When he thinks back on the months of futile apartment hunting in San Francisco, one moment sticks with Sean Patrick Taylor. The 35-year-old was attending an open house in Lower Haight with his girlfriend, Isabel Trew, when she told the agent that they were both teachers. Maybe the landlord would take pity and reduce the rent?
“The lady literally, like, laughed in her face,” Taylor said.
The couple quickly realized that to stay in a city where the average monthly rent is $4,500, they needed to get scrappy. So they did what an increasing number of desperate SF apartment hunters are doing: posted on Nextdoor.
The post on the popular, if persnickety, neighborhood forum described them as two educators wanting to move back to the city of Taylor’s birth. It included a picture of the couple and their budget for a one-bedroom: $3,200 or less.
Many strangers wrote in support, and several shared listings. But there were also responses pointing out that the price they sought was a pipe dream. “If you put down something right now on Nextdoor that’s below market rate, you will get a wave of older men telling you, ‘Not everybody deserves to live here,’” Taylor said.
He deleted the post because of the finger-wagging. “I just didn’t wanna deal with it anymore.”
The couple’s online plea joins an ever-growing chorus of apartment-seekers taking to last-gen social media platforms like Nextdoor, Facebook, and Craigslist in the hope that their personal stories will help them find housing. The posts range in tone from pitiful to angry to desperate, with posters turning to strangers on the internet on the off chance they know of a room or an apartment to rent. For some, the method is successful; for others, the results are a gut punch.
A Nextdoor user named Elisa S. posted a note (opens in new tab) Aug. 21 on behalf of her friend, “a single mom to a newborn [who] doesn’t earn enough to be able to rent her own apartment in San Francisco.” Responses included instructions on how to access homeless shelters. Others chimed in with links to housing nonprofits that help tenants find below-market rentals. Some suggested setting up a GoFundMe campaign to cover a few months of rent.
While Craigslist and newspapers have long served as platforms where renters can solicit apartment offers, public comment features on Nextdoor and Facebook offer something more like a mutual aid society, or a spectator sport, allowing strangers to root on their neighbors’ quests for housing — or troll them with utter assholery.
In response to a Sept. 16 Nextdoor post (opens in new tab) from Anton Narayan seeking “a place to rest and get my things together … just to start over,” commenter Frank Jerich replied, “San Francisco has literally devolved into an unspeakably horrific extreme liberal city where poor people think they have a ‘right’ to live here even if they can’t afford to live in SF.”
In a city where the average monthly rent is $4,500, renters are turning to last-gen social media platforms in the hunt for housing.
The majority of the 35 responses to Narayan’s post were commenters chastising Jerich, calling him entitled, gross, and rude. Others offered advice for Narayan on how to get a better job.
And then there are the posts that read like primal screams. On July 28, Amy Bacharach posted on Facebook’s “Main Street Mamas: San Francisco” group explaining that her landlord was raising her family’s rent by 63% in December and asking if anyone knew of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment on the city’s west side or near its southern border. “We’re basically the exact type of people SF has been chewing up and spitting out while gleefully laughing over the last decade,” she wrote.
“It was just all emotion, there was no strategy,” Bacharach told The Standard about the post a few months later. She said her anger was the product of having to move her family three times in seven years, first due to an Ellis Act eviction, then to a severe mold infestation, and then to the giant spike in rent. “San Francisco has become a city of landowners and serfs. I feel like I’ve loved San Francisco for 20 years, and it has not loved me back in a very long time,” she said.
Despite her frustration, she described the act of posting as one of hope. “I think that there are still plenty of landlords in the city who put people over profits,” she said. Maybe these landlords aren’t advertising their available units as widely as those seeking to cash in on the rental boom, she figured. “So, with social media, my hope is that there are people out there who are still a little old-school in their thinking that people should have a place to live that is affordable.”
