Food. Air. Water. Shelter. All basic necessities of life, but some harder to find than others. At Swarthmore, for instance, it can be tough to find good food, especially at 2:00 AM once Appetito’s has stopped delivering. Yet out in the real world, it’s much tougher to find good shelter. Sure, there’s always the option of squatting in an abandoned warehouse or moving in with your parents. (Many recent grads would find these two choice about equally bearable). But without a doubt, the gold standard in shelter is getting your own apartment, and that’s not always an easy thing to do. That’s why today I’ll be giving you an overview of the apartment-renting process. If there’s interest in this topic, let me know, and in a future entry I’ll give more precise and useful advice about how to navigate these various steps.

1. Background Research

This is the part of the process where you stare at grainy satellite images of potential neighborhoods and look for cracked sidewalks that might indicate a community in disrepair. You also dredge up old crime statistics and ask yourself questions like, “How many murders per capita is too many? How many rapes? How many arsons?” Is 7.3 aggravated assaults for 13.5 narcotics arrests a reasonable trade?” Eventually you give up and decide you’ll need to visit and judge it on its “feel”, a fancy word meaning “the number of boarded-up buildings, graffiti-covered walls, and drug busts in progress you observe while on a (brisk) stroll through the neighborhood.” (See Part 3, The Walkthrough, below).

At the same time that you’re researching neighborhoods, you’ll also be figuring out your preliminary price range. There are two easy ways to do this. The first is to calculate your estimated post-tax earnings, develop a comprehensive monthly budget, and determine from that precisely how much you can afford to spend on housing. Then take that number and add 15%. The second is to pull a number out of thin air. Either way, your price range will end up turning into “whatever it takes to get into a neighborhood with appropriate ‘feel’”.

2. Research

This is the part of the process where you obsessively refresh craigslist seven times an hour so you can make an appointment to see your dream apartment the second it goes on the market. This can be both time-consuming and stressful. That's why you'll want to pursue my tried-and-true tactic of finding a roommate who'll take care of it for you.

3. The Walk Through

This is the part of the process where you amble through potential apartments with a quizzical look on your face, peering intently into dusty corners, pretending that doing so will answer all your concerns about the livability of the place. You’ll ask realtors open-ended questions, hoping they’ll accidentally blurt out condemning (“Why, yes, the cabinets are new and the colony of cockroaches here just love them!”) or captivating (“Blackbeard was a wonderful tenant, but he wanted a smaller place after he kept misplacing his treasure maps”) responses. This will rarely happen. You’ll leave after ten minutes of wandering around with the same impression you had the second you walked in the door.

The walk through is often followed by the walk around, wherein you survey the surrounding neighborhood for features like public transportation, grocery stores, and panhandlers. This latter step can be curtailed slightly if panhandlers approach you as the realtor attempts to unlock the apartment, as happened once during my many tours.

4. The Application

This is the part of the process where you pay for strangers to dig through your past for reasons not to lease you an apartment. You also fill out lots of forms where you attempt to spin “unemployed” and “no previous rental history” into positive qualities. (Unless, of course, neither of these descriptors apply to you, in which case you’re way ahead of me and probably don’t need this blog for advice). Eventually, you’ll come to the realization that you’ll need your parents to co-sign your lease. Most realtors will have no problem with this. Unfortunately, I can't make any similar promises about most parents.

5. The Lease Signing

This is the part of the process where you sit down in a small room and sign away your right to own pets, play loud music at any hour, or “use [your] water closets…for any other purpose than that for which they were constructed.” (The latter restriction taken from my actual lease). You also promise to write checks to your landlord on a regular basis that are far, far larger than any checks you’ve ever written in the past. In exchange, you'll receive a pamphlet describing how the lead in your apartment’s paint will slowly kill you. And, I suppose, the right to live in the apartment with all the lead paint. This whole process can be a bit scary, but if you simply think of the lease-signing as a “rite of passage” rather than of “mess o’ responsibilities and legal obligations” you’ll feel much better about the whole ordeal.

Besides, once the lease is signed, things are easy. All you have to do then is pack up everything you own, shop for lots of things you don’t own, move them all to your apartment, unpack them, set up utilities, decorate, buy all the things you forgot to buy before, and then you’re (almost) set. I’ve got plenty to say about that as well. But that’s a topic for another day.

Until then,

Swattie Emeritus