The Renter's Blues

Leigh and I have been going back and forth about the most lately is housing. We live in Anchorage, the most populated and most "American" city in Alaska. We have Target, Sears, WalMart, Costco, chain restaurants, two malls, etc. However, we have an extreme lack of decent housing options. Property is extremely expensive here, considering what you get for your money, and it doesn't matter if you rent or buy- you WILL pay more than what the property is worth.

Apartments and small houses in Anchorage run $850-2,500 per month. If you want a duplex unit it will cost you roughly $1,500. These prices are pretty standard regardless of neighborhood or whether the property is updated at all. Let's just say there's a lot of shag carpeting and 15 year old dishwashers out there!

Buying houses in Anchorage is a big deal too. The price for a medium to large house is about $250,000-300,000. You can get a tiny or ramshackle place for about $175,000 if it has a yard. Compare this to the remodeled duplex (each unit had 2 bedrooms and it was one street over from a very popular park) Leigh and I almost bought in Buffalo for $175,000. Repos come pretty cheap, but the bank wants cash only sales for those. Last week I saw a listing for a one bedroom house with a little yard for $141,000. Not bad, right? Well this house has a total of 312 square feet of living space! It's the size of a backyard shed, but at least the interior is beautifully redone. It would make a wonderful playhouse for children.

Leigh and I rent a small apartment in Midtown East. Our neighborhood is pretty sparse and it's only redeeming quality is a nice view of the Chugach mountains from our porch, but a nice view isn't exactly novel in Alaska. We are a block down from a liquor store, a post office, and a really run-down trailer park. How did we find this gem, you ask? Before leaving Seattle we assessed our financial situation to find that we couldn't afford to just show up in town without a place to stay. Hotels in Alaska are too expensive and we had Juneau the Cat with us, so we needed a place to crash land after nearly a week of driving and camping. So we looked online, called around on Craigslist to hear "NO PETS" and be hung up on several time and then finally resorted to the Weidner Group Properties. Now we live in a tiny one bedroom in a massive apartment complex. This is not a deal-breaker in-and-of-itself, but upon arrival we were greeted by 520 quare feet of old, dingy carpet, cabinets and countertops made of the ugliest particle board with lamenant "wood grain" for decoration, and a mere 2 small windows to ventilate the entire apartment. If I lived alone, this would be fine, but I don't. There are two of us and a cat. We need space, or at least a more functional version of the space we have!

Not only is the apartment itself disappointing for the $955/month we pay (this includes a pet fee and most utilities, plus use of the "club house" which is an utter piece of shit that I've never found a reason to use), but the Weidner Group can't be bothered to provide us with certain promised services like SNOW REMOVAL (this is Alaska!). Then this weekend some workers started drilling around the area that normally houses our dumpsters. Eventually they needed to remove the dumpsters, so now we don't have dumpsters and nobody has told us when to expect them back or where to find dumpsters on other parts of the property. Frustrating!!!

The worst part is that this is completely typical in Anchorage. One or two huge companies own all of the more affordable housing that allows pets. They charge what they want and treat tenants as they please with very little backlash. Leigh and I have decided to move at the end of our lease (August 2011), no question. We are preparing to have to pay more for housing to get a place closer to work or at least in a nicer area (near parks/trails) and pay our own electric and heat, but we'll have the same budget next year as this year so we can't go too crazy. Anyway, now that we live here we have more flexibility to look for private landowners, etc. We are hoping we can see what's available at the last minute, so July or so, and extend our current lease month-to-month if we don't find anything by the end of August.

Our wish list includes:
-2 bedrooms (we need some quiet space, plus we want our friends and family to visit!)
- larger kitchen (currently we have a tiny alley style kitchen with old appliances and a bar area that we use as our kitchen table because there's no space for a table and chairs)
- a dishwasher that actually gets the dishes clean
- near downtown, Turnagain, or Kincaid park- basically the West side
- in-unit laundry or at least in the same building (right now we carry our laundry down 3 flights of (icy) stairs and drag it across the parking lot to a separate building, which is often a place that transient people use to stay warm)

That's it! Not too demanding is it? I hope we can find this, or something similar, for roughly $1,000/month with at least some utilities included. Our thought is that we'll continue to rent for another year or so. If we love our next rental we'll keep renting for a while, but if not we'll take a look at our savings and maybe buy a small place here. I posted last week about a cute little log cabin in a decent neighborhood. That's what we'd be looking for: a small, reasonably priced property in a decent neighborhood with a lot of DIY fixer-upper potential. For now, I just want to find an apartment that doesn't make me feel cramped and depressed.