Haunted House Hunting, Part Five

[rynling]

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.

Comments

[lassarina]

DC rent is so absolutely bonkers. I mean, so is Chicago (a friend just was hunting for new apartments and I was absolutely dying at the rent levels) but not quite the same level of Bad.

[rynling]

Out of curiosity, I looked at average rents for a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago, and... wow. That's not great. Personally I never really aspired to live in a house or cared about "building equity" or whatever, but I've gradually arrived at the conclusion that paying rent is just another poor-people tax.

My hope is that, as more housing is built to accommodate the gradual reurbanization of America, renting (or perhaps even buying) apartments will have more legal protections and will be managed more by tenant co-ops than corporate property holdings groups.

Based on what happened in London and Tokyo and what's currently happening in Tel Aviv, I have a feeling that the situation is going to get much worse before it gets better, but I can still dream.

[lassarina]

Illinois has decently strong tenant laws, and Chicago in particular (including things like minimum heat temperatures, etc. which are posted on big billboards where you see them as you go past on the train) but yeah, a lot of it has gone wayyyyyy up. The place where I had my first solo apartment has gone up almost 50% in eleven years. I probably would struggle to afford even the medium tier of these apartments solo and I make low-end tech money, which is just....whew. (Well. I wouldn't struggle if I didn't also have things to pay off, but it'd be a lot more than my mortgage, and above the "advisable" percentage one is "supposed" to spend on housing.)

I despair, a little bit. More than a little.