By Steven T. Jones

I LIVE ON the border between two worlds. Geographically, my tiny studio apartment is in the Tendernob, that quasi-neighborhood that separates tony Nob Hill from the gritty Tenderloin. Financially, I have a good job, but I'm living from paycheck to paycheck, with no margin for error.

Lots of San Franciscans are on that same cusp. Census figures show it and so do conversations on the street. Too often, those of us making less than $46,260 a year – the median income for a male, full-time, year-round worker in San Francisco – are just barely getting by in this expensive city. More than 150,000 households in the city – nearly half of the total – had to survive on less than $50,000 a year in 1999, the 2000 census figures show, and I suspect the situation is even worse now.

It's hard for me – and I'm a college-educated white man with a middle-class upbringing and steady employment. Rent (I live alone) and child support eat up more than half of my after-tax income. The rest seems to disappear quickly; at the end of the month, there's nothing left.

So it's hard to imagine what life is like for people even just a little worse off than me. If I live frugally and still go a little deeper into debt each month, how do they make it? What if I didn't have a credit card to absorb my spending miscalculations? I grumble about the occasional $35 street-cleaning ticket, but what if that were a full day's pay in a minimum-wage job?

There's a lot I don't know about the people making less than me, even though I ride past them on my bicycle commute everyday. Few in this polarized city, where beating up on homeless panhandlers scores political points with the people on the hills, know much about the poor people they see, beyond the stereotypes.

So I decided to learn more.

• • •

On my ride to work, I see the outward signs of poverty everyday, as well as the institutions that have formed to alleviate or exploit that poverty. The ever present homeless occupy every block. Rarely do they make a scene in my neighborhood, and they're usually gone by the time I leave for work.

Dropping down off lower Nob Hill into the Tenderloin, I see the prostitutes and street hustlers. I pass social service providers like Project Open Hand and the Food Not Bombs volunteers handing out food to the poor in United Nations Plaza, from the loud alcoholics to the meek down-and-outs. City Hall shimmers in the distance.

Across the street from the plaza, over at Seventh Street and Market, there's the poor person's money changers – Western Union Payday Loans and Money Mart Checks Cashed – charging rates that would have gotten them damned for usury back in biblical times. Continuing my ride down Eighth Street toward the Bay Guardian's Potrero Hill office, I see various South of Market denizens going about their business. Crossing under the freeway overpass, I see the homeless encampments, or some days, I see the cops ripping them apart and arresting their inhabitants.

And on my way home up Seventh Street, I pass that ultimate monument to poverty – the Hall of Justice – where the cops bring the Larkin Street prostitutes, the Market Street hustlers, the U.N. Plaza drifters, the Eighth Street campers, the Van Ness Avenue panhandlers, or anyone else who just doesn't fit in with polite society.

Over the last couple weeks, I've stopped my bike journey over and over to talk with the people I see everyday. They're real people who, like me, are just trying to get by and not having an easy time of it.

Sure, many in poverty struggle with addiction or mental illness. Some turn to crime. Many were born into dire poverty, with a lack of professional and educational opportunities to lift them out. They all need help from a society that spends too much on armaments and lets the superrich keep too much. But few expect that help anymore, so they try to help themselves.

• • •

Some people just get sick of scraping by and do whatever it takes to make more money. I've had lots of friends who have sold out their values for a well-paying job with some megacorporation. And then there's Olivia, who has been walking my street at night for the last month and a half, just down the hill.

Slightly mousy, with short blond hair tucked under a pageboy hat, warmly dressed, and with a charming British accent, this 32-year-old is the last person you'd pick out of a lineup as a prostitute. The friend I first saw her walking with, sure. She was a heavily made up transsexual more common to Polk Gulch, but Olivia didn't look the part.

Olivia worked as a personal assistant and was doing all right until her parents kicked her out because they didn't like her boyfriend. Once she had to make rent, she discovered her paychecks didn't go far enough. She was trying to save money so she could get her sons back from her ex-husband, who made enough money to provide them a decent lifestyle in Las Vegas. Turning tricks just seemed to be the easiest way to get ahead. And since she's bringing in $200 to $300 a night, it seems Olivia was right.

"I make a decent living now," she told me. "The toughest part is dealing with the cops, who don't realize what we're going through."

In fact, Olivia said she got arrested the night before, as well as 10 days earlier, both times for just being on the street. The first time, she was even waiting at a bus stop. That charge was dropped. If the other one is prosecuted aggressively, it could cost her $500.

"These girls aren't all bad," Olivia said, flashing a smile of straight, white teeth. "They're just trying to make a living and support their children. They're just trying to get by."

Olivia said she's having more fun turning tricks than she did in her last job, and the lifting of the financial burden showed in her easygoing manner. She figures she'll do this for a year, then use the money to start a jewelry design business and get her kids back.

Maybe she's right, or maybe she'll get stuck like so many other people who turned desperate. That's what happened to Alton Trelstad, a 61-year-old homeless Vietnam veteran I often see camped out under the freeway overpass on Eighth Street.

Trelstad told me he had a mechanical engineering job and was doing fine until 1990, when he had a couple run-ins with the police for drunk driving and fighting. He paid fines and served a few months in jail, and he just hasn't been able to stabilize his situation since then, particularly with the regular police harassment homeless people face. Fines for illegal camping start at $76 and go up to $500 with priors or aggressive prosecution.

"Instead of fighting crime, they are hassling me," Trelstad said. "Who am I am bothering here?"

