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How much can a starting teacher spend on rent?

Where to move, for nice weather and maximal big city feel, yet low rent?

  • I'm choosing a place to move to. I'm single and mostly unconstrained, except by my finances, my personal preferences, and the boundaries of the United States. My heart votes San Francisco, but my bank account strenuously disagrees. Also, even though I'm from Iowa and am therefore accustomed to a wide range of temperatures, I happen to be depressed at the moment and so I must have sun and warmth. For the moment I'm stuck in a suburban apartment complex surrounded by highways, in a New England state that is becoming increasingly wintry. This is my nightmare. My finances are somewhat flexible, and I don't know exactly what I can afford, but for the purpose of this question, let's say I'm absolutely unwilling to pay more rent than $700 per month--and on top of that, I require a living space to myself, with no roommates. On the scale between nightmare and downtown San Francisco, how close to the latter can I get? ...I mentioned San Francisco there, but I'm not specifically aiming for that part of the country. SF just seems to be the coolest big city in the US (according to my limited knowledge) that isn't also too cold or cloudy for my current needs. Also I gather that my use of "warmth" in connection with it may jar some readers, but I'm not aiming for year-round shirtless beachgoing here--I mainly just want to get away from what I think of as winter. Iowa is too cold; New England is too cold. St. Louis is iffy. Sun could help make up for cold, but not by very much. Likewise, frequent clouding would be bad--so even if I win the lottery or something, I probably still have to rule out Seattle, unfortunately. I don't care as much about summer weather; extreme heat bothers me but I think not in the depression-enhancing way of cold. For instance, I don't think weather considerations would drive me to rule out Texas, though other considerations probably would. Family, friends, and work are not much of a factor here. My personal connections are few and unhealthy right now, and I need to start anew much more than I need to move someplace to be close to somebody. And the job I have right now is entirely done over the Internet. I've got no children, no debt, and not a lot to lose. I think that for various reasons I shouldn't seriously consider leaving the country; but other than that I'm free to go where I like. And what I'd like is to recreate, in a sense, an experience I had while living in a dormitory in college, on a small, dense campus in an otherwise pretty sleepy little city: being surrounded by people and activities, all of which I can get close to without having to spend much energy, and some of which I can't even avoid. I have difficulty engaging in society, and I need it to be as easy as possible or else I'll barely do it at all. I need to be close to a dense concentration of many kinds of people doing interesting-looking things and I need to be able to expose myself to their activity without having to make much of a "trip" out of it. In a college dorm you can just walk down the hall and pass through a dozen people's personal lives--and even get involved, by stopping at somebody's door and starting a conversation, if you want to--but if you don't get involved then it doesn't cost you anything. You didn't spend ten minutes walking across campus to wander down this particular hall. You spent three seconds standing up and crossing your room. The difference between three seconds and ten minutes may mean the difference between having three friends in that hall and having none. What I want now is that, but on a much larger scale. I can get to a fairly large city right now, if I spend twenty minutes on the highway first. But I hate driving in traffic and I hate hunting for parking spaces or worrying about whether my car is safe where I've left it--so change that to twenty minutes on mass transit and my chance of making friends, or even doing anything at all social, shoots upward. Change it to TEN minutes on mass transit and my chance shoots upward again. Change it to five minutes on foot and my chance is multiplied yet again. Etc. I know people are social in rural areas too, of course. But I know myself and I know that if I moved to a nice, cheap rural place then I'd just end up appreciating nature alone, and continuing to be dangerously disconnected. I think I belong in a big city anyway. I like color and drama and activity. I don't mind spending twenty minutes, or even forty minutes, driving to some beautiful forested park or whatever, because I'm confident about what I'll do when I get there. But I need the people to be close by, because I'm not confident about dealing with them. So failure must be as cheap as possible. Sprawl makes travel costly for me (in mental energy) and makes personal connection more costly too (by putting everybody in their car armor most of the time); that may be the thing that rules out Texas for me, though weather did not. And Los Angeles too, even if I win that lottery. I want a dense, lively, "city"-feeling area and I want to be quite close to it (or in it if possible), and I need there not to be frequent unexpected delays in the trips I make in and out of it, whether they come from parking troubles or crappy bus schedules or whatever else. So maybe I should just go back to Iowa and live in Iowa City, and buy a couple of light boxes, and be done with it. That'd improve my situation a lot and still easily meet my rent requirements. But this could be a real adventure if I stretch further than that. Could I afford a studio apartment in one of those cities everybody knows the name of? Maybe someplace not so wealthy, yet still very colorful, like New Orleans? Maybe someplace not so exciting, but still big and dense compared to anyplace I've lived, like... I don't know, some random state capital that I wouldn't even think of on my own? If a wizard were to move NYC to southern California, then I would certainly want to live there, but $700 would probably put me ninety miles away from it instead. Maybe it'd be better to live right next to a dimmer light, than to be so far as that from the brightest one. Either way, I want as much light (so to speak) as I can get for this much money. So how much is that, and where can it be found?

