Housing Hassles

For someone who, in periods with lots of down time, watches a lot of HGTV's various house-hunting shows, I am absolutely *horrible* when it comes to dealing with the hassles of a housing search for myself.

In college, I was an RA for my junior & senior years, so I didn't go through the off-campus housing shuffle that all my classmates did. I just showed up, and I had an apartment and it was all furnished and perfect. Same pre-packaged deal for college summers.

After college, when I moved with five of my best friends to a bit city, the process was relatively painless, too (but it might have just been a HUGE stroke of good luck, since it took a lot of wrangling to get 6 people to agree to live together/submit all their paperwork/tour the place we eventually picked/sign the lease)...my boyfriend-at-the-time and I just used Craigslist, found five places that had enough bedrooms and public transportation access, and went to see them. We instantly fell in love with one, and the rest, as they say, is history. Two years later, some of the original group is still living in "the house," and it looks like it will stay a permanent fixture in our lives for the foreseeable future, even though some of us (myself and Cat included) have moved hundreds of miles away...we've got a rotating crew of friends and acquaintances ready to take over the lease, so long as the landlord doesn't realize (or doesn't care?) that we've killed the lawn/broken the banister/almost knocked down the garage/burned a hole in the sink with a hookah coal.

When it came to choosing a place for law school, I was similarly laissez faire. I don't think the reality of "law school is starting in three months!" hit me quite as it should have...so I just somewhat randomly agreed to live with a girl from the YLS 2011 Facebook group after talking to her on the phone [we picked up a 3rd roommate, too]. It's turned out amazingly: we're now GREAT friends, the living situation couldn't be better.

EXCEPT, that now we have to:
* Find subletters for the summer, and
* Pay more for rent starting July 1st.

Both of those things suck. Big time. It's been a hassle and a half finding subletters who want our apartment for the whole summer at the price we're looking for; as you can imagine, New Haven's not the hippest summer destination, so the market's depressed overall...we're now trying to calculate just how much of a hit we're willing to take, rent-wise, to get a sure-thing set of subletters lined up.

And, of course, even though the real estate market in Manhattan and everywhere else seems to be favoring renters right now, for some strange reason our rent is going up by a not-insignificant amount. So we're trying (to use our lawyering skills?) to negotiate with the management, but as we live in a pretty in-demand building, it's not really as if we're bargaining from a position of power. Perhaps I will bake caramel-chocolate chip cookies in attempt to bribe the nice leasing lady? :)

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