I recently returned to my parents’ house in Urbana, Illinois, where I moved after failing—for nearly three years—to find full-time employment in San Francisco. I had no trouble finding cafe jobs, or unpaid internships, for that matter. Freelance writing (emphasis on the “free”), too, was generally readily available. But editorial assistant jobs, content managing positions, entry-level admin jobs at non-profits? No luck. I have records of applying to over 150 opportunities. After a while, throwing out carefully tailored cover letters and resumes felt akin to hurling a grappling hook out into the middle of the night. Responses were so rare that even their apologetic phrases—”we regret,” “better-suited,” “best of luck,” were slightly comforting. At least the grappling hook had clanked against some dark specter of a job out there.

The evidence of my long hunt is almost laughable, and, laughter, I think, is far preferable to self-pity. I have saved a copy of each altered resume (LucySchillerResume.docx; SchillerLucyResume.docx; Lucy-Schiller-Resume.docx; GOODBASICRESUMEGOODLUCKANDGODSPEED.docx). I still find applications I don’t even remember constructing—mostly to jobs so far from my interests they serve as excellent floodmarkers of my increasingly desperate tide. Bookmobile driver through rural Vermont. Sephora copywriter. Fair trade certification assistant. Administrative assistant for a taxidermist. A member of the “Flight Staff” at an indoor trampoline park.

It has always been hard to be a young person looking for work. The Economic Policy Institute reminds us that people under age 25 have historically experienced around double the general unemployment rate. This means, though, that when something like the Great Recession hits, we experience a disproportionally high rate of joblessness. I approached the task of finding a job with true energy and excitement, and struggled to maintain that passion for three years. It began to feel like a fevered and foolish grasping.

I look at my friends and I see more of the same. Many of us still live at home, or have recently returned there, welcomed by generous parents. Many of us have three or four jobs at once. Many of us are taking refuge in graduate school. A great number of us are operating under the diminishing delusion that the unpaid commitments we can barely afford to take will turn into the jobs we once dreamed of having. For me personally, the last few years have been characterized by the slow realization that although I was working incredibly hard, something larger wasn’t.

The word that comes up over and over again when I talk to people in similar situations is “hustling.” The term has a suggestion of the underhanded, and I think that’s actually fairly apt: because we can’t subscribe to the typical forty-hour workweek, we construct almost subversive amalgams of part-time employment. It’s impossible to say what we do. I remember struggling a lot with this. “I write,” I’d say, grimacing slightly, “which means that I make coffee. And work at a farmers’ market. And intern, and I just started at a new restaurant.”

Sadie Scheffer, founder of the gluten-free bakery Bread SRSLY, might well be termed a hustler supreme. Sadie dropped out of mechanical engineering at MIT in 2009 to followed a serious crush to San Francisco. She converted her sublease into a sewing studio and began crafting bicycle clothing, which she sold to a shop in the Mission District. She picked up other gigs–”spraying glitter on giant tigers” as a float builder for the Chinese New Year parade, working at Blue Bottle Coffee Company, probably the most prestigious barista job possible. And Sadie cooked, quite a bit, in hopes that food would provide a tunnel into her intended’s heart. When it turned out that he was gluten-intolerant, Sadie tweaked her strategy, and ended up with gentle-on-the-belly sourdough starter, her own business, and a relationship. SRSLY.

Sadie stands out among my friends for the relative success of her efforts. From an email in July 2011 that she sent out to everyone she could think of, Bread SRSLY was born. Since the beginning, she has bicycled all over San Francisco delivering her loaves and the sandwiches they’ve engendered. Also since the beginning, she has been severely sleep-deprived. When I briefly hawked her gluten-free goods at a farmers’ market, Sadie paid me generously in cash as well as bartered produce, and I always felt terrible: she couldn’t have been making any more than I was, and she was doing probably thirty times the work. But Bread SRSLY is starting to make sense, says Sadie. Not only has she hired a baker, but last week, that baker got a raise.

There are many stories, though, involving about the same amount of work as Sadie’s but without any visible payoff. A close college friend—she asked not to be named—recently returned to her mother’s house in Berkeley after working in France and then Kansas City. Back home, she realized that jobs she imagined to be “in the bag” were totally out of reach. Having managed numerous farmers’ markets in Kansas City, she applied for a job at an information booth at one Berkeley market. She never heard anything.

