When Jack Sherwood told his friends that he was moving from New Jersey to San Francisco to get a job at a restaurant, their reaction was immediate.

You’re out of your mind.

They knew how expensive it is to live in this city. Surely, the job market would be incredibly competitive, right?

“I found a job in three days,” said Sherwood, 39, who works his preferred schedule — lunches, not dinners, at the Hayes Street Grill. “It was fantastic. There are so many opportunities in the city for people with restaurant experience.”

He’s right. There are so many opportunities that restaurants and other businesses are competing over the ever-shrinking pool of available lower-wage workers. A big reason for this is that housing in San Francisco is hard to find and expensive — and, good luck trying to find something affordable outside the city within a reasonable commuting distance.

“Not only are people unable to live in the city, they aren’t able to live near the city,” said Bill Russell-Shapiro, who runs several local restaurants — Absinthe, Arlequin, Boxing Room and the Comstock Saloon.

Russell-Shapiro has a good sense of just how bad it’s gotten.

“We are really trying to do the right thing for our staff,” he said. “We pay the going rate or more. We provide full health insurance, paid vacations, and we have a 401(k) plan. But I know for a fact that they turn us down because it is just not enough money.”

It’s an odd juxtaposition. On one hand, the cost of living makes staying in the city difficult, yet there are so many jobs that applicants can feel entitled.

Kai Shane manages Alternative Apparel in Hayes Valley, where she says they pay “well above the minimum wage,” which is currently $12.25 an hour and will rise to $15 an hour in 2018.

“Now we are having people schedule job interviews and not show up,” she said. “I’ve been in retail 20 years and that had never happened. In the last year, I’d say 10-25 percent are no-shows.”

Jon Handlery, general manager of the Handlery Union Square Hotel, has been in the hotel business in San Francisco all his life.

“At the start of the year, I was trying to fill a bellman position,” he said. “It’s a great job, steady, cash tips, really good money. It took me like three or four months to fill it. I’ve never had an experience like that.”

Elizabeth Leu owns Fiddlesticks, a boutique that stocks “hip kids apparel” in Hayes Valley. She says she just lost her store manager, after nine months, because she couldn’t afford city prices. She’s posted the job on Craigslist, but the response has been tepid at best.

“Usually when you post on Craigslist, you get an immediate reaction,” Leu said. “Two years ago I would get 100 responses. Now I have three. And I sent each of them an application to submit, and of the three, no one wrote back.”

Leu has been in business in Hayes Valley for 12 years, giving her a front-row seat as living expenses climbed out of reach. She estimates that a typical retail salary in the boutique apparel world ranges from $38,000 to $48,000.

“Twelve years ago I lived on that,” she said. “And I lived fine.”

Now you may have your choice of jobs, but one may not be enough.

Basia Carroll, who is 23, works two jobs to make ends meet when she’s not studying at City College. She spends $500 a month to share a seedy apartment — “the bathroom leaks and we have bedbugs,” she says — in North Beach with an older woman in a rent-controlled unit.

The alternative is to do what some of her co-workers do: commute for an hour and a half or more.

“It’s super-easy to find a job in the city,” said Carroll, a born-and-raised San Franciscan who never thought housing would be so hard to find. “I moved back here from Santa Barbara and in maybe a week I had a job. Then it took me four months to find a place to live.”

Carroll works three days at Hayes Street Grill, four days at Macy’s and goes to school on Thursdays, which she calls “hectic.”

“I work at Hayes in the morning, school in the afternoon and then my other job,” she said.

Where is this all headed? Not to a more reasonable cost of living, Russell-Shapiro predicts.

“We have more restaurants per capita than any city in the United States,” he said. “But last year we had a net increase of 60 restaurants.”

And the job market is about to get even more competitive.

“In a month, it is going to be tough,” Shane said. “We’re going to be competing with everyone else for holiday workers.”

Leu says framing the problem is simple — getting a job in San Francisco is easy; finding a place to live is nearly impossible. Now she’d like answers.

“Everyone talks about the cost of living going up,” she said. “But it is the service industry that is getting hit hard. The bigger conversation is, what is the city doing about this?”

Well?

C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius