There is no where to live in the Bay Area. Please change the laws.

If you look online right now, on a website like Zillow, and search for rental properties for $1,500 per month or less from San Francisco down to San Jose, here is approximately what you will find: 10 properties. 10 properties out of about 3.5 million total households. Upon closer inspection, you will find that half of these are not actual units, but individual bedrooms that share a bathroom and kitchen with other bedrooms. For the sake of comparison, if you apply the same filter to the greater Boston area, where about 35% fewer people live, Zillow gives more than 1,000 options. In other words, if you are looking for a place to live for $1,500 or less, and you do the math, there are 150 times more options per capita in the Boston area than in the San Francisco Bay area.

In California minimum wage is $10 per hour. After tax, this comes to about $1,400 per month in take-home income. But take to what home? On a peninsula that is 50 miles long and 25 miles wide, there is practically no home available for $1,400, let alone for 30% of $1,400 — the rule-of-thumb maximum amount a person should spend on rent as a percentage of income. The nearest affordable rental unit available for a single minimum-wage worker is in Fresno.

Let’s grant that the de facto minimum wage in the Bay Area is not $10 per hour, but closer to $20 per hour. Rule of thumb leaves about $800 available for rent. At $800 per month, you are no longer doomed to homelessness. At $800 you can now have a roof over your head, but only if you are willing to use Airbnb — or other similar websites that the privileged city councils of the Bay Area are intent on outlawing — to find “shared room” situations. These are places, sometimes called “hacker houses”, where you sleep on a bunk bed in a bedroom with 3 or more other people, in a house with 3 or more such bedrooms, and hope that the city doesn’t force the landlord to kick you out on the street.

I have lived in multiple such houses, all of them under continual threat from city governments claiming we are a public nuisance, no matter how quiet, respectful, and peaceful we are.

There are four types of people you meet in these houses: short termers who can afford to stay in a hotel but are prudently saving money, visitors who definitely cannot afford a hotel but have good reason to be in the area for a week or more, three-month interns, and 20-to-30-somethings who work nearby but are at a stage of life where they need flexibility and cannot commit to a 6 or 12 month lease. The first two types of guests are outlawed by most Bay Area cities, either explicitly or tacitly through complex zoning, licensing and taxation laws. A new hacker house starts with these illegal guests, but after about a month, all of the guests are the latter two types. They come, they stay, and pretty soon you have a house full of semi-permanent people. None of them have better options. Some of them pay 2 weeks at a time, because that’s all the money they have. None of them commit to more than a month at a time, because they’re not sure what will happen in their lives that far in the future.

While living in such a hacker house, I made two friends from Turkey, one who works in Palo Alto in a one-year training program, and another who is a visiting PhD student at Stanford. We decided to try to live together in our own apartment. The cheapest walkable / bikeable option was a $3,100 unit in an apartment building owned by a Very Rich Man (nothing against rich people — I want to be one too someday, but one who is understanding of others’ hardships). The three of us applied together, but were rejected because my friends each make less than $3,000 per month. Instead, the property manager offered to rent to me alone, and my two friends could live with me off-lease. I asked if I could find additional off-lease roommates, and the manager said, sure, as long as we don’t cause trouble with the neighbors. Before long, we were joined by a medical doctor from China, a medical doctor from the Philippines, a postdoc biomedical researcher from India, an entrepreneur from China, and an African-American recent college grad looking for work. Two Muslims, two Christians, two Buddhists, one Hindu, and one atheist, living peacefully together, walking or biking to work each day, and very happy for our luck in finding each other.

Then the Very Rich Man found my listing on Airbnb, was upset that I might be making money (sense the irony?), and kicked us out. To be clear, I made no money.

Through a stroke of luck, as this was happening, I met a lady who owns several properties in the area, and she wanted my help to run an Airbnb. We started with a large, beautiful 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom house, in an average Bay Area neighborhood. At $750 per month, we offered by far the cheapest deal around, and within a few weeks we were maxed out with interns and month-to-month renters.

Then the city code enforcer called. It is illegal to list a property on Airbnb, he said, even if the renters are month to month. I had googled beforehand to try to discover if the city had such a law, but had found nothing. That’s right, the city guy said, you can’t find it on Google, you can only see that law if you come into City Hall and ask to see it.

What now?

I don’t think of myself as a political activist, and have never had the aspiration to become one. But if I were to advocate for something political at this moment in my life, I would propose a new state law:

In any county, city, or other jurisdiction, should a condition of overpopulation manifest, no governing body shall have the right to enforce any law or code that would limit directly or indirectly the number of occupants allowed to live in any building, so long as sleeping quarters meet fire safety requirements. For the purpose of this law, overpopulation in a government jurisdiction shall be declared manifested when the number of individual living units available for a reasonable monthly rent falls below a reasonable number. The loss of government’s enforcement rights shall be in effect for three years after the last manifestation of overpopulation. For the purposes of this law, a reasonable monthly rent shall be equal to 50% of a minimum monthly full-time wage, and a reasonable number of available individual living units shall be equal to five one-hundredths of a percent of the population of the given government jurisdiction.

Such a law would galvanize city governments into action to rearrange their priorities and work hand-in-hand with local companies and private investors to do whatever it takes for truly affordable housing to sprout forth from the Peninsula’s approximately million acres of open space. And I’m not talking about solutions like Facebook’s $10,000 stipend to encourage employees to live near its headquarters. Newsflash: that doesn’t help.

Thanks for reading. If you are looking for an affordable place to live in the Bay Area, please send me an email with the subject line “No place to live, please help”. If you are a homeowner who would like to help, please use the subject line “Have house, can help”. If you are from the government, media, or an advocacy group, please use the subject line, “I want to help”. If you don’t want to help or don’t need help, please don’t write. My email address is: solution@livingasaservice.com