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

Comments

[ritaxis]

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.