March 20 , 2007

Making It Work
By Allyse Heartwell
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

            “I’m stuck in this situation now because I didn’t evolve with the economics of the City,” observed Peter, a 60-something cabinetmaker, tree house-builder and jack-of-all-trades, as he sat outside of Farley’s Cafe on a Thursday afternoon. Peter has lived in the same live-work artists’ collective since the 1970s, but now he’s fed up. He would leave if it wasn’t for the cheap rent.
            Complaints about San Francisco’s high cost of living are as common as rainy days in January, but in general they’re far more colorful. People make sacrifices to live in the City, and find creative ways of making ends meet. That’s especially true if they’ve opted, or simply found themselves, doing something other than a respectable nine to five.
            Joanne is a mother of two and works two part-time jobs: teacher and hand-model. She has small, dainty hands, long fingers, and well-kept nails.  Both jobs have their challenges, but her more unusual intermittent career as a hand model allows her to work minimal and flexible hours, taking only a few gigs a year.  “I’m lucky that I can work part-time like this and still get by in this town, have time with my kids, have time to myself,” she said.
            Hand models get paid a base pay of $187.50 an hour, but Joanne often earns more than that. She’s not so much under-paid, as under-employed.  A trained dancer and therapist, working in schools and psychiatric hospitals has given her a deep appreciation for her situation. “Honestly, I’ve worked these other stressful jobs, and it’s never full time anyway, I’ve been laid off… but then as a model, where I get paid so much for so little and get treated like a queen – why is it that there’s such a huge discrepancy?” she wondered.
            Dale, 31, works in a bookstore and is no stranger to low wages. He’s lived in San Francisco for five years and most of that time he’s worked in one bookstore or another. Most of his income is spent on rent, food, and alcohol, although “not necessarily in that order.”
            When asked about how he gets by, he responded, “Two words: rent control.  I guess I live cheaply too, but I couldn’t do it if my rent was higher, if it was market rate.” The City’s cost of living is about 1.75 times the national average, but housing costs are more than three times as high.
            Laura, a 27 year-old hostess at an upscale restaurant, is from Arizona and has been living in San Francisco for two years. She works four days a week for “good money”.
            “It’s not something I want to be doing forever, obviously, but for right now it’s okay,” she said. “I mean the service industry kind of sucks. You have to serve people, and people kind of suck, especially when you’re serving them.”
            The hostess job keeps Laura on a budget, but she couldn’t recall having to make any great sacrifices. A car would be nice, perhaps. “But I’m sort of torn about that anyway, because it’s so hard to keep a car here. But if money was totally not a problem, then yeah, I’d want one.”
            She wants to go back to school someday, but hasn’t decided what she wants to study yet. Eventually she sees herself working “a regular job”. “Nine-to-five is just what most people do,” she said. “It’s not going to be fun, but work is always going to be work.”
            Erica, 24, also anticipates joining the nine to five work force, but right now she’s thrilled with her part-time internship at a design firm. The position is paid, but “not well,” and she admits that her income hasn’t yet met her expenses in the eight months that she’s lived in San Francisco. The difference is made up by a trust fund that her grandparents set up for her.
            “I’m not what you’d call a ‘trustafarian’,” she laughed. “But it’s nice. It lets me do things that I couldn’t do otherwise. Like I probably couldn’t really work this job. And I don’t have to worry about it – that’s the really big thing.”
            “If I was actually earning more money, then there are ways I’d live differently. Now it’s like sometimes I don’t go on a trip or something, because it’s expensive. But I can’t really complain,” Erica said.   
            “The place has been taken over by yuppies,” Peter said of his artists’ collective, where he claims most people rely on outside jobs rather than living and working onsite. That gripe might as well stand for the rest of the City as well – no matter your opinion of the professional class, we’re primarily a city of comparatively well-paid office workers.
            In 2005, “management, professional, and related occupations” accounted for approximately 193,716 of San Francisco’s jobs. “Sales and office occupations” were a distant second, with 90,953 jobs, while “service occupations” accounted for 62,047 jobs. Extraction, production, construction, and maintenance jobs combined totaled less than 50,000, and 132 people work in farming, fishing and forestry. The occupation with the fastest job growth is biomedical engineering.
            Peter used to aspire to San Francisco home ownership. He still does, but only hypothetically. “The reality of it is how’s that ever going to happen?” he wonders wryly. For the time being Peter is happy with his lifestyle, despite occasional feuds with his neighbors.
“Is it worth it? No, not really. But I’m in love with this City,” he said.

