On Apartment Hunting

I love living in the city. I’ve written about many of the aspects that I adore. From finding great furniture on the side of the street, to being able to walk down the block for candy, to just being able to stare out the windowand see something new every day. However, there comes a time in every urban resident’s life when they wake up and they say to themselves, “Hey, wait. Actually, this apartment sucks ass. It’s right next to the freeway, it’s got no air-conditioning, people trespass onto the property and take big poops, right in the middle of the parking lot, and the management threatened to sue you when they (allegedly) gave you carbon monoxide poisoning.” Or maybe that’s just my personal experience. Either way, after that moment of awakening, you come to realize one universal truth: apartment hunting is miserable.

In the city of Los Angeles, there are many fun and beautiful neighborhoods to live in. Growing up, most of these neighborhoods had a variety of inhabitants from different places of origin and socioeconomic standings. Now, however, pretty much anybody who isn’t filthy stinking rich has quite a hill to climb. Just down the street from our poop-in-the-parking-lot apartment is a lot full of condos…each one of them costing over a MILLION DOLLARS. So, needless to say, finding something affordable for a struggling screenwriter (who happens to work very hard on a weekly blog which he gives away for free [this is my occasional plea: share my work, please. It costs you nothing and it means a lot to me]) that isn’t all the way out in Mojave, is very difficult.

I’ve heard that back in the day, you’d drive around the area you wanted to live in and look for signs. You might also check the local newspaper for listings. Today, if you do either of these things, you’ve already lost. Listings go up and down on the internet in seconds. When a reasonably priced place shows up, it’s like dropping a piece of meat into a pool full of piranhas…except the piranhas don’t bite, we just complain about how people told us we could buy a house if we just stopped eating avocado toast. Once you find a place you like, that happens to be around the area you like, and is within your price range, the key is to get extremely attached to it, instantly, so that when it flies off the market in two minutes (seriously how do people do their paperwork so quickly!?) you’re absolutely devastated!

Apartment hunting is like anything else in the world, though. It’s incredibly frustrating, it feels impossible, it seems like the entire deck is stacked against you…and then, it finally works out, and it is euphoric. You take the day off work, you get super-duper sweaty moving out and moving in, you only break a few things, and you just fight with your significant other because you’re both hot and stressed and you forgot to eat until 8 pm. And then it’s over. You’re in a new place and it’s wonderful…until you realize the neighbor is an aspiring tuba player, and there’s a fire station around the corner, and the laundry machines don’t work…and the apartment hunting cycle begins all over again.

So, do you have any apartment hunting tips? Any horror stories?