This is not surprising to anyone, ever, who attempted to ford the murky river of the hiring process. So this friend kept applying everywhere she could think of, including to a nearby restaurant, assuming that with several years of serving experience and her familiar neighborhood face she was sure to get at least an interview. After a few weeks, the manager asked to speak to her, then brushed her aside: he was too busy for a full-length conversation. But he found time at 10 am on Presidents Day to call her out of the blue for an immediate trial shift bussing plates. “We can see if your instincts are a good fit,” she remembers him saying. She worked what turned out to be a supremely busy morning at the restaurant, and was then called upstairs, where she was told that she lacked the smile they were looking for. The manager handed her twelve dollars.

“I felt really used,” she says. “It was a shit job. He could afford to not give me a real chance, because he knew that someone grinning ear-to-ear could walk in the next day.”

This friend now is working forty hours a week. Those forty hours are split between five regular commitments—tutoring, babysitting, catering, and two volunteer positions. She also supplements her income with odd jobs: working as a typist, staffing estate sales, creating “artistic rock arrangements,” and helping at a family friend’s landscaping business. Even her unpaid positions, she says, were hard to come by. One interviewer asked her to imagine herself as a kitchen implement and then explain why, of all things, a whisk. She has given up, for the most part, applying to urban farming initiatives, whose unpaid internships and “allyships” are, she says, incredibly competitive.

“I felt manic,” she says of her initial job search. “One day I would wake up and think that the world is my oyster, that I was in the right place at the right time. The next day I’d wake up and be clearly deeply depressed, thinking I was totally unqualified for any job.” She is obviously qualified enough to hold five jobs at a time. The hard part for her, and for many of us, is finding just one.

The names are easy to rattle off. Christina Afanasieff, 26 in 2008, when she quit her job and then made a huge gamble: buying the tiny Kafe 99 Sqft, where I was later to work as a barista. Like Sadie, Christina has made it work, but barely—she works at the café as a barista as well as owning the place, sometimes works as a temp, and is also currently enrolled in a master’s program at San Francisco State. “I know the job I’m giving people is not a permanent job,” she says of hiring baristas, “and in my interview process I have to ask what other things they’re doing in their life. Everyone I interview is a freelance something or other.”

Like Caroline Kessler, student speaker for her graduating class at Carnegie Mellon and alum of the prestigious Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. She has recently quit a job at a tech recruiting firm in order to work as a freelance writer. But she has clear memories of the application process for the seemingly impenetrable entry-level admin jobs many others and I have been applying to. “Writers, artists, café workers—everyone across the board would apply to these jobs,” Caroline says. She describes her mass weedings of all applications not strictly adherent to the job’s most basic qualifications. “If you say you’re detail-oriented and have a typo in your cover letter, I don’t believe you,” she says.

Now, Caroline is in that all-too familiar state of “paralyzing fear” accompanying the multi-employed. “I get super freaked out when I think too far in the future about how I am going to sustain this, how I am going to pay rent when it just went up 50 bucks,” she says. Caroline lives in a relatively affordable apartment complex in the Presidio, a removed and forested area of the city many of us would never consider for housing, as it involves an interminable uphill bicycle ride.

Before meeting Caroline, I thought the apartment I shared with Bridgette Haggerty was as far away from the rest of San Francisco as you could get: $1575 was a steal for our unheated abode, its two bedrooms, kitchen, and narrow entryway/living room lopsidedly sloping with the weight of its charm.

When Bridgette joined me in San Francisco, I was freshly unemployed and she had freshly left her parents’ house in Grand Junction, Colorado. “I remember not being able to get a job at the grocery store in my hometown,” she says, and felt as if she would “have a better chance in San Francisco because it was a bigger city.”

She was right. Bridgette found a job at Marmot, selling activewear close to downtown. Because the job was part-time, Bridgette’s initial plan was to supplement it with an internship more aligned with her longer-term goals of working in environmental activism and stewardship. But, she remembers, she eventually stopped applying to internship positions because she would never hear back. Slowly, her plan shifted. “My boss would tell me stories about his own [pre-2008] rise in the world of retail, and it seemed sort of attainable…I was like, this isn’t terrible. Could I do this for the rest of my life?”

