When I moved to the Boston area, I learned in a hurry that I had come to take a lot of things for granted.  One of them was housing.

In Atlanta, when I needed to find a new apartment, I would go down to the supermarket and pick up a free real estate guide.  Then I'd flip through and find a handful of potential complexes in more or less the right area and more or less the right price range.  Then I'd start visiting the different complexes, and pick one...simple as that.  The whole process could be done in a few days if you were picky, an afternoon if you were desperate, and was completely free.  Most of the complexes were at least pretty decent; the big tradeoff usually came down to either having more space in a complex that dated to the 70's or sacrificing space for snazziness in a more modern complex.

When I moved up here, I figured I'd do my usual thing.  Work covered a house-hunting trip of up to seven days, so just to play it safe I scheduled a trip for Sunday to Saturday about a month before I started the job.  They even put me in contact with a real estate agent who in turn referred me to other real estate agents specializing in renting in the areas I was most interested in. 

This was my first sign of trouble.

As it turns out, apartment complexes simply do no exist in the Boston area, nor indeed in much of New England.  Perhaps it just never occurred to them. Admittedly, there are some high-rise apartment buildings around; however, the vast majority of renters here live in two- or three-family homes, i.e. two- or three-story houses, often dating to the 19th century, with the floors partitioned off into separate apartments. 

This immediately poses a problem, because you can't count on a big complex that always has vaccancies...instead, it's about finding what's available today, right this instant, and jumping on the first thing you see that even remotely looks habitable before someone else steals it out from under you.  It turns out it's all a big racket, because many landlords don't even advertise...instead, they work with one of these real estate agents to screen for the most desirable tenants.  Who pays for this fantastic service?  The renter, of course, and the fee is one full month's rent.  And anyone who know anything about real estate in Boston knows that's a hell of a lot of money just to run a credit check and drive someone around showing apartments for an afternoon.  Of course, what else is someone like me going to do?  I had to find a place in five days, and all I knew about the area was what I was able to glean from the internet.

I wasn't completely naive, so I had braced myself for the sticker shock of rent in the Boston area.  What I wasn't prepared for was the absolute dilapidation of most of the housing up here.  It's one thing to throw away a lot of money on a nice place, but it's another thing completely to throw it away on a dump. The real estate lady showed me one place in Cambridge that I thought should have been demolished. Seriously...I actually thought she was joking when she took me into this place.  There was spray-painted graffiti on one wall (inside the apartment), and another wall had a gaping hole.  And it gets worse...Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge, is so run down that most residents refer to it as Slumerville.  And they're not kidding. 

All things considered, I could have done worse...I found an apartment, and it's not completely awful.  Except in May, June, July, August, and September, when it's unbearably hot and humid, and December, January, and February, when the ice makes the stairs and the driveway treacherous and potentially lethal.  The rest of the year it's just fine, if a bit cramped, for only three times what I was paying in Atlanta.

When it comes to my Boston real-estate fantasy, I have three words: burn, baby, burn...