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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.
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.