We Asked San Franciscans
I live in the same house as a family day-care and still pay $1,200 every month in rent. Welcome to San Francisco. During the time I’ve spent splitting a two-room in-law basement apartment in the Outer Sunset with three other girls underneath our landlords, I have quickly learned that cohabitation is not for everyone.
I have also learned to always close doors quietly so as not to wake sleeping babies upstairs; never to change your laundry in your underwear; and that even the best of friends can make for the worst of roommates.
But that’s what living with roommates is all about, right? A learning experience? A rite of passage? Maybe not.
In the city, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $4,550 per month. Since most people can’t afford to pay that on the basis of one or two salaries, more residents are forced to split the bill than ever before.
I asked San Franciscans about their worst roommate experiences, and the feedback was, well, enough to make you want to move home with Mom and Dad.
The Frat House
Amanda Aragona
“I live with nine people—seven boys who are all in the same fraternity, me, and one other girlfriend. Currently, the ongoing incident in our house is that one of our roommates downstairs has a sexual partner who pretty much screams as if she’s getting murdered at all hours of the day. And it happens every single night and every single morning. You can hear her clear as day as if you’re watching porn in your room; she’s so loud. You can also sometimes hear the crack of a whip and lots of, um, ‘fun screaming’ down there. I mean, obviously, congratulations on the sex—I’ll bake you a cake. But please just shut up!”
George Washington
Brandon Carter Meixel
“I had been friends with this guy from high school, and a couple years into college, we ended up moving in together. He was an artist, and over the course of our time together, I watched his life deconstruct over a larger-than-life-size portrait of George Washington. It was a worm’s-eye-view charcoal portrait of Washington eating cherries, with his wooden teeth bearing. It had an ax, and there was a cherry-tree stump. And it was in our dining room, by the way! He had it taped from the floorboards to the crown molding. [He] would [drink] grain alcohol, listen to The Eminem Show and then smear a section of his drawing out [so] he would be covered in charcoal, and there would be handprints all over the dining room.
Eventually, the entire white canvas was smeared to nothing but black, and he started over again with white chalk on the same canvas. He was trying to make the same drawing, but when it was in white, it became all polygons. So it was George Washington in all these lined polygons. I mean, he was a remarkably good artist; he just could not handle what was going on in his head. He ended up spiraling completely out of control, and we had to call his mom to bring him home and get him some help. That’s the last time I ever saw him. I heard a long time ago, though, that now he works at a Sunglass Hut in Port St. Lucie, Florida.”
Dormistory
Harrison Rich
“Last year when I was a freshman, I was living in the dorms, and I personally picked my roommate. I met with him before, and he seemed like a fine guy. It was me, him and two other roommates who were randomly assigned to us. As the year progressed, me and the other two guys slowly started to figure out that he would talk about nothing but himself—every sentence he said began with I. He only talked about clothes and his money, even though he didn’t have any; it was all his parents’. One day we tried an experiment where we gave him nothing but compliments to see if he would catch on, but he never did.”
Cats
Emanuel Rosales
“A while ago, two of my roommates were drug addicts, and both started stealing from me. They took my NBA jerseys and my LRG brand shirts. They took the copper wiring from my radio and speakers, ’cause you can sell that. After I had started noticing these different things, I confronted them about it, and they slowly started leaving the house. One of them paid the last month’s rent and left, and the other just went M.I.A. completely. Eventually, I knocked down that guy’s door, and when I got in, it was all dark and had a funky smell, and the closet door was gone because he had sold it. Then I heard meowing coming from inside the closet, and when I looked, there were eight newborn baby kittens in a box. I have no idea where he got the kittens or what he was going to do with them, but they looked, like, maybe two weeks old; they were really little guys. I had to clean out his room and change the carpet. I moved out of that house and never went back.
Two years ago, he texted me, asking if I knew where his poker set was, but he never did ask about the kittens.”
& Dogs
Sabrina Dhaliwal
“I always noticed that every time anyone would mention dogs or anything that had to do with dogs, my roommate would get really uptight about it and dodge the subject. Eventually, I found out that the reason why she ultimately moved up here was because of her Chihuahua passing away. She was so upset that she transferred schools, moved away and never called her parents or any of her brothers; it was crazy. And I’m a total dog person, and my other roommates love dogs too, but we always had to walk on eggshells around her.
This past December, when Christmas was approaching, me and my other housemates decided to buy a little tree and decorate the house, even though my roommate said she didn’t want to celebrate because her Chihuahua was born on Christmas. At this point, we were over her and wanted to make our house look really welcoming and festive because we needed to be in good spirits (finals were coming up). Then, late that night, my roommate came home from work and booked it to the living room, tore down all of our stockings and grabbed our Christmas tree, and all the ornaments were flying everywhere. Our house was a mess. She went full crazy, like ape shit—sorry for my language, but that’s what she did. I yelled for my other roommates to come, and we were all shocked; we didn’t think it would escalate that far, ya know? We understood for a while, but her dog passed away two and a half years ago.”
The Flip-Flop
Lauren Diez
“The first day I moved in with this girl a couple of years ago, I got locked out of our shared bedroom because she was hooking up with a guy. At first, I was, like, ‘Eh, all right, whatever. I’ll let her do her thing.’ But then she did that three times a week. There was this one time—God, this is actually so funny to look back on—I came home one day, and she was locked in our room with a guy, and I needed to get to my clothes to change, and she started yelling when I tried to unlock the door. So I screamed back, saying, ‘I just needed my shoes and my wallet.’ Instead of letting me in, she threw out a single flip-flop and closed the door. I needed two shoes to put on my two feet. She just had no respect for the fact that I lived there too; it was horrible. And at the end of the year, she asked if I wanted to renew the lease. The answer was ‘no way.’”
