> room in a house for rent between $1000-1600 in SF

In SF? If you mean in like Oakland, yes I believe I've seen some listings a couple years ago, though I wasn't sure they were real (sites seemed shady). I don't recall finding anything in SF proper for 1.6k, let alone 1k (anywhere), but to be fair I wasn't looking too far out from downtown at the time and since I was coming from out of the country, I was restricting my searches to reputable sources and I had no word-of-mouth network. For what it's worth, I used to rent my basement in Toronto for $300 and you can go even cheaper w/ student houses. So even if you can actually find "cheap" housing in the Bay Area, I can tell you that you can get even cheaper stuff from GTA's chinese community.

The 28k/13k figure is from Bright Horizons (they have locations both in SF and TO so it's perfect for apples-to-apples comparison, and it's what I'm familiar w/). You can get definitely cheaper childcare in both cities (with the caveat that in SF you're going to struggle with wait lists, whereas you typically don't in TO). IIRC, the cheapest in SF is if you qualify for public childcare (1.7k/mo I think it was?), which is still more expensive than Bright Horizons in Toronto.

You have to be careful using craigslist to assess prices. In the cities I've lived, ALL of the cheap ones are scams. They may run half or less the going rates, and promise way more for your money than the cheap end of the market should be.