CHAPTER 1: Studio Living: Canned Chili Never Tasted So Good
Remember college? It was awesome, wasn’t it? On most days, there was no reason to wake up before 10:00. You had maybe sixteen hours of class time, but the rest of the week was free to do whatever, whenever. Perhaps you even studied a little bit too.
Remember your first job?
My first job sucked.
Don’t get me wrong—I really wanted to help the Jewish Campus Service Corps (JCSC) with their mission of creating a new culture on campus. It’s just that it came at a cost for a newly graduated kid like me, trying to find a place to live in Silicon Valley.
The base salary for a JCSC Fellow was about $19,000 a year. Cost of living was adjusted for certain areas, so when I decided to take my mission to San Jose, California, I was granted an extra $3,000. That’s right: I had a whopping $22,000 to live on in Silicon Valley.
I did some quick math: My car payment was $300 a month; auto insurance was $100; I spent $200 for groceries; $100 for taxes; $60 for my cell phone (god bless those Nokias). Tack on an extra $100 for gas, another $100 for incidentals, and $200 for an emergency fund. That left me with a little over $600 a month for rent and utilities in an area where the average rent at that time was $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment (cue laugh track).
Perhaps in the Midwest or any other region of the United States, these numbers would have reasonably worked, but not in Silicon Valley. People were just realizing that the tech bubble had burst but had not come to grips with how bad things were about to get. Even when they had realized that the “New Economy” was just another cycle, the real estate market was un-impacted.
Lucky for me, the director of Hillel of Silicon Valley (HSV) knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a triplex house. It was a normal-sized house, three bedrooms, but the owner had divided it into three parts. One part contained the garage (converted to a room) and two of the three bedrooms. It was inhabited by a religious family of five.
On the other end was the landlord’s mother, a sweet old lady.
My apartment was sandwiched between the two, a middle unit, which technically had no bedrooms. It was fifteen feet across and thirty feet deep. It had a bed and a table jiggered together with a piece of plywood and two rusty legs. But I didn’t care. My rent was $500 a month, and it included utilities
