whoosh

[ritaxis]

That's the sound of the nest emptying. Whoops! Emma wasn't even really looking for a place. She was preparing to look for a place this summer. She emailed her Jason some Craigslist links to show him what the market was looking like, and -- suddenly, Jason found them a little room in a luxury apartment downtown (that is, five blocks from us and one block from the bus station, solving all sorts of problems). They have to pay $550 each for their halves of the room, which is just a bit more than ten times as much as I paid for my first off-campus room in a flat.

Meanwhile, it's raining. Kind of. And the water department got all excited about rainfall reaching "90% of normal" and called off the watering restrictions (idiot newspaper which is no longer printed nor even has its offices in town proclaims that "rationing" was lifted, but we never had rationing). Now you can water your garden in the middle of the day. Stupid. Since you were always still allowed to run a drip line or use a hose with a shutoff or a watering can, what is gained by this? As a community we're good at conservation, but why ask for wastage? Anyway, the river is still low, and that's where the water comes from, not the sky.

And I'm still not writing much because we're still putting the "library" back in order. Some of you will be aghast to learn that I have culled three boxes of books. Others would be puzzled by the books that I will not consider getting rid of.

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

$1100 for a room in an apartment? What about the roommates? Are there things like a pool or fitness center?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The top floor apartments in that particular building go for $2400 a month total. This is not unusual in Santa Cruz. It is kind of a luxury apartment building. It's right on Pacific Avenue, the "main drag," and a block from the central Metro bus station. It's a pretty new building, with a courtyard and apparently a gym. I haven't seen it yet.

Family student housing would have been $1500 for a townhouse, but since they have no children they would keep dropping to the bottom of the waiting list, and there are restrictions on the number and relationship of roommates (you must be able to claim some kind of partner or kinship relationship: I don't know whether that allows for poly families or not), so they would probably have ended up spending more.

There are studios that run less than a thousand a month but they didn't find any that were reasonably near to a reasonable bus connection to the University. Driving to and from the University is not a realistic option for Emma, even if I were to hand over my car, because of the cost of parking permits and the inaccessibility of the parking lots that are available to undisabled students.

They probably could have found something cheaper and still appropriate if they had looked longer, but with Jason's family willing to take up any slack he needs I think the motivation was a little lower than it might have been.