"Starting at $8.25/Hour," shouts a banner hanging in the window of the cafe near the corner of Market and Stockton streets downtown. Jason DiPatria already works the counter there. He hasn't noticed a drop in business as the economy has slowed. "The economy doesn't affect people's need for caffeine," he says.

Anna Petrovic (not her real name), who cleans houses in San Francisco, says she's felt almost no effect from the economic slowdown. "There really hasn't been for me at all," she says. In fact, at $15 an hour, she's still overbooked. One of her clients, trying to cut costs, asked her to come every three weeks instead of every two, "which is fine because I have people waiting for the slots," she says.

But Martin Campos (who, like Petrovic, asked that his real name not be used), a bellman at a Union Square hotel, has felt the pinch. "All the guests and our groups were kind of eliminated right now," he says. The loss of business means a loss in tips that can cut his take-home pay nearly in half. "The hourly is not much to rely on," he says as he stands on the sidewalk and smokes one of the cigarettes he's taken to conserving lately.

The boom didn't make millionaires out of everyone in the Bay Area, contrary to what you might have heard. Only about one in 17 civilian workers here works in a high-tech industry, though that figure includes, say, a dot-com's janitors and excludes related fields that have benefited from the boom, like advertising. And now in the bust, life goes on for the working folks in the earthbound sectors of the economy. It was really, really hard to make ends meet in San Francisco on an hourly wage during the dot-com days. It's really, really hard now.

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The average rent for a newly vacant one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco the first three months of this year was $1,888 a month, according to Rent Tech, a listings agency. In February, the median price of an existing one-family home in the city was $573,530, reports the California Association of Realtors. The Bay Area median was $485,980. Only one in nine Bay Area residents can afford to pay that, the association says. Nationally, the median home price is $138,800, which nearly three in five people can afford.

Bay Area residents don't necessarily know these figures, but they can feel them. "I will never own a home here," says a housecleaner and bartender named Denise, echoing many. "It stinks." Ask the people who have been serving coffee, or cleaning houses, or carrying bags what would happen if they lost their jobs or the low-rent living situations they've lucked into, and you keep hearing the same answer: "I'd be fucked."

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