The answer, she realized, was no. Bridgette moved back to Colorado to take a position on an Americorps chainsaw crew, a year-long commitment which recently ended. She’s now in Denver working retail and an unpaid internship at an environmental nonprofit.

“Many if not most of my friends are self-employed. They are builders, artists, freelance designers, chefs, farmers,” says Sadie Scheffer. “Most of them have a part-time gig to pay the bills, and spend the rest of their time…planning and brainstorming for their future self-employment.” For those with self-employment as the end goal, these early years of sleeplessness and one or two part-time jobs make sense—slowly, the balance is tilting towards savings and time spent making a business out of a passion. The rest of us, though, are still hustling.

Lucy Schiller now lives in Brooklyn and works as a writer. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming on The Rumpus, American Suburb X, zyzzyva.org, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Riveter, Thought Catalog, and Broke-Ass Stuart. Photo: Faruk Ates

Entire industries that didn’t exist ten years ago are either thriving on venture capital, or thriving on companies that are thriving on it. It is now possible to find a $6 bottle of Miller High Life, a $48 plate of fried chicken, or a $20 BLT in parts of the city that used to be known for their dive bars and taco stands. If, after all, money has always been a means of effecting the world we want to bring about, when a region is flooded with uncommonly rich and uncommonly young people, that world begins to look very different. And we’re all living in it, whether we like it or not.

In the East Bay Express, Ellen Cushing looks at how a population of young people with a lot of tech money in their bank accounts have transformed the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s a story about gentrification, but the kind of gentrification that happens when “young people routinely make six-figure salaries, not necessarily beginning with a 1.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that S.F.’s babysitters and nannies charge the highest rates in the U.S. (though not that much more than New Yorkers do), but some of the city’s moms and dads don’t seem to mind the cost so much. Amy Graff, the reporter for this story, surveyed some parents to find out how much they paid, and if they think they’re paying too much:

I heard from over 30 different parents and while everyone had varying opinions on whether the rates are too high, nobody seemed surprised that San Francisco is higher than New York. Also, everyone agreed that for the actual city of San Francisco $14 an hour is low. The parents I heard from are paying anywhere from $15 to $22 for one child and $18 to as much as $30 for two or more.

“Our nanny took home $18 an hour post tax for one kid, $24 an hour for two kids post tax (nanny share),” Simona shared. “She got two weeks paid vacation, sick days, paid holidays, and year-end bonus.”

“I do not think this rate is ‘high,’” she added. “It is a living wage for San Francisco.”

Other parents chimed in similarly, with the basic idea being: The cost of living is high in San Francisco, so why wouldn’t childcare be? A refreshing, reasoned perspective!

Over at Priceonomics, Alex Mayyasi looks at the culture of homeless “street kids” in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, where he says homeless youth tend to fall into two categories: the transient and homeless who found a home in the street kid community, and those with job prospects who made the decision to become a street kid because they preferred the street kid life. Most people in the community earn money by finding part-time gigs in construction, busking, selling weed, and panhandling:

Whenever Haight Street tourists or bar hoppers crowd the neighborhood, street kids panhandle (hold a palm out for money – resembling a pan handle) and spange (“Spare change?”). An average day of spanging brings in about $40. But with some luck and creative tactics (jumping out of trash cans to scare a group of teenagers, or telling tourists how to take the perfect picture of the Haight and Ashbury street signs), a day’s haul can break into triple digits.

This struck us as a good deal of money for the homeless. The street kids disagreed. “I have a spot downtown where I can make $50 an hour,” one girl told us. “But I try and respect the spot and not go too often.” Others added that spanging elsewhere easily brings in triple digits every day. Yet they still panhandle in the Haight even though it’s not their most profitable location.

Of course, it’s also a dangerous existence—the street kids are often robbed and attacked at night, don’t have adequate access to health care, and don’t get along with law enforcement.

