Fine, so San Francisco rent is ridiculously high, but if there’s anyone who can pay up, it’s a professional in tech, right? Not according to Katherine Patterson, a gainfully employed Silicon Valley software engineer who’s living in her van (although not actually the one pictured above). Sad, but true.
“Today, I work in a multi-million dollar office complex, and I live in a van,” Patterson wrote in Quartz. “As a software engineer, I’m one of the lucky ones! Imagine those who aren’t lucky enough to be on the tech payroll.”
And it’s not exactly a nice van, either: It’s a 1969 Volkswagen Camper equipped with a hole in the floor and a family of spiders. Patterson fixed up the van so it could pass for a tiny studio apartment. Thankfully, she can shower and do laundry at work. And although it’s illegal in California to live in a vehicle, Patterson brightly points out that as a young, white woman, she has “the immense privilege of pulling up a creepy van and parking it without being harassed.” Perhaps that is why she hasn’t had the cops called on her.
Was the van her first choice? When she accepted her job over the summer, Patterson shopped for a more conventional place to live, but was horrified by her options: A bedroom with a shared bathroom would cost her at least $2,000 per month; a single bunk in a room packed with eight people, $1,000.
Even though Patterson fully admits she could afford a better living arrangement, she points out that she preferred to pay back her student loans instead of resentfully paying her rent.
OK, so we get it, Patterson is making a statement: If a software engineer can’t pay rent in San Francisco, who can?
