really blessed in this area," she admits. She lives in what she calls a "weird compound thing," a group of cottages in Oakland, and she pays an incredible $410 a month to live alone. The landlord is elderly, Denise says, and his wife recently passed away. He's thinking of selling. "He's getting ready to give it up, and I'm like, no!" she says. "I'm safe for six months. He said he just paid all the insurance and taxes, but he's starting to think about it." Thanks to a friend hooking her up, Denise recently began working part time at a San Francisco staffing agency for "creative professional-type people," mostly in advertising. She works 32 hours in three days. "I'm making incredibly good money at the city job," she says. "They're paying me -- which I still can't believe -- $24 an hour." She still works two nights a week at a Berkeley Irish pub (a genuine one, it should be noted, not one of the prefab models that pop up across the bay), and has cut down on the housecleaning, though she keeps a few clients. All told, she works 52 to 57 hours a week, she says. The staffing agency where she works has had to lay off one person, and Denise is hoping that the downturn will spare her, at least for a while. "I'm using this opportunity to try to get out of debt, and I'm hoping and kind of praying that it'll continue, but I have a kind of sick feeling in my gut that it's not going to," she says, "and it's like, shit, you know? If I can get out of debt I won't be so scared. But I don't know. If I'm not out of debt, I'll probably have to leave the area, and that terrifies me because then what? Where do you go? I'll probably have to get out of here." Meaning out of the Bay Area. And why not do that? Why pay these prices? "I would love to live in some weird-ass small town," Denise says, "but I don't have any marketable skills. You know, people clean their own houses in weird-ass small towns. And I don't carve burls, you know, whatever, those burl tables, bears and stuff. I don't do that. So I'm kind of screwed in the small weird-ass towns. And I don't make methamphetamines either." She says that, assuming she's still making city-job money, she'd be willing to pay up to $900 to live alone, which she'd like to do, because otherwise "I would have to live in a house with a bunch of vegans or some weird-ass shit you find in the [free weekly East Bay] Express. I just don't want to live with a bunch of people anymore, but I would probably have to, and it would just be awful." But as nervous as she is, she sees real fear in the young people who have known nothing but economic boom times. "It's really amazing because I'm seeing résumés every day -- that's my job, I'm the one downloading all these résumés -- and people are desperate. They're calling and updating their availability, and they're scared," she says. "But, at the same time, people are hiring. I mean, there's hiring freezes, everyone's really scared in that [advertising] industry, but they just don't know that they can clean a house or something. They don't realize that because they're all like a bunch of 24-year-olds who just think that they're always gonna be wealthy." And if the downturn does turn her into what she calls "a minor-blip victim," Denise knows she has options. "I think rich people are always gonna have people clean their houses, I really do," she says. "And if I get laid off I guess I'll just find more houses to clean. I mean, I'm not afraid of it." DiPatria, 24, has been working part time at the Starbucks just outside an entrance to the Powell Street BART station -- one of 10 Starbucks in a quarter-mile radius -- for about three months. He says he makes about $1,000 a month, and that he figures he'll bring in an additional $1,000 from a new second job selling shoes down the block at Skechers. Like Denise, DiPatria has an amazing living situation. He and two roommates pay a total of $900 to share a place in the expensive Noe Valley neighborhood with DiPatria's girlfriend, whose father owns it. He's been with his girlfriend for six months -- and living with her for five. Before that DiPatria, who is from Santa Rosa, an hour north of San Francisco (but only if you go in the middle of the night to avoid the traffic), was living in Petaluma, which is 15 minutes closer. His rent there? "Outrageous. It was like $1,100 for a one-bedroom apartment." According to the FAQ on the Web site of Rent Tech, the listings agency, landlords expect tenants to gross three times their monthly rent. By that scale, a person making Starbucks' $8.25 starting wage, working full time, would be able to afford rent of about $475 a month, about a quarter of the average asking rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment in the city. DiPatria, making $2,000 a month, ought to be able to afford about $665. Even Denise's "incredibly good money," $24 an hour, would only be enough to afford about $1,385 in rent -- $500 below the average one-bedroom -- and then only if she worked full time. The downturn has brought some good news on the rental front, though. San Francisco's housing crunch has eased as laid-off dot-commers pack up the car and head back to, say, Des Moines, Iowa (average rent for a one-bedroom: about $470 in most parts of town, less in some areas), telling themselves that their sojourn to California has been, if nothing else, a valuable learning experience and résumé builder. There are actually vacancies now, and the days of would-be renters showing up at vacant apartments with briefcases full of cash or offers of sex or drugs are in the past. "We've got almost five times our normal inventory of vacancies," says Rent Tech owner Grey Todd. "Last year what we did all day long was work intensely to try and find people places, and now it seems we're working intensely to try to find landlords tenants." That's translated into a drop in rents, though it's a slight one: They're down $25 over the first three months of the year. "But I don't think they will go down that much," Todd says. "It's a glut that may last a few months, maybe through the summer, but I don't think it will last beyond that because there just is not enough housing here, and I just think that the market will adjust itself accordingly." DiPatria jokes that as long as he's nice to his girlfriend, he won't have to worry about such matters. And despite the fact that he'd prefer to make his living DJing at nightclubs, which at the moment costs him money because "I'm buying records and buying records and buying records," he likes the work at Starbucks. His job doesn't seem to have been affected by any economic slowdown. "I work with really cool people, and everyone that comes in here, I see them every day," he says. And as far as he knows, Starbucks hasn't had trouble finding workers to fill its openings. Down the street at McDonald's, manager Harry Ng says the strength of the economy has less to do with finding workers than the location of the restaurant. "We're hiring for a different group of people," he says. "We mostly hire new immigrants and [students or retired workers], so if you're closer to Chinatown or something like that, then it's easier to hire people. But in other places, in areas where there's a lot of high-tech places, they can hire with higher wages; it's a lot of competition around there. Like Starbucks, Walgreens, they're fighting for the same group of workers." McDonald's pays $6.25 to start, with a 25-cent raise every three months if the employee learns a new area, Ng says. After 27 years of such raises, that employee, working full time, would be able to afford today's average one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. In the wake of welfare reform, writer Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to see if it was possible to live on such wages, so she went undercover, so to speak, working entry-level jobs for monthlong periods in Maine, South Florida and the Twin Cities. She tells of her experiences in a new book, "Nickel and Dimed: Or (Not) Getting By in America." "I held a total of six jobs, sometimes working more than one at a time," she says. "I averaged about $7 an hour, and often less, and the bottom line is: No, it's not possible. I can't even imagine the Bay Area." Ehrenreich says she last spent time in the Bay Area a year ago, when she taught at UC-Berkeley's journalism school, "and, you know, being paid generously, as a professional and so on. But it was a losing proposition with the rents there." "It's just good to have good friend