When I moved to San Francisco from New York in 2006, I was lucky to have built up a small amount of savings. I’d lived at home for a year after graduating from college, and my poorly paying job in publishing had a surprisingly generous retirement policy. I’d moved simply to have a change in my life, and with several close friends already living in San Francisco, it felt like an obvious choice. Still, I didn’t have a job or an apartment when I arrived. My friend Amanda’s parents generously offered to let me stay at their house for as long as I needed to. At my insistence, I paid them $200 every month in rent. I got a temp job doing admin work at an architecture firm in downtown San Francisco so that I could have some income while searching for a permanent job and an apartment.

Like a lot of temp work, my days weren’t exactly bustling. I spent a lot of time on a freelance job I’d taken on before leaving New York: a page-a-day cat calendar that involved writing something cat-related for every day of the year. It was easy and lovely living with Amanda’s parents, who treated me like the adult child I felt like, but I knew I’d have to find my own place eventually. Still, I hesitated. I felt intimidated by the possibility of living with strangers, which I hadn’t done before. After I’d moved out of my parents’ place in New York, I’d lived in two different apartments, both with my boyfriend. Now I’d up and and left my apartment and my boyfriend back in Brooklyn. It felt lonely.

I was curious about living alone, but didn’t consider pursuing it very seriously. I wasn’t sure it was a good fit for my personality. I also knew enough to realize that San Francisco was hardly any better than New York as far as cost of living. By happenstance, one of the men who worked in the architecture office asked me about my apartment search, and explained that he was planning to leave his one-bedroom in the Castro if I was interested in it. I told him I was sure I couldn’t afford it, but he said I should come by to see the apartment anyway. If I liked it, he’d put me in touch with his landlord. Maybe we could work something out.

I called my brother and told him I was thinking about living alone. “Really?” he responded. “I mean, I would never want to live alone, but I guess some people like it.”

I went to see the apartment on a cold Sunday in December. I met my colleague on his front stoop and we walked in together. He had told me that he’d lived here for 10 years, and was leaving so that he could move into his girlfriend’s place, where he spent all his time anyway.

It showed. As soon as we unlocked the door of the building, we encountered a thick layer of coupon fliers covering the entire entryway like a paper ocean. It appeared to be the buildup of weeks, or maybe months, of mail delivery. He had to shove the front door hard in order to create a path through the coupons wide enough for us to walk through. I followed him up a dusty flight of carpeted stairs and entered the apartment at the top of the landing.

My first impression was that it was horribly depressing. Again, my colleague’s relative absence in his own apartment was obvious. The apartment, a small one-bedroom, looked slightly abandoned. Bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling and a sagging three-legged butcher block sat in a corner of the tiny kitchen like a stout troll. The flooring was stained linoleum in a parquet pattern. Despite this initial bad impression, I also saw nice ceiling fixtures, delicate molding, and design details like a marble mantel (the fireplace had been bricked in) and three big windows spanning one wall of the living room. I am not a handy, fixer-upper type, but despite my worries about the financial and possible psychological strains of living alone, I was interested.

I spoke to the landlord and learned that he wanted to rent it for $1,400 a month—an amount that I squarely could not afford. Amanda’s parents, god bless them, assured me that I could stay at their house for as long as I wanted, and that shouldn’t feel like I had to take the first apartment that came along. I sat down with some friends, who suggested that I should negotiate with the landlord. What could I offer the him in exchange for lowering the rent? We came up with a short list that consisted mostly of variations of

• Avoiding the hassle of posting on Craiglist
• Avoiding the expense of basic improvements like painting, etc.
• Helping with building upkeep (questionable; again—not handy)
• Promising to be a model tenant (desperate; who hasn’t said this?)

I called the landlord back and explained that I really wanted the apartment, but that on my salary ($36,000) there was no way I could afford $1,400 a month. But, I added, if he was willing to rent it to me for less, I would move in as-is. There would be no need to paint or spiff the place up at all. I promised to pay my rent on time every month and be quiet as a dormouse. He asked me what I thought I could afford, and I told him $900 a month. He counter-offered with $1,050, on the understanding, later written into the lease, that in exchange for reduced rent, I would help keep the building tidy. Maybe he was also tired of wading through weeks of coupon detritus.

