My Brother's Advice

Strange roommates, and more on the cost of housing

At 18 years old, when I moved across the country to San Francisco, my brother, who lived in San Jose, picked me up at the airport and dropped me at a pension (pen-see-ohn) on Market Street. I bounced from there to a dive on Polk Street, then the YMCA, and eventually I spent a couple weeks on the couch of my mother’s colleague before finding an apartment in the Richmond district, right off the 1 California bus line.

Here I shared a small one-bedroom flat consisting of a living room, kitchen, and bath with just one roommate. I had the bedroom while she lived and slept in the living room (with a door and corner windows in two directions). Oh, and she was a witch. Rather, she wanted to be a witch, but the coven wouldn’t take her. Something to do with an ex-girlfriend or that she received benefits from the state for being mentally ill. “I’m not,” she assured me, “but I know how to act when they interview me every few months.” She did seem a bit… eccentric, I suppose, but … I tend to give people the benefit of a doubt.  Even more so when I was young. I worried only a little that she didn’t have a job and was supported entirely on disability funds. And maybe everyone in San Francisco boiled Chinese herbs on the stove for hours. The smell was pungent and seeped into my room but hey, the rent was cheap.

Until one night I heard her on the phone saying, “I hate Christians so much, one day I’m going to kill one.” She didn’t sound particularly irate or even distressed. But she did sound serious. I was Christian, and she knew that. We had discussed her being Jewish. (a Jewish wanna-be-witch, seriously) She had thought about it and decided it would be okay. But that was a few months ago. Something obviously had changed and I had no interest in learning what or why. I was out of there within a few weeks.

My next home was in the Sunset district, three blocks uphill from the L Taraval streetcar, which took me directly to my job in the Embarcadero. I think I paid $300 a month for this rental. But this was a house, in a neighborhood full of houses. There were two bedrooms upstairs and the woman who held the lease slept downstairs, on the other side of garage. There was a small square outside space without a roof in the center of the house (very cool, especially for smokers), with the living room, dining room, kitchen, and hallway on each side. Off the hallway was the shared bathroom, a water closet (toilet only), and a phone nook. Best part: my room had big windows that looked out on green backyards and the twinkling of lights at night. After that, I never could have a bedroom that didn’t have windows with a view of something green.

not the house I lived in, but somewhere in my neighborhood Photo credit: Jan Peppler

I thought the place was great and my roommate seemed nice and easy-going. She was in her twenties, and her ex-husband worked at City Hall. Eventually there would be three of us and the other roommate and I would leave to rent our own apartment in the Duboce Triangle. But that was at least a year later, after I found a pail of plastic and rubber phalluses in the basement and finally understood why there was a photo of Annie Sprinkle in the water closet. (And if you aren’t familiar with that reference, that’s probably for the best.) It would also be after the night I answered the phone and the man on the other end offered to clean our kitchen on his knees, wearing only an apron. (Remember, we shared landlines back then, cellphones didn’t exist.) After that, our roommate finally admitted she had dabbled in domineering, with her clients coming mostly from City Hall, through her ex-husband’s connections.

I was from Chicago’s South Side, had already marched in a few gay pride parades, and I was not naïve. But damn, ALL of this was new to me! When she started leaving our front door open or the garage door up when no one was home, all presumably because she had just been a wee bit high, well, that’s when Liz and I decided to move out.

But a year or so prior, when I was new to the city and nescient, my brother and his friend helped me move in. I didn’t have many belongings, but I did have a small foam sofa that opened into a full-size bed. And my brother’s friend had a truck.

They arrived after work on a warm and dark November evening and the lack of moonlight prompted an urgency to head back south. But before they left, and before my brother looked down on me with soft, loving eyes, and that funny twitch he would do with his nose when feeling sentimental, he gave me some advice. “I don’t know how much you’re paying for this place,” he said, “but never let your housing costs be more than 25% of your income.”

Umm…what? He repeated himself.  “I’m telling you the same thing Dad told me. Never pay more than 25% of your income for housing.”  Oh, okay, sure. We hugged and he left. Later, I did the math. My rent (as I recall) was about 30% of what I made working at the Hyatt Regency. But I felt flush, as all young people do when they first start working full time. Surely his advice was only a suggestion, not a hard rule.

My mom on the roof of our Duboce Triangle apartment. Rent here was $700 or $750. Which would mean my share-before phone and utilities-was $350 or $375. I worked three jobs while living here and carried a full load at San Francisco City College.

Looking back, most of the rents I’ve paid, along with utilities, have been around 30% or more of my income.  Somewhere between 1984 and today, 30% became the new norm, not the 25% my brother had advised me about.

