QUARTZ
- Money-saving mobile. (Katharine Patterson)
About
a year ago, I was having lunch with a friend when I made a throwaway
comment: “Have you seen the rent in San Francisco? If I get a job in the
Bay Area, I’ll totally live in a van.”
As I
sit in darkness writing this, I’m trying to keep my typing quiet, lest a
real inhabitant of the neighborhood I’m parked in should walk by and
wonder about the sounds coming from the rusty bus loitering on their
block. Yes, you understood that correctly: Today, I work in a
multi-million dollar office complex, and I live in a van.
This
summer, after receiving a job offer in Silicon Valley, I went on
Craigslist and began sifting through housing listings: “verrrrrryyy
cheap bedroom ;),” “great deal on rent!” A single room with a shared
bathroom? Two thousand per month on the low-end. A small studio
apartment, you ask? If your startup wasn’t recently bought for seven
figures, forget about it.
I perked up after
finding a listing for $1,000 per month. Now this could work. Clicking
through to the details section however revealed the offer was for a
single bunk in a room with eight people, a set-up referred to as a
“hacker house” by an (evil) marketing genius.
Even
if I was to spend the huge majority of my salary on rent, I knew I
would likely still be in a grim living situation, resenting every penny I
handed over that could have gone towards paying back my student loans.
And as a software engineer, I’m one of the lucky ones! Imagine those who
aren’t lucky enough to be on the tech payroll.
Anyway,
three weeks ago I took the equivalent of three months’ rent and bought
an old red bus. It’s a 1969 VW camper van with a hole in the floor and a
family of spiders that has more of a right to be here than I do
(sleeping in your car on public land in California is illegal).
But with the help of Ikea and an army of cleaning supplies I was able to get the bus into livable condition.
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