That’s a misrepresentation and basically using the Bay Area as a reference point. I’m in Chicago. Starting sw engineer salaries is probably around $90k-$100k. The housing nightmare exists but not as bad - depends on your school district. A good 3000 sq ft house in a suburb palatine/Arlington heights or Buffalo grove is around the $600k-$800k mark. You could obviously go smaller for a lower price.
So there is privatized cost for universities. That's actually a major chunk of privatized cost a family with kids will bear. In Illinois, U of I has a total cost of $40k/year (may vary by major) for undergraduate education.
The rest of it varies. Health care costs are mostly high deductible plans but a lot of companies proactively add money to your plan to soften that. In general, for a family you're looking at around $7k out of pocket per year. As long as all is good its fine. When there is the unfortunate situation of family members needing medical care you are saddled with the worry of maintaining your job. This is the spot that sucks the most in my opinion.
K-12 schools are government funded but you pay property taxes. Here again, depending on where you live you can get excellent schools or not so great ones. But I think that's the situation in most places.
The Bay Area maximizes these problems because cost of living is so high there. My point on the misrepresentation was that a lot of places in the US do not have Bay Area cost of living, especially with the real estate. So you can actually have a pretty good quality of life.
