The Bay Area Is Expensive. What Do You Do When It’s the Only Place That Feels Safe?

From a young age, Liam Chavez felt different from the people around him.

Growing up in Thousand Oaks, he got bullied. In high school, he didn’t know anyone who was openly gay or queer. “I didn’t really fit in,” said Chavez, 28. “It was really hard.”

He was sure something was wrong with him. It wasn’t until he moved to Berkeley a decade ago for college that he felt like he was home. “A lot of people I meet are surprised to learn I didn’t grow up here because I enjoy it so much and fit in so well,” Chavez said.

For the first time, he’d found the language and the identity that matched his experience. “Basically, the day that I found out that trans men existed, I realized I was a trans man,” he said.

But staying here has come at a real cost.

When he came out to his family, they cut him off. His parents told him it was Berkeley’s fault, “that I’ve been brainwashed,” he said. His father refused to come to his graduation, and he said he’s hardly spoken to either parent since.

Fresh out of school, he felt overwhelmed. He struggled to find his financial footing, knowing nobody was there to catch him if he fell. At the same time, he was trying to heal from the trauma of a sexual assault by another college student, and he had developed chronic migraines.

“If I go back to that time, I just remember terror,” he said.

With no family support and significant medical expenses, including medication for his migraines and therapy, in part for the assault, the gap between what he earned and what he needed to live widened fast. But he couldn’t go home, and leaving the state for somewhere cheaper didn’t feel like an option.

When Chavez was transitioning, his doctor sat him down and issued some advice: Don’t leave California, at least not for a while. “I think she was right,” Chavez said.

While the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live in the country, transgender Californians like Chavez have found that the calculation of whether to stay or go is about more than rent prices.

In a national survey conducted following the 2024 presidential election, nearly half of trans respondents said they had already moved, or were considering moving, in search of a more trans-friendly community.

To afford life here, Chavez patched together part-time work as a tutor and dog sitter and picked up random gigs on Craigslist. His friends joked that he was always hustling. “I had no choice,” he said. “I had to, and it was exhausting.”

When it still wasn’t enough, he turned to credit cards. He charged food, gas and rent until he owed close to $15,000, on top of his student loan debt. “It felt crushing,” he said. “It felt like I could never get out from under that money.”

Research has found that nearly 1 in 3 transgender Americans lives in poverty — double the rate of cisgender straight people.

“Whether you’re looking at individual income, household income, food insecurity or housing instability, what you’ll see among trans people are much higher rates of economic vulnerability,” said Brad Sears, a distinguished scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

The reason for these discrepancies lies, in part, in demographics. Research from the Williams Institute found that, compared with cisgender straight men, transgender people are more likely to be young and people of color, and almost twice as likely to be living with a disability — all factors that can make it more difficult to achieve financial stability.

But even when researchers compared people with the same education, age, race and disability status, they found that transgender people still have 70% higher odds of living in poverty than cisgender straight men.

Sears attributes this to the unique layer of discrimination that transgender people face. “The pathways to poverty really start with [family] rejection, over-criminalization, homelessness … while trans people are still young,” he said. “That continues into adult life, where you continue to see high rates of discrimination in all parts of life, including housing, but particularly in the workplace.”

Addressing these disparities, he said, means working with parents to decrease family rejection, and with law enforcement — “so it’s not a crime to be walking while trans” — in order to keep trans people out of the foster care and criminal justice systems, “which are just huge predictors for future poverty.”

Workplace protections also make a big difference. Although federal employment protections prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, the Trump administration has sought to limit and roll back safeguards for transgender Americans.

California, meanwhile, has one of the country’s strongest nondiscrimination frameworks for transgender people, and some Bay Area cities add additional protection through local policies.

Sears said having a gender identity nondiscrimination policy is a good start, but workplaces should also have a plan in place to support employees who want to transition by doing things like ensuring there’s an appropriate bathroom available and providing colleagues with training. “Visible support from leadership at the top is one of the biggest things that make a difference,” he said.

‘A whole future that I can think about’

For Chavez, the turning point came when, out of desperation, he called the free, 24-hour 211 helpline that connects callers to social services. The operator referred him to a nonprofit credit counseling agency, Money Management International, where a counselor helped him build a monthly budget and negotiated with his creditors to cut his interest rates.

The agency consolidated his debt into a single monthly payment automatically drafted from his bank account — something that credit counseling agencies have set up in agreements with major creditors to help close accounts and dig borrowers out of crushing debt.

“These creditors know that when people come to us, they’re not just getting plugged into this affordable repayment plan, but they’re also getting budgeting advice and advice that helps people achieve financial stability, which makes it more likely that they will repay the debt that they owe when presented with more affordable repayment terms,” said Bruce McClary, a spokesperson for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

Chavez said the counselor’s debt management plan helps hold him accountable, and the low monthly payment has allowed him to chip away at his balance. “That’s really helped because it’s really the interest that is just like a killer,” Chavez said.

Three years later, he has paid off more than $10,000. “I really want to be debt-free,” he said. “And I’m so close.”

Much of Chavez’s life today is structured around that goal.

At home in Oakland, he tracks every dollar in a spreadsheet: rent, insurance, groceries, savings, income from his job and side gigs like a pet-sitting job he recently took on. “I’m actually pretty comfortable this month, which I’m kind of like, whoa, this is new,” he said, laughing.

To cut costs, he keeps his heater off and uses an electric blanket. He buys clothes, furniture and appliances secondhand. Groceries come from a mix of bulk purchases, discount markets and Trader Joe’s. When money gets tight, he turns to food pantries.

“I just visited a couple weeks ago because I had some unexpected expenses and I was really hungry and I needed to eat,” he said.

He shares a one-bedroom apartment with Erasmos, a 7-year-old Greek tortoise he got during a difficult stretch in college. “I thought to myself, it might be good to have somebody to be responsible to, another creature,” Chavez said. “In order to take care of him, I have to take care of myself.”

The tortoise’s name means “beloved” in Greek, and Chavez has a custom bumper sticker on his car that reads: My tortoise is smarter than your honor student.

Today, Chavez has a full-time job at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, where he administers grant funding to students working on community health projects and helps them manage budgets — skills he’s honed through hard experience.

Recently, he ran his salary through an online calculator and was surprised to find himself labeled middle class, like his family had been growing up.

“I was like, really?” he said. “Because … I think about my family, they could go out and buy their RV, and they could go on vacations. But I don’t do any of it.”

Even small splurges require planning. Instead of credit cards, Chavez sometimes uses “buy now, pay later services” to spread out costs, like when he bought a hot pink inflatable flamingo-shaped buoy that he named Chorizo, which bobs along behind him to keep him safe on his open-water swims off Crown Beach in Alameda.

He’s been swimming since he was a kid. As an adult, it’s become a kind of therapy. “Sport has been such an instrumental way of me reclaiming my bodily autonomy and my power,” he said. It’s one of the small, hard-won pleasures that make staying in the Bay Area feel worth it.

In his spare time, he volunteers on a crisis line for sexual assault survivors. He said he recently took a call from someone whose circumstances closely mirrored his own. “It was incredible that I could answer that call and be their advocate and be their support,” he said.

He’s considering pursuing a master’s degree in social work or public health once his debt is paid off — a path he hopes will lead him to a stable career.

“It’s kinda been crazy for me to think about, like, oh wow, I actually have a whole future that I can think about,” he said. “I can have professional aspirations now instead of just thinking about: Where’s my next meal? How am I gonna pay the rent?”

Some months, Chavez is still living with little room to spare. His medical expenses remain high, and the cost of living continues to climb. But for the first time in years, he said, “I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel.”