Today, more than ever, affordable housing is a problem. NPR recently reported on a Harvard University study that found half of all renters in the U.S. struggled to pay for housing. You think things have been bad before? Not as bad as this. This is a new record.

So what does this mean?

A whopping 50% of renters paid more than 30% of their income for rent and utilities in 2022. And nearly half of those renters paid more than 50% of their income.

Households with incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 have seen the biggest increase in unaffordability. In this group alone, even among those working full-time, ONE THIRD were burdened by housing costs.

This means that if you’re not struggling with housing costs, you probably know someone who is. In fact, I would guarantee that you do.

Then, for those renters with incomes under $30,000, well, 83% of them are struggling to pay their rent. And yes, that is another record high.

Too often we hear, “Well, if they weren’t paying for expensive phones or cars or haircare or Starbucks or ____(fill in the blank)___, housing costs wouldn’t be such a problem. It’s all about priorities.”

Umm, Yeah, no.

This same Harvard report notes that while the annual median income for renters has risen by just 2% since 2001, median rents have risen by 21%.  In twenty-one years, the median cost of housing rentals has risen 19% OVER income increases.

Come on, that’s insane. How can a renter keep up?

Of course, I wrote about the unsustainability of current housing costs in my last post, which received more comments than any in my three years of writing on Substack. I appreciate everyone who contributed to the conversation. It really helps to know others are struggling in similar ways. And, if you haven’t already, you can still share your thoughts here: findinghome.substack.com/lets-all-have-a-door/comments or below.

I know sometimes there’s a glitch and particularly if reading this in your email, sometimes the “Leave a Comment” button doesn’t work.  In which case, please, you can always email me directly.

Which is what Ed did. Ed is an architect in Philadelphia and this is what he told me:

I typically only have about half dozen major renovations or new houses bid each year, but enough to see the dramatic upward swing of construction costs. I’d been blithely saying that the pandemic caused a 30% increase in construction. A few days ago, I read a NYT article stating that the cost of homes from the start of the pandemic through October of this past year rose 45%. 45% !!!!! I went back and checked my own numbers. Unfortunately, it’s pretty spot on with my experience. The upshot of the NYT article was that renting is probably a smarter move at present than buying/building. Talk about crushing the American Dream. To anyone not already owning something, I can’t see how they ever will. It’s very depressing and scary.

The New York Times article he was referring to is, “Is This Really ‘The Worst Time to Buy a Home’?” The sentence that caught his eye was, “By October 2023, home prices were up 45 percent since the start of the pandemic, according to the Case-Shiller home price index.”

The subtitle to this NYTimes piece is “Maybe – but it’s not a terrible time to rent.” I admit, based on everything we discussed in my last post, my reaction to this subtitle was to cuss quite loudly.

Ok, deep breath. Here’s what the article says:

Not since 1973 has the United States seen so many apartments — about 1 million nationwide — under construction at once. More than half will be available this year, and almost all are rentals.

Many of these developments broke ground during the pandemic, when developers bet on a market with soaring rents, as people uprooted their lives and moved. But a multifamily building takes time to construct, and these buildings are entering a changed landscape. Renters, squeezed to their financial limits, are no longer signing as many leases, which is driving up vacancies. - Ronda Kayson, New York Times

“Renters, squeezed to their financial limits, are no longer signing as many leases, which is driving up vacancies.” Can someone explain what this means? Is this confirming what you and I already know, how homelessness is on the rise and people are living in cars?

Kayson does acknowledge current “crushing housing costs, with rents 19% higher than they were before the pandemic” and that housing costs were a top driver of inflation in 2023. Her conclusion, however, is that newly constructed apartments should keep rents from continuing to rise and may even result in “deals”, such as months of free rent, gym access, or parking.

Hmmm… okay, maybe… but this doesn’t acknowledge everything from my last post, how rental inventory is currently at an all-time low. So maybe the new construction mostly just brings us up to par?

Personally, I’ve never been enamored with large apartment buildings or complexes. I think it’s the elevators. Or maybe the parking lots. But that’s just me. I can certainly understand the allure of amenities like a pool or a gym or a dynamite view.

But here’s the real question: Do you believe this new rental construction is going to solve the housing unaffordability problem?

I saw this on Instagram last week.

It’s easy to lament what might have been. The house you could have purchased or *should* have when prices were lower. In 1955, a new home could be purchased for $7,450 – the equivalent of $85,270 today.  What that really means is that one dollar in 2024 only buys 8.737% of what it could buy in 1955. (CPI Inflation Calculator)

---

Next week I’ll show you how far we’ve come in renovating our Bellevue, Idaho house, which means we can start working on getting Tom’s old place fixed up to rent! Every month that place sits empty is not only income we don’t have, it’s also a moral burden to do what we can to offer affordable housing to someone who needs it.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts.