This was a comment for this post: http://chrismissal.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/more-of-chris/
When I moved to San Francisco in 2007, I knew it wouldn’t be cheap. Ever since I’ve been conscious of phrases like “cost of living” and “quality of life,” I’ve understood that this is an expensive city. But I had been living in Los Angeles and was coming up here for research on a novel that I was writing, and I fell head over heels in love with the city. There was no going back. So I found a job, packed up, and took some crappy apartment in the Lower Haight that pushed the boundary of my nonprofit salary. The place was beyond gross. There was cat food stuck in the old, dingy carpets. Human feces often greeted me at the front gate when I left for work in the mornings. Instead of borrowing things like eggs and sugar, my drug addict neighbors borrowed strips of aluminum foil and small Band-Aids that could fit in between toes.