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OBJECTIVE:
Find an acceptable studio apartment in San Francisco within seven days.
CASH ON HAND:
I begin my mission with $2500 and no way of obtaining any additional funds. After a week, this will have to be cut by $250, to pay for additional rent at the hotel I am staying at during my search, and so--probably--there will be insufficient funds left to me to cover deposit and first/last for an apartment. I literally must find a place within a week or forget about an apartment, and resign myself to living in a transient hotel forever..
This was my situation.
What follows is a somewhat abridged diary of that week. It was one of the most stressful experiences I could imagine. Thankfully, for the most part, it ended well...but it rather chills me to know that it so easily might not have...
The Sweden House Hotel, where I stayed while all this was happening
DAY 1:
The Greyhound pulls into the terminal and I have returned to SF after spending a month living with my mother in Sacramento--although considering the quality of the air in the Central Valley, "living" might not be an entirely accurate term. I noticed even before getting off the bus, as I always do, the incredible change that always falls on me when pulling through Pinole, and passing through Richmond and then I'm in the Bay Area again and I can breathe! It seems that I have left Sacramento at its worst weather-wise and pulled into Frisco at its best. The sky is so blue it is almost deep violet.
I walk to Market Street to catch a MUNI to the hotel and immediately I notice people everywhere are smiling at me. I realise it is likely because for the first time in months, I am smiling at them. I am giddy.
The desk clerk at the Sweden House Hotel welcomes me warmly. I'd stayed here for two months before I left to go to Sacramento. As Tenderloin hotels go, this one is a gem amongst the dirty coal stones that surround it. It manages to be accessible to the modestly-incomed while not screaming "Transient Hotel". It's clean, pretty much bedbug and crackhead-free, and has wireless internet and flat-screen cable TV. I set up the former and watch the latter while I cook a TV dinner in the microwave oven that comes with every room there.
I rest for a short while then fire up the browser on my laptop, and go immediately to Craigslist. First off, I set my search requirements to screen out any rental over $900 a month. I am not expecting to find too many listings in that range for studio apartments, but am pleasantly surprised to see that one effect of the Bad Economy blues is that the rents in SF seem to actually be shrinking for the first time since I first came here 25 years ago. I take down addresses and numbers in a leather-bound blank book and go to sleep.
DAY 2:
Wouldn't you know it? My first day of concentrated apartment hunting is a Saturday, and it turns out that this means I'm not going to manage to make any connections that result in actual viewings. After calling all the listings I took down last night and this morning, I get nothing but voicemails. I leave messages. But as the day goes by, I get no callbacks. I send out email inquiries, but these too go unanswered. While I'd been marooned in Sacramento I'd made one appointment for a viewing that I go to this afternoon, but when I arrive at the building, no one answers, and the man does not answer his phone when I try to call him and tell him that I am here.
I get nervous and a bit discouraged, but swallow that feeling down with breaths of that wonderful, clean and watery San Francisco air - and it makes me feel like my lungs are breathing at 200% capacity, after all that exhaust and brushfire dust in Sacto.
DAY 3:
Sundays are as dead as Saturday in Realty-land, apparently. No one answers at any of the rental offices or realty services. I mutter swear-words under my breath, and I wander about, in order to not waste the day. You can spot a lot of rooms for rent just walking around looking for them. I take a long, slow amble through the Tenderloin, arcing up into the lower Nob Hill area, then about-facing and winding my way down towards Market Street and the SoMa district to the south of it. Even though I am keeping my eyes peeled for those FOR RENT signs in windows, I take time to also just appreciate the hell out of the wonderful San Francisco air that smells like the ocean, and like a melange of different restaurants' cooking fumes, and like marijuana, and like those big pink rubrum lilies from the Farmer's Market flower stalls. And hopefully--soon--also like home.
I manage to find signs in the windows of several different rental properties Unfortunately, these signs seem to never list the amount the rooms are going for, and this frustrates me. I jot them down anyway.
I run into one room on Turk Street that has a sign that has the logo for West Coast Properties on it, and I suddenly perk up a bit. This was the outfit that used to own the building I lived in on Geary and Larkin for 10 years back in the 1990s! I'd thought they'd folded, or been swallowed up in a merger. Since they apparently still exist, I might be able to get this room on the strength of my good record at my Geary Street place. I leave a message with the manager and ask if I might have a look at the studio. I receive no calls back.
DAY 4:
Finally it's Monday and the realtors are answering their phones. I make some appointments for the next two days. Still no call back from the Turk Street place. However, I begin to find a lot more listings on Craigslist that look good to me, especially one on Geary Street, in a building located in the same block I used to live on during what I think of as my Halcyon Days.
The ad for this one instructs all interested people to come to an open house today at 2pm. I get cleaned up, dressed up and arrive just a wee bit after the appointed time. I look around the room and notice that there are about six other people looking at this room with me. I try to ignore this, and instead focus on how amazingly clean it is, compared to the apartment I had once lived in.