  • Answer:

    http://www.walkscore.com/CA/Sacramento/Boulevard_Park fits your requirements. Walkscore in Midtown is in the 90s out of 100. Streets are tree-lined and beautiful. You can live without a car. Bicycling in the central city is easy and common. Crime is relatively low. You can rent a studio (or a slightly dodgy one bedroom) for less than $700. It's sunny 300 days per year. It will never snow. Great art and theater scene. The bar scene has gotten a LOT more active in the last 10 years. So, why doesn't everyone move to Sacramento right now? Average high temperature in summer is 95 degrees. Everything outside the central city is boring, car-oriented, suburban sprawl. The city has a reputation for being podunk (which is nonsense). It's overshadowed by San Francisco. Sacramento doesn't get big live music acts because they all go to the Bay Area instead. I wouldn't say people are particularly friendly (or unfriendly). The Midtown crowd is 20-35, hipsterish and can be cliquey. As far as the hot weather goes, all the trees make a BIG difference, and it cools down to the high 60s or low 70s almost every night in the summer, so it's really only hot between 1PM and 7PM even on really hot days. Sacramento's central city is better for your requirements than anywhere in the Bay Area that's not Berkeley/Rockridge or San Francisco, and half the price or less.

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And what I'd like is to recreate, in a sense, an experience I had while living in a dormitory in college, on a small, dense campus in an otherwise pretty sleepy little city . . . I think I belong in a big city anyway. I like color and drama and activity. A large city is not a dorm room or a college campus but bigger. The resemblance stops at "buildings in which many people live at once." I love big cities because I really don't ever want to talk to anyone ever, and in a big city this is possible (and even sometimes encouraged). If you actually want to live in a place that is like a college town, then focus your search on actual college-bearing towns in warm areas. (Raleigh-Durham? Baton Rouge?) Others have mentioned Georgia and Arizona, which also seem to be cheap and warm. However, and I mean this kindly, though it may sound harsh: You really can't recreate the feel of being in college once you are out of college. That place does not exist in the real world. It gets much harder to socialize as you age, for most people, and that is true no matter where you live. The zero-cost 100% available social life you describe can only happen when people have forced close proximity AND shared goals/tasks/demographics. Changing your city might improve your mood or give you a sense of a clean slate and a new start. But the only thing that can solve your fears of dealing with people is: you.

like_a_friend

I live in Savannah, pay 700 a month for a large (3 bedrooms!) apartment close to downtown. The sun shines here a lot, winters are very mild, summers hot but bearable. It's both a tourist town and a college town, so there's always something going on.

