When I moved away from my hometown of San Francisco, I told myself I would come back every month to visit. As anyone who’s ever lived there knows, leaving her is like finally ending a bittersweet relationship. She’s a beautiful city with everything in the world to offer, but the cost is just too high. Of course I did not return every month, but I do return a couple times a year, and I have found that relationship to be much more sustainable.
Wintering through San Francisco summers
When I lived in San Francisco, I lived out near the ocean which, ironically, is one of the lowest priced areas in the city. The reason for that is because the ocean produces a fog that blankets the western side of the city for most of the summer. So many times I’d get the idea to have a bbq while enjoying a sunny afternoon in downtown only to get home in the evening and find myself living inside a 50 degree cloud.
I still had the BBQ, though not as I’d envisioned it: standing around with friends on the rooftop of my apartment building. Instead, I’d quickly open the bay window to reach out and stoke the coals of the grill perched out on the fire escape before the cold air could reach inside. This didn’t go without other problems like the time the fire department showed up to respond to a report of smoke coming from our building.
Being city folks, we’d all leaned against the window to see where the truck was headed, only this time it stopped in front of our building. The fire fighters all jumped out of the truck, looked up at the building with hands on their hips, and just shook their heads. In a city like San Francisco, with a history of devastating fires, people are quick to call the fire department anytime they see smoke issuing from a building. We were only issued a warning, but it offered an opportunity for me to explain why this neighborhood was less expensive than others.
Returning to San Francisco as a tourist
The first time I returned to San Francisco, I chose to stay in North beach, otherwise known as little Italy. People only began calling it that recently. When I grew up we all knew North beach was the Italian neighborhood and also the most desirable. With Italians living there, it obviously had the best food in the city, but it’s also walking distance to downtown, Chinatown, Fisherman’s wharf, Lombard street, Nob Hill and the ferry building, which provided water access to cities all over the bay.
It had always been my dream neighborhood to live in, but with rent three times that of the rest of San Francisco, it was a place I could only dream of living. Now that I visit San Francisco a couple times of year, I get to live in my dream neighborhood, if only for a few weeks a year, but hey, that’s more than I got when I was living there.
Affordable rent in North Beach
You see there are several places I can stay in North beach for less than rent would be in the neighborhood. First, there’s the San Remo hotel, a European style hotel with shared bathrooms on each hallway. The appeal is that you can stay there for about $100 a night, and being a return customer, they give me a rate of less than that, including a free night for every seven I stay. That comes out to far less than monthly rent for the neighborhood.
Another budget option is the Green Tortoise Hostel. This is a beautiful building with a two story grand room overlooking the famous intersection of Broadway and Columbus street, the border between North Beach and Chinatown. Though they have private rooms, you can get a shared dorm room for as little as $45/night. The one catch is that you can’t stay for more than 14 days in any calendar year, but there are several hostels in the city so it is easy enough to rotate through them. In this way, I spend up to two months living in one of my favorite cities; a city that is otherwise known to be prohibitively expensive.
Free rent for half of the summer
My career as a tour guide keeps me moving around the country, and tour companies pay transportation to/from destinations as well as all expenses while on tour. That usually means I only have to cover about two weeks of my room and board costs each month. I take advantage of this by extending my stay in each of the cities where my tours end. Those are typically: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
Each of these cities has hostels, AirBnBs, and budget hotels which are all more affordable than monthly rents in those cities. Clearly, I have an ideal job for making this happen, but anyone with a job where they don’t have to be at an office can take advantage of this.
In fact, if you work solely from your computer, you can become a digital nomad. Taking my concept of enjoying an expensive lifestyle for an abbreviated period, I realized that I could make my meager income go farther if I only stayed in the U.S., one of the most expensive countries in the world, for a limited time period.
Low rent for the rest of the year
During the winter, when there is no work to keep me in the US, I head to Mexico or Asia. Because there is no work, I have no income so I choose to reduce my costs by staying in countries that are cheaper, thus the money I did earn goes farther.
It also turns out that I can spend short time periods in other desirable cities throughout the world. While I can’t afford to live in Paris, or Rome, or Rio, I have spent time in each of these cities, living as a local if only for a short period of time.
As the world moves to more technology driven work, we shouldn’t rush to live in the cities where this technology is centered but rush to figure out a way to leverage that technology to work from anywhere in the world. Instead of just struggling to live in San Francisco, spend the year living in Istanbul, Barcelona, AND San Francisco.