Sidebar:           Other Ways to Make it in the City

            One sector that’s thriving in San Francisco but doesn’t appear on the census is the sex industry. From the strip clubs on Broadway to the recently high-profile outing of Kink.com to the transactions conducted behind closed doors, sex work is big business in the City.
            “V” is 21 years-old. She wears a faux-leopard coat. Her hair is dramatically styled and multicolored. Over Thai food on a rainy Friday night, she refers to herself as a postmodern prostitute and proud of it.
            A recent transplant from Minneapolis, V has been doing sex work of various kinds since she was 18.  “It’s not like it was something I wanted to do growing up or anything,” she explained. “Mostly because growing up in a small town in northern Minnesota, I didn’t think of it as possible. But I did see it as exciting and fun, and I didn’t understand why there was this negative stigma.”
            V started out doing erotic massage, has dabbled in stripping, worked as a phone sex operator, and once performed oral sex for $700. She now works as a pro-domme, or dominatrix. “I’m interested in sex work in general,” she said. “I’m interested in the politics of it, and in the way sex workers and clients interact with each other. Because I think in every type of sex work there’s a distinct variation.”
            Despite her sociological interests, in the end it’s about the money. Or, more precisely, it’s about the money and the freedom. V charges $200 for a “session”, of which the dungeon that she works out of takes $50. That’s $150 for an hour of work that she claims to enjoy very much.
            She works anywhere from two to 15 hours a week, and sets her own schedule. This leaves her with plenty of time to pursue her true passion of creative writing. Currently, she spends between up to five hours a day working on a “surrealist memoir” novella.
            San Francisco is in some ways an ideal place to do sex work, due to the City’s liberal mores and a generally more sex-positive culture. But for precisely these reasons, the competition here is steeper than elsewhere. The website that V advertises on features 40 other dommes offering a range of kinky activities in the Bay Area alone.
            When she was doing erotic massage in Minneapolis, V “always had a couple thousand dollars lying around,” but here she makes just enough to live comfortably. “I probably spend most of my money on food,” she mused. “San Francisco is just such a fabulous place to eat out!”
            V has worked other “menial jobs” in the past, from waitressing to selling cable door-to-door. Since her arrival in San Francisco, she held one job as a waitress – which lasted for a total of three days. “The funny thing was that here I was doing this thing that’s actually approved of, culturally speaking, but for like no money, and it was terrible; and I’ve never felt so much like a whore!” she joked.
            V has a balanced view of her work, admitting that there are both pros and cons. “I don’t really think anything is black and white and grow very irritated by those who do,” she said. “I don’t think sex work is either the greatest thing that ever happened or this horrible degrading thing that’s harming my psyche.”
            V explained that the money, freedom, and enjoyment that she gets from doing sex work are counterbalanced by negative aspects, such as a certain degree of risk (she says she’s never felt physically endangered) and a skewed perception of the value of money. “I know I won’t be doing this forever, and when I’m not I know that whatever it is I am doing I’m going to be working so much harder for so much less money,” she said.
            As a largely underground activity, sex work can also be alienating. “You’re not in touch with the mainstream,” she said. “You’re not in touch with the world of the worker bees doing the 9 to 5, and – even though that reality sucks and I don’t want to be a part of it – I do feel left out in a certain way. There’s a certain bonding in that whole ‘life is hard, you gotta go to work and you gotta pay the bills’ mentality, that I’m just not part of.”