mareli

In a college dorm you can just walk down the hall and pass through a dozen people's personal lives--and even get involved, by stopping at somebody's door and starting a conversation, if you want to--but if you don't get involved then it doesn't cost you anything. You didn't spend ten minutes walking across campus to wander down this particular hall. I've spent most of my life living in a big, dense city full of fun things to do and cool people to meet and so on. This is not what life here is like. If ten minutes is a barrier for you to actually do things, you may be severely disappointed with what you think a bustling city has to offer. Unless you move into a commune situation, or a squat or an art residence or something that is explicitly collective, you're just going to be living in an apartment building. That is: rows of closed doors, people that don't want anything to do with you, no one like an RA minding people's behavior. The activities all take place in places. To get to the place you have to a) find the place, b) find out how to get into the activity (sign up in advance, pay a fee, etc.), c) go to the place for the activity. Unless it is somehow in your building, that's not going to be a quick, painless trip. You might not have to make your own fun, but you certainly have to find it and actively get involved. You might end up in a building full of cool young people, sure, but I've never lived anywhere people just left their door open so others could come in and say hi like in a dorm. No one will be knocking on your door to invite you to go do stuff unless you meet people in your building who like you enough to do that, and that sort of relationship takes time. People don't hang out in hallways because that's incredibly obnoxious because everyone in every apartment can hear every word of a conversation going on in the hallway. In the dorms that's par for the course; in a regular apartment building, that's rude. Before you put the time and energy and effort into moving your entire life somewhere, do a bit more research as to what city life is like. It's not a college dorm magnified to a million people. It can be more alienating, insular and closed-off than any boring, small town.

griphus

It is not healthy to expect your environment to change to suit your needs. You need to change your needs so that you can adapt to your environment. I don't know. I moved from a cold and grey climate to a sunny climate a few years ago, almost solely because of weather, and I couldn't be happier with my decision. The effect on my mood and happiness has been massive, and that has not diminished over time. It won't work for everyone, but it sure did great things for me. San Francisco would not be my choice for that, though. At all.

primethyme

Same for Harlem or Queens around NYC. There is nowhere in NYC you can get a habitable studio apartment for $700/mo.

griphus

I will also point out, as a big-city resident, that even though we live denser, we often compensate for it by becoming more disconnected. When I walked through my apartment building it was very different than, say, living in a barracks, which is similar to living in a dorm. You don't knock on anyone's doors. If people's drama spills, you avoid it and pretend you're not even there. You don't talk to people easily and are suspicious of someone who talks first - what are they selling?

corb

New Orleans sounds like it could be ideal for you. Warm for most of the year. It freezes only a couple times a year, usually overnight. It snows so rarely I can remember every time I saw so much as a snowflake from birth through age 19. Winters are short and generally sunny. Extreme heat is a factor, but air conditioning is pretty ubiquitous. Cost of living is dirt cheap. You could have a one bedroom apartment in a great neighborhood for under $1000 a month, and buying something is even more sensible. Everyday necessities are even cheaper, and because it's Louisiana gas prices stay pretty reasonable. If you lived in the French Quarter, the Marigny, or some parts of the Garden District, Uptown, or Midcity, you'd definitely have the walkable "center of everything" neighborhood effect you're looking for. You might also want to look at Austin.

Sara C.

I'm not 100% sure about the car situation there, but otherwise it seems like the obvious answer is Austin.

pretentious illiterate

SF just seems to be the coolest big city in the US (according to my limited knowledge) that isn't also too cold or cloudy for my current needs. San Francisco is cloudy and cold. It is not really a very nice place to be in the winter, to be honest. I realize this is somewhat counterintuitive, but the geography of the Bay doesn't make the city very appealing most of the year (however, it is exceedingly appealing in the summer). Either way, I want as much light (so to speak) as I can get for this much money. So how much is that, and where can it be found? Serious answer - at a psychiatrist or psychologist. Your restrictions here suggest what I think you already realize - that you are affected by depression and it is constraining your life choices. That is your root problem here, and moving won't help that. I'd especially suggest that moving to a large urban area would not be what you want, as large cities can be exceptionally alienating for people that aren't willing/able to actively seek out engagement with other people. It is not healthy to expect your environment to change to suit your needs. You need to change your needs so that you can adapt to your environment. In particular, nothing in your post indicates to me that moving will solve any of your problems. In fact, I think they may actually become worse, especially if you try to live in an expensive urban area with a restricted budget.

saeculorum

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