The cost of living

The Web is a wonderful resource for house hunting. And there seem to be many more sites that aggregate rental listings than the last time I was looking, which was in 2010.

They all have different ways of slicing and dicing the data, of course, so it’s still a slog, especially when you’re covering three state jurisdictions.

The District They Call Columbia is actually a whole thing. As you can imagine in any urban locale, space is at a premium. This means that buildings dating back from the Age of Decent Construction do not come with parking spaces, and those dating from the Age of Internal Combustion charge you extra if you want to park your car on their premises. So you have to figure on an extra $125-$200 per car if you don’t want to play parking roulette on city streets.

This I do not care to do.

At any rate, I realized this was serious business when on one of these rentals sites I came across a listing for an off-street parking slot, all on its own in Dupont Circle:

And then another in the hip-and-trendy U Street corridor:

Having back in the last century seen a healthcare provider in Dupont whose clearly marked patient parking spot was often usurped by people who felt that the restriction didn’t apply to them, I would not have a lot of hope that either of these “properties” would be secure from interlopers. So it’s not clear to me that you’d get your $175 worth.

But that’s not what I’m writing about. What stopped me in my tracks was the fact that if you are so inclined to fork over your money in hopes that you’ll get a decent ROI, you have to also cough up $175 in “security deposit” and pay a $75 application fee for the privilege.

That, in my opinion, is just taking the piss.