Another out-of-state student in mid-May sent an e-mail that said: "I know people are (still) desperate. I was desperate for a moment . . . so I found a summer sublet near Cleveland Park after 3 weeks of searching. The frustration is not knowing anything about the neighborhood/area (I was originally from California), not knowing where to start looking, and working with very limited budget. For $800 a month, I still have to share a bedroom with someone?!" A George Washington University student who posted an online ad for interns, Olivia Achtmeyer, said her sorority house filled all 24 slots by the first week of April.
The Post followed a 19-year-old freshman from a college in upstate New York as she struggled with the housing dilemma. Her name is not being used because she ended up in a sublet of a sublet, and her roommates panicked at the thought of being identified and possibly losing their hard-sought apartment.
For a month and a half this spring, the freshman tried to pin down housing for less than $500 a month, she told The Washington Post in a series of conversations, including e-mails, a phone interview and an interview in person.
Because she had a scholarship toward her congressional internship and didn't want to ask her parents for money, she was on an extra-tight budget, she explained.
A week before her job was to start, she hadn't found a place. But she was still optimistic in a phone call with a reporter: "I'm sure something will turn up. I'm definitely coming, one way or the other," she said.
"I guess if worst comes to worst," she said, "I can live somewhere in the suburbs and take the subway in. But I want to get a part-time job to make ends meet, about 12 hours a week, maybe in a restaurant, and I'm not really keen on taking the subway at midnight."
The student said she thought she had nailed a place early. But one spot vanished when a person looking to share a bedroom didn't respond to e-mails. And another "guaranteed" position disappeared when a roommate who was expected to leave, didn't.
The student pounded the pavement electronically during her search, using sources that many students and non-students use for housing and other needs, such as Craigslist.org, Washingtoncitypaper.com and the Washington Post's Web site. She had begun the process by looking at Roommates.com, a roommate-matching site that charges a fee to read e-mail responses, but she quickly learned about the free sites and shifted exclusively to them.
She also placed her own ad in the City Paper's electronic listings that said: "I'm desperate!"
Then, almost miraculously, she heard back from the very first person who had offered her a room-share. That student explained that she had lost contact because of computer problems and only had a university dorm phone number to rely on, not the New York student's home number.
When the deal was re-sealed, the student finally relaxed a little. She arrived last Sunday, after a rendezvous along the way with her parents.
"We've heard all the horror stories about interns in Washington," the student's father said, "but [she's] pretty smart and it'll all be okay."
Upon seeing the apartment building, he concluded, "The building looks pretty secure to me, and the room looks fine."
One of the student's biggest problems in finding a summer rental, she admits now, was that she wanted to pay so much less than the going rate. To do that she was more or less forced to sublet and had to rule out a big source of housing -- area universities.
