at GMI and then a further three years as a coop student - all of which was to fast-track his career at GM - and still struggled financially as he started our family.

In 1960.

If you're young, if you have a fresh degree, who promised you a career, specifically? Who said it was guaranteed? It's not, and it never has been. You have to make your way.

Should employers pay their people a living wage? Yes. Otherwise, they're going to leave. Should an employer located in downtown San Francisco pay their employees sufficiently to live in downtown San Francisco? No. Going back to my dad for a moment: we lived in Pontiac, Michigan. His office was in downtown Detroit. There's no way that we could have afforded to live a decent lifestyle if he had had to pay the rent in Detroit. the answer here is "commute".

What happens to San Francisco if people can't afford to live and work there? It will collapse under its own weight.give it ten years. The housing and COL bubble in SF will collapse. There's no where else for it to go.

Also there's a conversation going about this at metafilter that you may find interesting:

https://www.metafilter.com/157297/I-cant-afford-to-buy-groceries

Sometimes you can't always get what you want right at the beginning of life. I wanted nothing more then to go live in New York as soon as I graduated. But when I really looked at the reality of what my salary would probably be in comparison to New York prices, I had to reevaluate. I started looking at my next best options, and ended up in Philadelphia. A city with a lot of New York qualities with a far lower COL. I made a smart decision (a sacrifice, I guess) and it worked out anyway.

This woman is delusional thinking she's going to live in a extremely expensive, very wealthy city with a housing shortage on poverty level wages. Go somewhere else, San Francisco isn't as great as it used to be anyway. 

Sometimes you can't always get what you want right at the beginning of life. I wanted nothing more then to go live in New York as soon as I graduated. But when I really looked at the reality of what my salary would probably be in comparison to New York prices, I had to reevaluate. I started looking at my next best options, and ended up in Philadelphia. A city with a lot of New York qualities with a far lower COL. I made a smart decision (a sacrifice, I guess) and it worked out anyway.

 

This woman is delusional thinking she's going to live in a extremely expensive, very wealthy city with a housing shortage on poverty level wages. Go somewhere else, San Francisco isn't as great as it used to be anyway. 

She did write a follow-up response...I think she's still got stars in her eyes but we'll see how it goes for her. I do agree with her that you shouldn't be barred from exploring and growing in a place you want to be at because you don't make enough relative to the cost of living- it shouldn't be that way. I get her viewpoint, and I also get that she's still in for a very rude awakening as well. It sucks that this is the way the world is, and that a beautiful place like San Francisco has become out of reach for anyone who doesn't make close to 6 figures, but it's just the reality. If San Francisco would loosen up on zoning laws and allow more high-rise apartment buildings, rent would actually fall, but they would rather keep things the way they are. (D.C. has a similar issue going on.)

I remember watching the movie Brooklyn, which shows Saoirse Ronan as an Irish immigrant who moves to Brooklyn in the early 1950's. She gets a job working at a department store, gets a room at a boarding hourse, and takes night courses at the local college. That is basically impossible now for someone to be able to show up to Brooklyn like that and set up a life like that on a retail job. And it made me sad to think that.

Anyway, Philadelphia has one big advantage that a lot of the high-cost-of-living cities don't have- for an East Coast city- it's pretty big. (152 square miles.) It's also not afraid to build high-rise apartments, or turn old buildings into apartments. It also really doesn't have the whole tech thing going for it right now. (Comcast is trying to change that, but for now, the big white collar job for that city would be education and medical.)

I might try to wind up there, but honestly...I kind of think it would be cool to go to Detroit. Something about it speaks to me.

I also really loved Chattanooga.