• • •

Being a central gathering place and hosting an evening Food Not Bombs bread line, U.N. Plaza is perhaps the most high-profile face of poverty in San Francisco, and it's often that dirty and desperate kind of poverty that causes such a popular backlash against the poor.

Yet there are all kinds of people in this urban hub who are just getting by. Tim Livingston, 31, works at the farmers market in the plaza and others around the region, making about $20,000 a year but getting by on the free vegetables he takes home and the rent-controlled apartment he's shared for six years with his fiancée (she's studying to be a physician's assistant) and his brother. Trying to save up for the wedding, he recently got rid of his truck and discontinued their $20-a-month cable service. He doesn't go out much. He'd like to diversify his diet a bit, but the free veggies are what make his budget balance.

"It's not easy. But I count my blessings. I'm not rich, but I have a lot more than a lot of people out here," he said, motioning to the people pushing carts along the plaza's edge.

One of those cart pushers was Nancy Leal, a nervous-looking 49-year-old white woman who was fishing through the garbage for cans and bottles. She told me she makes $15 to $20 a day by recycling and $410 a month on General Assistance. The single-room-occupancy hotels in the Tenderloin cost about $150 a week, "so after a week or two there, I can't afford it and have to leave."

But life on the streets is rough for someone who has a hard time coping because of mental illness and addiction. Leal said she was raped six months ago. "I'm a female, and it's just not safe on the streets," she said. "It's hard to get by now."

Oscar Holland – a 47-year-old black man with a long gray soul patch and denim clothes who was born and raised in San Francisco – is far from the comfortable and stable existence I hope to have by his age. Like me, he was born middle-class, but with a restless soul that's moved him around several times, including a two-year stint in the merchant marine, whereas I've changed towns but not careers.

But now that he's back home, during a tough economy and without a college degree or even a résumé of traditional jobs, the only full-time job he could find was earning $8 an hour sweeping streets for the city's Department of Public Works. I met Holland outside Money Mart Checks Cashed, where he cashed his $600 paycheck, paying $6 to do so, a lower-than-usual rate because of his VIP card. Holland said he doesn't like banks because "they ask too much of you."

So even with his VIP status, he's paying $12 a month. Without that he'd be paying $42, or 3.5 percent of his income. When he or others run out of money they often get "payday loans," or cash advances on paychecks, whose fees run about 15 percent every two weeks. That would take $90 out of his $600 checks – and even more if he missed a repayment deadline. That short-term rate translates into an annual rate of 391 percent.

"I got caught in the budget mess, and I didn't know what to do. I was desperate," Holland told me. "You have to use your imagination to survive these days."

Without any savings to his name, Holland can't come up with the deposit to get an apartment, so he's homeless. Some nights he'll get a room, or crash with friends here in town, or cough up $3.25 to take BART over to Richmond, where his mother, sister, and brother all live, carpooling back into the city for work in the morning.

Holland was positive and upbeat but said he doesn't know how most people make it these days. "It's the cost of life – it's just so high," he said before walking up Market Street to buy a $5 pack of cigarettes, "and they aren't giving us any subsidies to offset it."

• • •

Just about everyone from the lower-middle class on down has a hard time making the rent. Every person I talked to cited it as the biggest barrier to making ends meet, and the Consumer Price Index shows that the average American spends about 40 percent of his or her income on "housing" – a category that includes shelter, utilities, and domestic supplies – and that figure has been steadily rising for years.

"Housing costs are just unreal. We're all scratching our heads and wondering where people are going," Todd Johnson, the Bay Area's regional economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which puts out the CPI, told me.

Every two months his office puts out an adjusted regional CPI – the most recent one titled "San Francisco Area Consumer Prices Unchanged from June to August 2003" – but Johnson is the first to admit the CPI doesn't actually measure how hard it is to get by, particularly for people at the bottom.

"That's probably very difficult to measure using the CPI," he said, and even after I pressed the point for a long time, he still couldn't come up with a good statistical measure for the plight of the poor. "They pay a lot for necessities, with just trying to keep a roof over their head."

The recent regional CPI is unchanged because the cost of necessities like gasoline, natural gas, food, and shelter rose, while that of household furnishings and apparel – things the poor rarely buy new – dropped.

Food costs are a big part of my budget, but none of the poor people I talked to say it's a big problem, because there are lots of free lunches offered in this compassionate city. One of the main sources of free meals for AIDS patients and senior centers is Project Open Hand on Polk Street, which I ride by every day. Of all my visits, that was perhaps the most heartwarming, but even there, there are signs of trouble.

Spokesperson Bob Brenneman gave me the grand tour, showing me the kitchen where staffers and California Culinary Academy students prepare hot lunches for 1,000 homebound critically ill clients (90 percent of whom live below the poverty line) and 22 senior centers around town (homebound seniors are served by Meals on Wheels). Open Hand also provides 400 to 500 bags of groceries to clients each week.

The nonprofit gets one-third of its funding from government programs and the rest from individual and corporate donations, and those have dropped off sharply with the economic downturn. Like many nonprofits that serve the poor, Open Hand is barely getting by and has had to cut staff and expenses.

"It's been a struggle," Brenneman said. "We've seen big cutbacks in donations. It's the worst I've seen, and I started fundraising in 1987."

Yet they've not reduced their services or had to put anyone on a waiting list. But he sees the concern in clients. "There is a walking fear and stress in people," he said. "People are feeling a lot of uncertainly in this economy as the social safety net unravels."