A homeless man became a tech worker at Zenefits for 45 days

Paul Krantz moved to San Francisco five years
ago with dreams of living in a city of artists and
writing the great American novel.
He attended the University of San Francisco, and
barely survived on odd-jobs, he wrote in an essay
for The Bold Italic.
"When I arrived in San Francisco, it seemed
that the majority of twentysomethings I
met were in the same boat," he wrote.
"However, today it seems that starving
young artists and writers like myself are a
dying breed."
He moved four times in five years, hanging on by
sharing rooms with others.
But in that same time, things shifted in the city
of San Francisco.
Salesforce, Twitter, and dozens of other
companies grew up, bringing tens of thousands of
new tech workers into the city.
A small startup scene ballooned. Workers for the
giant tech companies south of the city started to
move to San Francisco and commute, often in
luxury buses provided by their employers.
And the already expensive real-estate market in
San Francisco became so unaffordable that
Krantz found himself homeless, sleeping on the
beach.
Until he landed a contract job at the San
Francisco startup Zenefits. He was hired as a
copy editor to answer questions related to human
resources. For the first time, he could genuinely
afford to rent a home in San Francisco, he writes.
Now the problem was, he couldn't find one.
Talking to co-workers, I began to see that most
of my fellow employees had moved to San
Francisco within the last six months. So it
appeared that many of my incoming counterparts
were filling up potential rooms before I had a
chance at them.
A month and half after starting the job, he
"caught a break when a room opened up in a
friend's household" and he "thought he had it
made."
But two days later Zenefits ended his contract,
letting him go.
That was it, game over. Not even spared a few
minutes to say my goodbyes, I was promptly
escorted out of the building. I went from
homeless but employed to being housed but
jobless in less than a week.
A taste of financial stability was enough to make
him rethink his life, he writes. He doesn't want to
live hand-to-mouth each month any more than he
wants to work for a company "I don't believe in."
In the end, he's looking to leave San Francisco,
he says, and write his novel, perhaps returning
when he can really afford to live there.