renting an apartment
Apr. 6th, 2022 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI'm planning to move in with redbird and cattitude this summer. We've gone from vague plans to actually signing a lease on an apartment in Brighton. (ie, on the Boston side of the river, near the B branch of the green line.) Moving Day is June 10, and Measuring Day* is June 2.
I've lived in Massachusetts for almost 24 years, never more than 4 miles from the Somerville apartment I rented in 1998. Moving across the river feels like a big change. Even leaving this apartment feels pretty significant...I've been here 8 years. I was at my previous Arlington apartment for 10 years. It feels oddly uncomfortable to realize I've lived here longer than I lived in either of my childhood homes, the houses in Michigan my parents owned.
It goes past "uncomfortable" to think about how much contempt my neighbors have for renters, as being bad for the neighborhood. When I read the Arlington Facebook or Nextdoor (which seemed like such a good idea for finding people who might want a used lamp and were in range to come get it.) Because they think homeowners are respectable, and renters aren't. And homeowners are stable, and renters are transient, and transient is horrible. And of course not just here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/31/charlotte-rental-homes-landlords/
There are certainly appalling landlords. We encountered some while searching for apartments. (Well. Mostly we kept running into That Guy.) But the general attitude of "tenants are contemptible, we only want homeowners here," does not seem like a solution.
*We decided to rent the place without taking many measurements, because the current tenants are still living there. After they move out and we get keys, we can go over it with measuring tapes and graph paper and decide what furniture will fit where. Including the hard decisions about what furniture will fit at all.
redbird and cattitude this summer. We've gone from vague plans to actually signing a lease on an apartment in Brighton. (ie, on the Boston side of the river, near the B branch of the green line.) Moving Day is June 10, and Measuring Day* is June 2. I've lived in Massachusetts for almost 24 years, never more than 4 miles from the Somerville apartment I rented in 1998. Moving across the river feels like a big change. Even leaving this apartment feels pretty significant...I've been here 8 years. I was at my previous Arlington apartment for 10 years. It feels oddly uncomfortable to realize I've lived here longer than I lived in either of my childhood homes, the houses in Michigan my parents owned.
It goes past "uncomfortable" to think about how much contempt my neighbors have for renters, as being bad for the neighborhood. When I read the Arlington Facebook or Nextdoor (which seemed like such a good idea for finding people who might want a used lamp and were in range to come get it.) Because they think homeowners are respectable, and renters aren't. And homeowners are stable, and renters are transient, and transient is horrible. And of course not just here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/31/charlotte-rental-homes-landlords/
There are certainly appalling landlords. We encountered some while searching for apartments. (Well. Mostly we kept running into That Guy.) But the general attitude of "tenants are contemptible, we only want homeowners here," does not seem like a solution.
*We decided to rent the place without taking many measurements, because the current tenants are still living there. After they move out and we get keys, we can go over it with measuring tapes and graph paper and decide what furniture will fit where. Including the hard decisions about what furniture will fit at all.
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Date: 2022-04-06 08:37 pm (UTC)(I love my current place in Arlington in a lot of ways - I wish it had a bathtub, and that it were somewhat closer to work, but the rest of it is great. But I also have the low-grade perpetual fear of what if that changes.)
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Date: 2022-04-08 05:31 pm (UTC)Only renters are not always more transient than owners. A lot of renters find a place they like and stay there for 5-10 years. A lot of people buy a house and sell it 3-5 years later when they change jobs (either because they can afford a bigger house, or because they want to move to another city), or because they are treating the house as an investment and they want to sell while the market is going up.
They say "transient" when they mean "poor."
They say "stable families" and "good neighbors" when they mean "people with generational wealth."
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Date: 2022-04-07 12:59 am (UTC)I have a similar moving day and measuring day, in May. Since I realized the apartment diagram I have is either wildly out of scale, or the measurements are wrong, or both. D:
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Date: 2022-04-08 05:37 pm (UTC)The big local controversy is about whether to let homeowners convert single-family homes to duplexes, in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. I think it would be great, both on general principles about walkability and environmentalism, and for our specific needs. (We would have loved to rent the first floor of a double-decker, if it was big enough and allowed cats and was close enough to transit.)
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Date: 2022-04-07 06:28 pm (UTC)I hear you on the contempt for renters. One of my neighbors point-blank asked me if I rented and then suggested to me that I should take more "pride in my homeownership" and the "property values" when the grass wasn't cut to his satisfaction. No offer of help, or of a reputable lawn care company, or anything actually useful, of course, came with that suggestion.
(I sympathize with not wanting faceless investors buying up your properties and then failing to care for them, but it seems to be more useful to then put in your contract that someone's not allowed to sell the house to an investment company, ever, than to say that it can't be rented out. Or to say that rentals must be owned by someone who is within so many miles of the physical property, or, or, or. But, of course, why blame the real culprits when there's a convenient scapegoat right there?)