It didn’t seem like the kind of negotiation that ever would have worked out, but it did. I quickly accepted his offer, high on the thrill of a successful negotiation, even though it was still far more than I’d ever paid in rent. A cadre of friends helped me move in a month later on a sunny Saturday morning. The west facing windows let in tons of light, even on short winter days. And as it turned out, I loved living alone.

Leda Marritz is the Creative Director at DeepRoot Green Infrastructure. She still lives in San Francisco.

San Francisco is thinking about getting into the “micro studio” business—just like New York! But S.F. would like their micro studios to be even more micro: 220-square-foot apartments that would rent for $1,200 to $1,500 a month. Tech companies like Twitter and Zynga have decided to set up their headquarters in S.F. rather than Silicon Valley, and their well-paid employees are helping to drive up the rents in the city. Some affordable housing advocates point out that this may help some young tech-savvy people find a place to crash in the city, but doesn’t really do anything to help families who are being priced out. Which is a good point! But if you look at the artist rendering of the proposed micro studio, it looks like having your bed next to the fridge will make it very easy for you to get a midnight snack.

With rents soaring in San Francisco, how would a person on a limited budget move to the Bay Area tech hub to start building his or her own startup? One solution: hacker hostels. I’d describe it less like a hostel, and more like living in the college dorms again with bunk-beds filled with geeks. The rent is about $40 a night, with some hacker hostels offering bike rentals for $3 a day. And just like the dorms (or in office buildings), tenants are asked to write their name on their food if they’re storing it in the shared refrigerator. That’s always been a funny rule to me, because who would eat some stranger’s food just because it happened to be unmarked? But as we’ve all learned, there’s always that person—which results in an angry person running around screaming, “Who ate my food!?”

Three weeks ago some clients wrote a $1.25m offer on a 1400 square foot 3-bed, 1-bath house with original kitchen and bath near San Francisco’s Delores Park. They weren’t even close. There were 51 offers. It sold for $1.4m and closed 8 days after offers were due. That’s the most offers I’ve seen in 10 years. And a different property at that week got 23 offers.

Two weeks ago, another client offered $245k over list price on a 3-bed, 2-bath Pacific Heights condo. One of the other 9 offers was the winning bid in this $1.6m to $1.9m market segment. That was my client’s fourth rejected offer. He’s looking at two properties in this price range this week, and the listing agents are reporting similar demand: about 10 serious buyers circling.

That’s the norm. It’s what some are calling The Facebook Effect on San Francisco real estate.

—Mortgage banker Julian Hebron blogs explains why the upper tier San Francisco real estate market is going craaaaazzzyyyyyyy right now, and doesn’t look to be slowing. Basically:  Social media companies keep being given valuations in the billions (Pinterest! $1.5 billion! Twitter! $8 billion!), creating slews of “liquid millionaires” all eager to buy up housing stock. But: For homes above $1.5 million, Hebron reports that  ”there are only 550-600 sales per year.” There are more rich people than fancy apartments and houses in San Francisco. Which means some of them are going to have to move to the East Bay. Like PLEBES.

When my boyfriend proposed we raise chickens in our San Francisco Mission District backyard, one of his persuasive arguments was that we’d save a ton of money on eggs. As someone who consumes more scrambles than is probably healthy, I thought it was a genius money-saving plan. This actually (surprise!) did not turn out to be true; funding a chicken setup cost a little more than I had anticipated, and the idea that we’d be spending significantly less on groceries was obviously laughable.

That said, owning chickens is really fun, worth the investment, and totally doable if you know what you’re getting into. Before you decide to tackle this daunting task, ask yourself the following questions: Do you mind getting up early … like, sunrise early? Are you okay with being dubbed the crazy house on your block? And most importantly, how much do you like eggs?

If you answered “not really,” “sure,” and “I’m obsessed with them,” you are ready! Here is a play-by-play of what we did, complete with price points—though of course, numbers will vary depending on where you live. Follow in these sometimes-misguided footsteps, and you’ll hopefully end up with only a few gray hairs. 