The manager seems to be a goth girl. She has tattoos and doesn't wear yuppie clothing and so I find myself thinking: Maybe I would get along well with this person. I ask her for an application, fill it out and am told to turn it in the following day. Happily, I notice that one by one, the other lookie-loos are falling away, and they are NOT picking up applications.
After I leave, and find myself traipsing down Geary Street more excited than I have been all week.
DAY 5:
I get a call back and am told that, yes, I was the only one to fill out the application. I begin to get REALLY excited. Now, she tells me, they have to run a credit check on me. It will cost $20.00. I have to save my money, so I am nervous about this, but I reluctantly fork it over. I am told that I will have my answer in the evening. I am assured that the only reason I'd get turned down is if they discover any evictions. Since I know this won't be a problem, I feel like I will finally be home soon! The hours move by at a slug's pace as evening approaches.
Finally the call comes: the phone rings. The bomb drops. "Your application has been denied based on the results of your credit check." But how could this be? I was never evicted from any apartment! I frantically explain this to her and she replies that if I want to, I can visit the building again to pick up a copy of my Equifax report.
I do so. I stand there, and stare dumfoundedly at it. Apparently, someone with the exact same name as me has just been evicted this year from an apartment in Oregon. The manager seems to believe me when I tell her it's got to have been someone else, but she tells me sorry, her hands are tied by the property management corporation that employs her.
I feel dismal. I know what I'll have to spend tomorrow morning doing: collecting evidence that I have not even left the state of California this year at all, so that this same crap won't happen somewhere else. With resignation's sigh, I kiss off the visions of the beautiful apartment I'd viewed, and try not to let this depress me, because I have literally only hours left to finish this vital mission, and I have to set myself to work again.
That night, I decide to detour my walking route and check out the Turk Street place again. I feel that I want to make sure the atmosphere around it doesn't bother me at night as well as in the daytime. Turns out that at night, it does bother me: a cluster of people are hanging around a nearby park, and they're gabbing to one another in the language that I have come to recognize as the language of crackheads and their suppliers. I cross that place off my list and sigh again. I wonder once again if I'm going to have to live at the Sweden House Hotel forever.
DAY 6:
After I spend all morning collecting paperwork from three separate sources soundly refuting the Oregon-based business on my Equifax report, I go to the Sunset district, to view a room that I had been told that I could move into the next day if I wanted to. On the plus side, it's very cheap; on the minus side, the kitchen is a communal one. When the landlord sees me, he says he has decided to give the room to someone else. I notice that everyone else in the house is Asian. I am not. I think this may be the reason someone else was chosen to get the room at the last minute. Sigh.
In the afternoon, things get less depressing again. I am shown two buildings on O'Farrell Street by a realtor representing Citiapartments, and one of them turns out to have something that I suppose could be described as "perfect architectural-positional Feng Shui" - or whatever you'd call Feng Shui if it applied to the room itself instead of the furniture in it. I fill out applications for both buildings, and fax copies to the realtor and to Citiapartments. The realtor seems to like me.
I look at two other places with him on the same street that would suffice, maybe, but they aren't half as nice as that one, perfect room. I tell the realtor to put a priority status on the place by the Nitecap bar on O'Farrell and Hyde. When we're finished, I stroll by the building and cross my fingers HARD.
DAY 7:
After hours of wrangling paperwork, answering questions and dealing with callbacks and voicemail jails, I finally, finally sign a lease! The O'Farrell room, the one I really got a great vibe from, is mine! I'm told that I can move in the day after tomorrow.
The fear drains away--as does all my money: this place required a REALLY large deposit. But I just didn't have time to be picky about that sort of thing. Especially when I knew that this place was really the one for me!
Even though it's technically located in the upper Tenderloin--the part I like to call the TenderNob--it's at the back of the building, with a fourth-floor window overlooking a small lot with a couple of trees in it. The sliding closet doors are mirrored. The whole place gleams white, with all the kitchen cupboards sparkling clean, as well as the bathroom. I dub my new home "The Whitebox" and after a final day at the hotel, I will begin to move my meagre possessions into it.
It means a real lifestyle change for me because at $895 a month rent, I no longer have ANY spare funds whatsoever for anything beyond rent and food--and the latter I'll be able to barely afford at all.
Somehow, at least for now, it is worth it.
675 O'Farrell--otherwise known as "Home"
POSTSCRIPT: After a month of residence, I received notice that Citiapartments had sold my building to another big property corporation called Laramer SF. So far, it doesn't seem to be problematic. (Neither Citiapartments nor Laramer seems to have a particularly good reputation, if one goes by posts on services like Yelp. But since both companies own literally thousands of buildings, I'd imagine there's a wide variety of good and bad management that goes on.)
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