~10 years ago my wife and I lived in a 1BR in Fenway that was $1,950, which was considered pretty pricey. Most of our friends were spending $700-800 for bedrooms in fairly solid places in neighborhoods such as Mission Hill/Davis/Porter/East Cambridge etc.

Those rooms are probably 1.5-2x the rate now, and the salaries certainly didn't scale commensurately. The early '10s were definitely an easier time when everything was just a little bit but not utterly prohibitively expensive.