Irrelevance Glorified

(Note : I realize that most of what I say here is more indicative of the area I’ve been living in the past 11 years rather than this particular urban area, but it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.)

For the past 5 years or so (plus-or-minus 6 years) I’ve had the good fortune to live in Urbana-Champaign, an area with a very low cost of living. It’s a very livable town, even on a graduate student’s salary. One of the most successful scams in Central Illinois is the wool that local landlords have pulled over student’s eyes, making them think it’s a sellers market instead of a buyer’s market. Many people sign leases in November for an August move-in, and they’re in their new home for about two months before they’re being asked if they want to renew. But for the past three years, I’ve paid about $230 for my share of the rent. Not too bad.

So it’s come as a sort of shock to come to the Bay Area, where housing prices are quite higher. I was prepared for that. But finding a place to live has been such a hassle, in some part because there are so many options spread out over so much area. I’ve been trying to find a place somewhere between Mountain View and San Jose — an area something like 275 mi². My main tools for finding apartments has been Craigslist and Apartments.com, for finding smaller complexes and larger complexes, respectively. I’ve preferred Craigslist because often it’s a little more informative, and other sites are clearly more corporate. Anyways, let’s look at a typical listing.

$1150 for a 1 Bdrm in Palo Alto. You’re not going to find too much cheaper in the area, unless you go to East Palo Alto (Note: Never go to East Palo Alto). On Craigslist, you can search for items with a picture posting. A lot of listings just put pictures of the outside, which is pretty suspicious, unless they are advertising an outdoor bedroom. But sometimes, it’s just as awesome when they do post pictures of the interior. Check out what they took pictures of — the outside, the floor, the corner of a ceiling, and the kitchen sink. Not the kitchen….the kitchen sink. How underwhelming must this apartment be?

Okay, okay, let’s keep on looking. Hmm…let’s do a search for the words “Mountain View”. Oh, here’s what we get.

Gee, it looks like there’s a large, sunny 1 Bdrm apartment available. Multiple times. Apparently, the apartment manager thinks they will get more responses if they repeatedly post the same damn thing over and over again. Methinks they have not grasped the concept of the online listing. When I see these, I STAY AWAY, because I feel the listing reflects the attitude and personality of the manager.

But hey, let’s go with it. I open up that listing, and it mentions Newport Apartments, and all the amenities. Of course, it’s in Campbell, not Mountain View. Not even neighboring Mountain View. But the description says that apartments do offer “spacious mountain and courtyard views”. Sometimes people put words like that in there to attract more hits, I think. They list a webpage at “http://www.76.162.1.147″, which doesn’t exist, because it’s an IP address with www in front of that. But even though that error is on all twenty of their listings, they do not seem to mind. But yeah, take off the www and you get the real web page. But I will often do a Google search of things like this, and I’ll find something like this.

Doing things like this is what got me to introduced to ApartmentRatings.com, which appears to be the largest ratings web site around for apartments in the U.S. But the awesome thing is that almost unilaterally, all apartment suck. Check out the listing for Newport Apartments here. Overall, maybe a 2.1 rating out of 5, and only 19% of people recommend it. It is quite commonplace to get a rating like this. It’s the comments that are the best. Check out the reviews for this place. As an apartment manager, when you see a comment like “May terrible, painful diseases befall that witch, Leanne and that wank, Walter and bring them to reality with their deeds!” you know you’ve left your mark. A composite ApartmentRatings.com negative rating would say something like :

DO NOT LIVE HERE! They will take your entire deposit, and charge you $2000 more afterwards. All my furniture is inflatable or styrofoam, and I can levitate, but they still charged me $500 for carpet repair. I spent three days cleaning the kitchen with a toothbrush, but they took all of my money. The walls are so thin I can hear whenever the person two doors down sighs. I’m surrounded on four sides by apartments with 20 mexicans in them, and they are all in late-shift web cam mariachi bands. They also sell crack. Everyone has dogs that poop on the sidewalk and into my shoes. Every day someone steals my tires. Every month they raised my rent $300. You can do so much better for the price, although I will not tell you of any better place. Also, the place smells like curry. It was so much better 18 months ago before the management changed.

Every once in a while someone would come along and remind people that noise is something you’re always going to have to deal with in apartments. In general, I found the ratings websites generally useful, but they always need to be taken with a grain of salt. So, I’ve been in California for a week now, and no apartment lease signed yet. I’ve looked at about 9 or 10 places, ranging from laughable to acceptable. Nice places built in the last ten years seem to run higher than my price range, like $1800/month. But hopefully I’ll have some good news soon, and a place to put all my stuff.

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