Haunted House Hunting, Part Four

We bought a townhouse in South Philadelphia yesterday afternoon.

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Basically, if you can secure a reasonable down payment and take out a thirty-year mortgage, you can buy a brand-new, gorgeous townhouse kitted out with brand-new, gorgeous appliances for a price that amounts to about $1300 a month including property taxes. But only if – and this is the important part – you’re okay with living in a mixed-race neighborhood. LMFAO. That sort of prejudice is wild to me, but I guess it’s fitting that assholes have to pay a racism tax on home ownership.

There are a ton of houses like this in the area without much competition, so we looked at a dozen and just sort of picked the one we liked. If we don’t get this one, we’ll get another one. I have a feeling that South Philly is going to be like the mixed-race Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC, which used to be considered sketchy but is now where the Obamas live. I had a friend at GMU who bought a small townhouse in Adams Morgan and was able to retire early after selling it for almost $2 million, and it would be cool if we could do something similar. For the time being, I’m just looking forward to the prospect of getting out of our garbage apartment. And maybe growing some delicious fucking tomatoes in my new backyard to celebrate.

Haunted House Hunting, Part Five

To give a point of comparison, $1300 is the rent I paid on a shitty awful garbage slumlord apartment in West Philadelphia during my first year of grad school, and that apartment was a disaster zone.

During my last year in Atlanta, I was paying $760 a month for a beautiful new industrial-chic apartment in a renovated cotton mill next to a gorgeous old historic cemetery (it's actually the building that housed the team headquarters in the reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). That apartment was posh as fuck, so I thought a $1300 apartment in Philadelphia was going to be fancy. Like the Jeffersons, I was moving on up. I couldn't really afford the rent on my graduate student stipend, but I figured a nice apartment was worth cutting corners elsewhere.

Damn was I surprised when I moved in and saw the apartment in person for the first time. I still have nightmares about that place.

And don't ask me about my rent in DC. I lived in a subsidized, rent-controlled building, and you still don't want to know how much it was. Every day I took a long walk around my neighborhood and cried because it was so beautiful, and every night I checked my bank account and cried some more. There was a lot of crying. I couldn't afford living there, but there was literally nowhere else to live. I considered moving to Baltimore, but the commute would have killed me.

Part of me feels guilty about having nice things, especially since the only reason I can have nice things is because a global pandemic depressed the urban housing market, but fuck it. Bitches gotta live somewhere.

My Murder Crawl Space Nightmare

Content warning for gruesome true crime under the cut.

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And that is why I do not want a crawl space in my house.