Twenty-four-year-old Joe Baird misses a lot of things about San Diego. He loved spending a quiet night at the Children’s Pool in La Jolla “…just standing there listening to the waves and watching the seals.” He loved the “openness and warmth of Hillcrest” and how easy it was to do all of his shopping there. He met some of his best friends in San Diego, and of course he misses them, too.

What the young entrepreneur doesn’t miss, however, is San Diego’s toxic combination of high housing costs and low wages. Money is the main reason he moved back to Denver from San Diego last October, one year to the month from the day he arrived. What really frustrated the energetic young man was the fact that professional jobs were so scarce here and “you were expected to work for almost minimum wage. I took a pay cut when I moved to San Diego. How anyone can live on that I can’t imagine.”

The numbers are startling. It’s as if somehow, when we weren’t looking, San Diego became San Francisco. In fact, in 2004 the average apartment in San Diego rented for $1,213 a month – only $96 a month less than a comparable place in the Bay Area. Here’s an even scarier fact: 20 percent of San Diegans who rent spend at least half of their income on housing. “I had a great place to live in San Diego,” says Joe Baird, “but the stress it took to afford it was too much to bear.”

Buying real estate in San Diego is, by one measure at least, even more expensive than San Francisco. According to a recent report by the National Association of Homebuilders, in the third quarter of 2004, taking into account average wages, San Diego County was the second least affordable housing market in the country, trailing only Santa Barbara. (San Francisco, with its higher wage scale, came in ninth.)

“A lot of young people have told me ‘If I could afford to live in San Diego or Boston I would live there,’” Pepperdine University demographer Joel Kotkin told Money magazine last June. “But I’m 32 years old and I’ll never be able to live there. I think a lot of Americans are starting to realize that their first choices are no longer choices,” he added.

Joe Baird isn’t one of them. “I do love San Diego and hope one day to return,” he told the Gay & Lesbian Times recently. In the meantime, he’s started Zion Entertainment, a nonprofit organization in Denver who, as he puts it, “throw parties for a generation that loves to party” albeit with a different twist: “The proceeds go to a good cause instead of into some greedy pocket.” Earlier this month Zion sponsored an 18-and-older cabaret party that raised $2,000 for tsunami relief. The proceeds of an upcoming Valentine’s party will go to a local group that cares for and feeds people with AIDS.

Joe Baird thinks his way back to San Diego may ultimately lie in expanding his business from Denver to here. Let’s hope he’s right. After talking to him for a while, you can’t escape the conclusion that, while Joe Baird lost a lot when he left San Diego, San Diego lost a whole lot more when it lost Joe Baird.