Did you ever try the peninsula, like Palo Alto? Crazy expensive if you want a free standing house but condos and townhouses aren’t too bad (relatively) and always felt safe when I was there.
I wasn’t making very much actually and we were a single income household. We wanted to look into buying a house but it was north of 850k for a closet sized space. Rent+food basically ate up all my income.
Moving to Palo Alto was definitively not in the cards
