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Welcome, Home
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August 07, 2005
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« Goodbye, Irvine | Main | Welcome, Home part 2 »
In the past two months, Rebecca and I have finished school at UC Irvine, gotten our Master's Degrees, found an apartment back home in San Francisco, and moved in. I've started work as well, and slowly our situation is stabilizing enough that I have time to start writing blog entries and contacting friends again.
Our friends in San Francisco say that it doesn't feel like we've been gone but a few months. I'll tell you honestly -- we felt the whole two years. Now, I'm not saying that there's no fate worse than living in Irvine. (At least, I'm not saying that right now.) We did get degrees, after all, and managed to learn a few things despite them. We had some good times, cooked some good meals, and met some great people in the process.
Still, the whole time we were there, I had a feeling I couldn't shake -- as if I had made the wrong decision and chosen to be with some city other than the love of my life. And worse yet, that the love of my life was off having a great time with thousands of other residents and didn't miss me at all, while I was mostly alone and somewhat miserable. (Well, I suppose I'm glad that at least one of us could be happy.)
But it's all academic now; we're back in town, picking up where we left off. Already my mind is working its continuity tricks; the two years in Irvine feel as though they were lived by somebody else, as if I'd watched them on television or read about them in the memoirs of a person suspiciously similar to myself.
But enough of that nonsense. Let me tell you about our apartment hunt.
I was in town three weeks before Rebecca was able to move up. I stayed in a hotel on Nob Hill and started a job in San Mateo. My plan was to find a place that
- we'd love to live in
- was in a neighborhood we liked
- we could afford
- was commutable from work
and to do all of this in less than three weeks , so that when Rebecca was done with school, we'd just move right in to our new apartment. This way, we'd minimize the amount of time spent paying for a hotel, and we wouldn't need to move our things into storage while we looked for an apartment together. A good plan, generally, but I did worry about choosing a place without Rebecca having seen it at all -- even though she gave me full authority to do so.
I set up appointments on weekends and after work during the week. If I was feeling industrious and was lucky while scheduling, I could usually hit 3 appointments on a weekday after work and 5 or so on a Saturday or Sunday. All told I must have seen 40 or more apartments.
(I apologize in advance to all of you non-San Franciscan friends of mine who don't know the area. I've tried to link to information about the various places I'm rambling on about so that you can follow along.)
As far as neighborhood candidates: commutability to San Mateo put a big restriction on neighborhood choice. This is particularly true considering that I want to sell my car. When we lived here before, I used it twice a week at most, and it seems ridiculous to spend $150 or more a month on parking to drive a couple of times a week. But this means that the neighborhood we chose had to be accessible to the train station (pictured at right) so I could get to work reasonably fast. This leaves the following possibilities:
- SOMA / "South Beach"
- Potrero Hill
- the Mission
- Upper Market
- Hayes Valley / Lower Haight
- Nob Hill / Tenderloin
- Downtown / Fidi
- Chinatown
- North Beach
Seems like a lot of choices, but there were other constraints. We lived in the SOMA before moving to Irvine, and while we liked it fine, we wanted someplace different this time -- some place with more of a neighborhoody feel if possible. (The scene to the right is from the balcony of our SOMA apartment two and a half years ago.) The Tenderloin was...not where we wanted to live, so rule that out. Downtown/Fidi are pretty empty in the evenings and on the weekends, and there's not much housing there anyhow. Potrero Hill is a little bit far from everything to suit us. As much as I liked the idea of living in Chinatown, it's tough to find housing there if you don't speak Chinese, and a lot of what's there is subpar anyhow. As a result, I found myself primarily looking in Hayes Valley, Nob Hill, North Beach, and the Mission.
At first, Hayes Valley was where we really wanted to live. It's got its own center of culture, plus it's pretty central to the Lower Haight, Polk St., Castro/Upper Market, and Inner-Inner Mission. At first, I was put off a bit by the projects on the west side of the neighborhood. I heard mixed reports on how much of an effect these had on the neighborhood, so I focused on the east side near Van Ness. Found two great apartments there, but they were just too small. (This would become a theme in the search. There are lots of great apartments right in the middle of very cool neighborhoods. And they're all just about the size of a dorm room.)
I did a lot of looking in Nob Hill for two reasons: my hotel was there, which made it easy, and also there is a lot of housing available there, because it's so high density. You can't walk a block without seeing a FOR RENT sign in Nob Hill. Whatever you're looking for in terms of size or price, you can find it on Nob Hill. The downside is that you must like urban living -- you can't get much more urban than this on the West Coast -- and you have to like hills. One other problem is that it wasn't as commutable as I'd hoped. The 27 is the only bus that really runs through Nob Hill toward the train, and it turns west on Harrison at 5th, leaving you with a 7-10 minute walk to the train station. No big deal, but this was the route I took to work while I was staying at the hotel, and between waiting for the 27 to come, which itself was a dicey proposition, as it is one of the least reliable busses I have had the misfortune to take, and the time it takes for the ride down, you had to budget 40 minutes or so just to get to the train station. Nevertheless, we almost wound up living on Nob Hill anyway, because the plethora of housing meant that I found a couple of superb apartments. I mean, they were really choice -- top of the hill, top of the building, luminous red hardwood floors, remodeled kitchens, glorious period details, etc. (Pictured above is one of the Nob Hill apartments we did not get -- not even one of the nicer ones, but one well within our price range with which we would have been perfectly happy.) Other people thought they were great, too, I found out, and several had applied before I even submitted my application, so we didn't get them. I'm glad it worked out that way, though.
A lot of my friends live in the Mission, so it was somewhat tempting to try to move there. With a single exception, however, I wasn't excited about any of the places I saw there. Most of them weren't in very good condition and lacked the most basic amenities. I think this was mostly just coincidence, however, since several friends have great apartments in the Mission. I'll be damned if I could find anything decent, though. And there is one other downside; I don't think there is a direct route to the train station on a bus. Not that it matters, given that the apartments all sucked.
At first, I resisted the idea of looking in North Beach. It seemed too far from the train and too far removed from everything else. Then I went to dinner at a friend's place who lives in North Beach and works in San Mateo not far from where I do. He drives sometimes, but he also takes the train, and he told me that it's only 15 minutes on the bus to the train station. This made me reconsider North Beach as a neighborhood. That and just walking around in it. I'd forgotten how cool it is! (The picture at left is of North Beach at night.) Italian grocers and butchers, lots of restaurants, clubs of all sorts, night life, a nice park, and just a really cool vibe. After that, I made North Beach my #1 priority. Not that it mattered, because (big surprise) housing is pretty hard to come by in North Beach. I probably only saw four or five apartments there the whole time I was looking. I did find a nice one, applied for it, and was offered the place the same day that we were offered the place that we finally accepted, but -- guess what -- it was just too small. It was in a perfect spot, just up the street from all of the Grant St. shops and restaurants, 2 minute's walk from the bus stop. It had gorgeous hardwoods and a remodeled kitchen. But it was tiny. Theoretically a 1 br, I saw several Nob Hill studios that were larger.
So where did we wind up moving? You'll have to wait until the next entry to find out...
August 7, 2005 in san francisco | Permalink
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