Apartment Hunting
The past few weekends I’ve taken the hunt for an apartment up in the City more seriously. One Saturday I went up and just walked around the neighborhoods south of Market. As all major cities, SF has a lot of neighborhoods with unique personalities. Because the areas south of Market St (a main avenue cutting across the City) make the most sense for me commuting via the Apple shuttle (free Wi-Fi enabled coach service to and from Cupertino), I focused my attention there. You have the denser Mission District, with a panoply of good Mexican food, bars, and nightlife. As you walk west, you enter Mission Dolores by the pretty Dolores Park, and the vibe swings a little more upward, if not a little hipstery. Nice restaurants here. Continuing west of Dolores Park is the Castro District, and then the large neighborhood south of Castro is Noe Valley. After my initial scouting weekend, I felt most comfortable in Noe Valley, but Mission Dolores was nice too. What can I say? I’ve lived in the suburbs all my life.
This past Sunday, I scoured the Craigslist posting and lined up a dozen apartments to see. On the drive up 280-N, a good sign appeared:
The luck continued. The first apartment was owned by a Stanford alum. The second one of the day was a friendly fellow who works at Google (and later I discovered was on the Google PowerMeter team) who had a beautiful apartment. Then, I got a call from someone who said I could come by right now if I was free — turns out I was just two blocks away. Score! I had a free timeslot at 3pm and called up another place to schedule a viewing, and they said “Can you come at 3pm?” before I even said anything. I even had half an hour to enjoy the sun at Dolores Park. After a morning of drizzle, the sun finally broke and lit up the SF skyline.
Note: this is from an earlier visit but captures the same view. The iPhone’s camera doesn’t dynamic range well at all.
After killing some time in a coffee shop (otherwise quite nice but ruined by allowing that horrible Miley Cyrus song to be played), I saw the last place up on a hill on Noe St…an enormous three bedroom house that looked like a mansion compared to the other apartments I saw that day. Stunning though — huge entertaining friendly kitchen large deck, a real yard, big rooms. Too bad it’d come out to ~$2000 per month. Per person. Oh, and street parking if you can find it nearby. Another observation: I think it’s a requirement to own a dog if you live in Noe Valley. I must have seen over a hundred dogs being walked. Crazy.
I was dead tired by then, so I bailed on dinner and headed home. Michael and Karla arrived home with full shopping bags, and so for the next few hours while they made a butternut squash lasagna with fresh creamy pesto sauce, we enjoyed a long and meandering conversation that touched upon healthcare reform, the limits of capitalism, the psychology of difficult decisions, literature, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Michael’s trip overseas to Israel then India, the glorious thunderstorms Karla and I remember from Texas, Mike’s account of seeing a car get struck by lightning on a road trip with his dad, then onto an REU he did researching sprites (upper atmospheric lightning phenomenon only very recently discovered and pretty freaky) which actually tied back to my two weeks up in Alaska for the PARS summer school. There were other detours in there somewhere, but I’ve forgotten them already.
None of the apartments will work (the wonderful apartment of the Google guy was already taken that very night), but I have a better idea of what to expect now.