Apartment hunting rant

[Jackalope]

I haven't, not yet. I kind of want to live close-in on the east side and be able to walk damn near anywhere if I can.

And you want to pay $900?

No. The $900 example was just an absurd example of what a 300 sqft studio goes for just outside the (very nice) Pearl district in the (very shitty) Old Town area. (The place in question is near NW Everett and Broadway, smack dab in the middle of homeless central).

Better start stocking up on refrigerator boxes and scoping out the ritzy overpasses.... I could point you in the direction of some excellent waterfront locations.

Oh, stahp.

Bloody hell, if I see another "Conveniently Located in Gresham!" ad, I'm gonna hurl. Sorry, Gresham is conveniently located for people who want to do things *in* Gresham, which is exactly nobody.

I take the MAX in to Portland, but that's because I don't tend to go into the city for many events, besides working.

What really cheeses me off is that the MAX is priced perfectly so that whether I pay for gas for my car, or pay for MAX tickets 5-days a week I basically break even, so I might as well pay for the gas and have a 25 minute commute then have to bike to the MAX station, get a train into downtown for 25 minutes and then bike to my office next to OMSI - which takes 45 minutes.

Ah, you don't have to pay for parking. I have been staying at a friend's place during the week (Buckmann neighborhood, close-in SE, 10 minute bus ride from work). I started doing that because parking is $12 a day, or $180 to "how much you got" for monthly parking. I went through about a tank of gas a week as well, most of it burned up while crawling at 5mph on Interstate 5 in rush hour.

I get a free transit pass from work.

Easy choice - but transit is a non-starter coming from Vancouver. Cheap rent, but did you ever wonder what happened to all of the conservative non-progressive luddites in Portland? Answer: They all moved to Vancouver. Transit up here is a joke. I've tried to figure out every combination of driving to catch the Max train, walking to the bus, etc from where I live now, and there's just no way to do it that doesn't result in a ridiculous commute time for the distance, or a walk that I just can't count on being able to do twice a day every day. Shame, because there's a yellow/green line stop literally right in front of my office.