It's not that I don't feel sympathy for her, but yes, cities change and it's something you simply have to be aware of if you're living in one. If you're planning on being a life-long renter, you're really taking a risk that this will happen to you, too, if the prices ever experience a big boom as they have in San Francisco. If she had bought property back when it was cheap, she might be a millionaire today. If over the course of her life she could never afford to buy anything in the city, though, then evidently it wasn't ever really "cheap" relative to her income (or else she just wan't frugal enough).

Besides, I moved away from my family, friends, and contacts that I'd built up over the first 18 years of my life in order to attend college. People uproot themselves frequently because they realize that not doing so is just too impractical.