A Tough Initiation to D.C.
Area's High Rents Force Young Transplants to Scramble for Money, Roommates

By Mara Lee
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, April 12, 2008

When Jessica Otto thinks back to eight months ago, when she arrived in Washington, she still sounds bewildered.

"I had no idea what to expect," she said.

Renting a place on a limited budget in the Washington area is already hard enough. Most young college grads can't afford more than $1,000 a month, and even most basement apartments and studios cost more than that in the neighborhoods young people are attracted to.

Searching from out of town and having never lived in this city makes it even trickier. Many new arrivals are ignorant -- or apprehensive -- about cheaper neighborhoods like Petworth, Brookland and Takoma, so that leaves living with roommates. And those roommates are going to want to meet you -- and compare you to the 10 or 20 other applicants they've got.

Otto had tried to find a place while living with her parents in Atlantic, Iowa, population 7,257, but nearly all the ads she saw were for immediate openings. Even if they were planning ahead for August, few were so desperate that they'd pick a roommate without meeting her first. She had to stay at a friend's place and search once she arrived.

Otto checked out group houses in Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights during their open houses, at which three, four, five or more roommates lobbed questions at her.

She likened the experience to a sorority interview. "It was kind of uncomfortable. What you do, where you went to school. . . . If you want to live there, you kind of have to sell yourself," she said. "And often, there are lots of people there. It's a very bizarre arrangement."

And after all that, the rejections. "You can go to 10 of those without being accepted to live at one," she said.

Otto ended up in a studio in Arlington's Rosslyn, where she pays $1,000 a month, utilities included, and $100 a month for parking. She can afford that rent because she chose to work as a legal assistant rather than at an environmental nonprofit, where salaries are in the low $30,000s, "or even less," she said.

She's unhappy with how it worked out. "The first year out of college, it's a big shock to my system anyway. Studios can be isolating."

Her restlessness might help some friends from Wheaton College, her alma mater, avoid the struggles she had. She's been scoping out three-bedroom places, with the thought of rooming with two women graduating next month.

At least she has a middle-class salary to rely on.

Erin O'Brien, 28, is coming from Madison, Wis., to get a master's degree in museum studies at George Washington University. She won't have a stipend, and she plans to work as a barista while she studies. "I'm going to be going deep into debt with the schooling," she said. "It's really obscene, the amount of debt I'm going to incur. At least $50,000."

O'Brien, who returned from teaching English in South Korea less than a year ago, pays $400 a month in Wisconsin for her room in a shared house. She wants to pay less than $600 a month in rent here but live no farther from D.C. than in Arlington or Takoma Park.

"I've been told, 'You really won't get anything less than $600,' " O'Brien said. But she keeps hoping the right place will come open. "I don't want to live in a hovel," she said.

Even though she can't leave the Midwest until mid-May, she's been looking at Craigslist ads almost every day since early March. But most houses are looking for someone to move in a few weeks, or maybe the next month.

"I guess I'll just have to bide my time a little bit," she said. "It's nerve-wracking." She will be making a trip here at the end of April to go on house interviews, she said.

Many students' and recent graduates' salaries don't match up with even shared-housing rents, so they rely on help from their families.

Andy Wright, 20, is a University of Southern California student coming to Washington for a summer job with the Shakespeare Theatre Company. A theater major, he'll be a camp counselor for acting students. He will be paid $140 a week.

He responded to about 50 ads for roommates and heard back from about 10, he said. He also looked into intern housing in dorms. But Georgetown University doesn't have intern housing this year, except for units its own students, because of construction projects. And American University wanted $850 a month for a shared room, he said.

There were rooms in the $600s that were unfurnished, but because he's here for only 10 weeks, he needs a furnished room. Even $600 is far out of the reach of his paycheck; a grant and his parents in Tampa will have to cover the rest.

Wright was flying blind. He wasn't sure which neighborhoods were a convenient commute to the Chinatown theater, and the sublets he expected to see from fellow students never appeared.

Ultimately, he placed a housing-wanted ad and mentioned the Shakespeare job. That got him sympathy from other performers: An opera singer who owns a house in Chinatown offered him a spot for $750 a month. "I talked to the guy for a half-hour," Wright said, adding that he thinks it will come through. "He's going to talk to my roommates from last year and make sure I'm not a serial killer."

Matthew McWilliams, 29, knew the terrain much better. McWilliams left Washington last May to travel the world. He spent five months in Egypt, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, and then another several months traveling the southwestern United States.

He had been working as an accountant at one of the Big Four firms before he left. "I was disenchanted with my job and looking for a bit of a change," he said.

He had lived in a group house in south Arlington and then with his then-girlfriend in a one-bedroom apartment in Clarendon. As he tried to arrange a new place from his parents' house in Phoenix, he considered Clarendon, south Arlington, Alexandria and Capitol Hill.

He posted a housing-wanted ad, too, with an $800 price tag, even though he doesn't have a job lined up. He looked at the array of ads and figured the going rate for a room in a shared house or apartment in the areas he wanted.

McWilliams knew he wouldn't have anything settled before he drives back east. "It's kind of a meet-first kind of deal," he said of getting a group-house berth. His first thought was to stay with his ex-girlfriend in Clarendon. "But that's not going to work out," he said dryly.

Instead, he invited himself to crash at a friend's house. And as it turned out, he found a place his first weekend in town, at the end of March. He had e-mailed the prospective roommates from Arizona, and they had a good feeling about him and didn't schedule any other interviews until they met him.

He'll be spending $850 a month, which includes most utilities, and living on Capitol Hill.

And a job might follow soon. "I've actually gotten two job offers based on my post. Kind of crazy, but the mention of being an accountant sparked some interest from some people," he said.