Nickeled and Dimed
Ehrenreich wrote the book “Nickel and Dimed” coming out of her experiences while being on assignment for Harper’s magazine, while trying to get the story of life as a low-wage income worker after welfare reform pass by president William Clinton. During her assignment she ran into many issues, like lack of basic necessities, poor working conditions, and having to work more then one job. Another set of pressing issues was the fact that in every city she moved to and tried to have a low-wage life in, she experienced problems with housing and poor diet. I am choosing to write about these issues in particular because being from San Francisco I can relate to a tough housing market and when times are tough it’s easy to have a poor diet. It is easy to relate to Ehrenreich’s trials and tribulations with the housing situation because being from San Francisco, the housing market has always been expensive, even years ago when I got my first place before the dot com boom, and all the new software company start ups. Also in an expensive city that’s only seven by seven miles, low cost housing is hard to come by. Anything new being built in the city is very overpriced and even the old houses and buildings are very expensive. In bad areas of the city one could maybe find affordable housing, but one would still need a lot of money for move-in costs. So a lot of people have to live outside of San Francisco in less desirable cities. Ehrenreich had a number of problems in her quests for housing during her journey. A big problem she found was coming up with move in costs. Move in cost would be first month’s rent and deposit if not more, and trying to come up with that while starting a low-wage job that held her first week’s paycheck was almost impossible for her. She was basically forced to live in motels that were not nice with no amenities or basic necessities, like a refrigerator or microwave. Sometimes the motels did not even seem safe and at one motel in particular there was