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Andrew Gold’s (opens in new tab) Sept. 27 Nextdoor post featured a photo of his wife, Ana, her belly pushing out beneath the bottom of her T-shirt, explaining that she was six months pregnant with twins. “Finding a home for our growing family has been quite the adventure … and not exactly the fun kind. 😅,” Gold wrote. “We love SF and really, really hope we don’t have to leave the city just as we’re about to start this new chapter.”
Gold said they’d been looking for an apartment for months without luck. Despite their decent salaries — he’s a therapist, she’s a lawyer — they found themselves attending one overcrowded apartment showing after another, constantly outbid. The pregnancy makes the hunt especially stressful.
“ This is a time for nesting, not necessarily frantically trying to go to open houses,” Gold said. “All of the energy put into incessantly being on Zillow and Craigslist and writing bios is taking away from finding all the necessities that we need to prepare for the birth.”
In the days since he put up the post, Gold has received mostly positive responses, with commenters offering well wishes and links to apartment listings. “It’s nice to know we’re not alone,” he said, noting that they still haven’t signed a lease. “The worst of it has been someone telling us to ‘join the club.’”
For Chad Morin, posting on Nextdoor (opens in new tab) the last few weeks has been a last-gasp Hail Mary, as he and his girlfriend have fallen into homelessness. The couple claimed to have spent their last $2400 on the first month’s rent and a security deposit for a room in Bernal Heights, only to be evicted along with the master tenant, who owed back rent. Since then, Morin and his girlfriend have been living in her car along with their puppy.
On Sep. 26, Morin took to Nextdoor to ask if anyone had a lead on a housing voucher. Several people responded with referrals to the Salvation Army and other shelter operators. But many of the responses were less helpful.
“Why would anyone move to one of the most expensive city’s with no back up money?” wrote one respondent.
“Buy a cheap tent and you can literally camp anywhere in S.F. …it free and kinda exciting!” offered another.
In a follow-up post on Friday, Morin narrowed the request: “Hello all, not good at asking for help, but we need it…A shower and a place to stay tonight would be amazing. God bless.”
One commenter offered to let Morin and his girlfriend shower at his place in the Sunset, but when Morin followed up, he received no response.
“I see a lot of posts on [Nextdoor] and I feel like it’s a good community, neighborly type thing,” Morin told The Standard. “I feel like there’s a lot of kind people on there… that are sympathetic to other people’s situations.”
As for the more negative responses, Morin is measured. “ I feel like everybody has a right to their own opinion,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
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After taking down his first post, Taylor and Trew reposted on Nextdoor in July, raising their target rental price to $3,800, still under the average for a one-bedroom apartment in SF.
”So many people were messaging me in nice ways,” Taylor said of the second posting. “People rallied to support us, which was wonderful.”
Nevertheless, even after following up on leads provided in the comments, they couldn’t find a place. So they kept looking.
Taylor and Trew’s housing hunt exposed them to landlords who questioned their life decisions. | Source: John DuBois for SF Standard
At one showing, a landlord chastised Trew for her student loans. “He gave us this speech about how irresponsible it was to have school debt,” Taylor said. “We’re just living in a separate reality from so many people.”
On Sept. 13, Taylor put up a third, more heartfelt post. “This is a last shot post before we give up on the city,” it began (opens in new tab). In 11 weeks, he said, they’d visited 25 apartments, sent more than 120 emails, and ended up with nothing. “Please only comment if it’s something nice or if you have a lead for us. We don’t need anyone telling us to move to dixon, saying rent control is the problem, or that no one deserves handouts.”
The post received two likes and three comments, including one that read, “Your message and the situation you find yourselves in breaks my freaking heart. Educators especially, need stable and affordable homes! I’m sorry you’re experiencing such a hard time.” The comment linked to a rental listing website.
Taylor and Trew officially gave up on the city Sept. 25, signing a lease for a small one-bedroom apartment in Mill Valley. “To be honest, the people here kinda suck,” Taylor said of the town in Marin. They’re holding out hope of eventually returning to San Francisco.”
“We wanna come back,” he said. “Who knows how long this boom is gonna last?”