1. Read up on your city’s ordinance laws, because there would be no bigger bummer than going through all the effort only to get a fatty ticket. The City Chicken is a good starting point. But since you should never fully trust the integrity of a website made in MS Frontpage, check out your city’s municipal codes on the official government website as well. We learned that in San Francisco, each residence is allowed up to four small animals without a permit. Chicken coops can be built as long as they are 20 feet from all windows and doors, though you probably want to build at this distance even if it isn’t your city’s law—chicken funk is icky.

1a. Get permission from your landlord, dummy! Our conversation more or less went like this:

Us: Hey, Landlord! Can we put a chicken coop in the backyard? We’ll keep it really clean, we swear!
Landlord: Um, what? Oh, ha ha. [sarcastically] Sure thing, you crazy kids! Ha ha.

Two weeks later:

Us: Check out our coop!
Landlord: Oh, you weren’t kidding? Well, I guess it can stay.

2. Obtain that chicken coop your landlord very nicely approved. My boyfriend wanted the “full experience” of building a coop by hand because he is macho. I wanted to just buy one off Craigslist because I am lazy—so lazy I couldn’t be bothered to argue, so my boyfriend got his way. All in all, the building supplies cost us about $400, though it can be done way cheaper, I’m sure (check Craigslist)—we waterproofed the roof, built it high enough off the ground that we wouldn’t have to bend over to clean, and also made it large enough to house a family of six chickens.

3. Adopt your chickens! This is the most exciting part, especially if you decide to get them as cute baby chicks so you can raise them yourself and teach them to love you (spoiler alert: this doesn’t work). Chickens only thrive in communities; you need to get at least three so they won’t be so depressed they won’t lay eggs. Also, one of them might die—because circle of life—so prepare for that potential tragedy. Chicks are cheap; we bought ours for $5 each.

Keep in mind that buying babies means you have to get special food pellets and build a small incubator with a heat lamp and thermometer to monitor temps since they won’t be able to live outside until they have all their feathers. It’s extra work and a little more money (about $60 for everything), but it is the only time in their lives they will be soft and let you hold them, so … worth it. Definitely.

4. Start eating your fresh eggs! Okay, your chickens won’t actually start laying until they are about six months old. And when they do start laying, their eggs taste a little funny at first, like how their pellets smell. But then they start to taste really amazing! And the yolk is so yellow! And you know exactly what you are eating because you are the one feeding them! And when you crack one open in a pan you are like, “I am responsible for this meal! I am powerful! I am a woman of the earth!”

Our three hens yielded anywhere between 14 and 18 eggs a week, which was more than the two of us could eat. We used the extras as hush money so our next door neighbors wouldn’t call the cops when the chickens got into heated arguments at 5am. We also pawned off the chicken poop to our neighbors with gardens, which made us really popular. Another unexpected perk was that you can pretty much feed chickens anything: moldy bread, rotten fruit, whatever. In addition to it being good for their diet and saving you trips to the garbage bins, it helps cut the cost of buying new bags of feed (the cheapest stuff, found at feed stores that cater to farmers, is $15/50-pound-bag).

Getting a noise complaint was my biggest worry, since sometimes our chickens screeched so loudly I was convinced our entire block would band together to get us a $100-300 fine (kill me) or evicted (please, seriously kill me so I don’t have to deal with this stress—eviction notices are devastating everywhere but especially here; San Francisco apartment-hunting is basically like The Hunger Games).

I was so stressed out that my boyfriend eventually MacGyver’d a coop nightlight that we kept on until about 10 p.m. The chickens would idly stand in this pool of light, sometimes chirping preciously; when we turned it off, they would waddle themselves to roost like a bunch of drunk babies. For the most part, making them stay up past their bedtime (sunset) kept them quiet until a reasonable daylight hour.

If they got loud during the day, I would either: put an ice cube in their nesting box to confuse them (they think their eggs went bad and it stuns them into silence) or put the noisiest one in a box and sit on it for about 10 minutes, or until she screamed herself to sleep and the less noisy ones get bored.

So there you have it—almost all you need to know about raising backyard chickens! Your final task: Learn a helluva lot of egg recipes, because you will need to eat them at least three meals a day to get your money’s worth.

Rebecca Pederson is an editor at Yelp. Her Aunt Leslie loves her blog.