Suggestions for finding a rental in Seattle
January 23, 2016 5:40 AM   Subscribe

I got my dream job in Seattle and will be moving cross-country! Yay! I'm going to make a trip out to find housing but have a couple of questions about when/where.

I've read the other recent questions about moving to Seattle so have a sense that pounding the pavement is going to be what finds me a place. I'm hoping that you all can give me some situation-specific guidance about where and when to go!

I want to live as close as I can to University of Washington while paying <$1500 in rent, keeping my 45-lb dog, and, ideally, not having to get a roommate. I tend to like units in old houses rather than giant apartment complexes, but beggars can't be choosers here. What are some neighborhoods I should check out? Also, how soon should I go, since I'm looking for a lease starting in July?

Any other tips for house-hunting in Seattle will be much appreciated!
posted by quiet coyote to Home & Garden (14 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Welcome and congrats!
Someone posted a similar question in the last 3 months and the answers were great so look for that.
What you want exists but it is quite unusual and would require you to monitor listing obsessively and get very lucky.
You might want to rank your needs and be ready to compromise.
I'm sure you can find a sub-1500 dog friendly room in a shared house. I'm sure you can find a dog friendly non shared house for 2000 but maybe not in the University District.

Can you explain why you want to live near the University? If you are a single young adult there are other neighborhoods, commuting distance to the U. If you can give us a sense of what you're looking for (bar scene? Walkable food?) and to where you'll be commuting, we can suggest more specific places.

My neighborhood, Greenwood, is up and coming. It isn't cool enough for single young people though. But it is a great location for a lot of commutes. Small houses here are around 2000.
Seattle commuting is all about crossing I5 and taking bridges. I have a coworker that lives on the correct side of I5 and her commute is far easier than mine. But I only go into my work place two or three times a week and I can control that I don't have to drive during rush hour so it isn't thst big of a deal.
posted by k8t at 8:25 AM on January 23, 2016


Here's the previous question.
posted by k8t at 8:28 AM on January 23, 2016


Response by poster: Thank you for the welcome and the tips!

I don't need to live walkably close to UW or anything, I just would like to balance what I'm looking for with commute time. I'm fine with a commute; I just wanted to give you a sense of the radius so it can be minimized. I'm not sure of what my parking situation will be at work, so it would be nice if I was close to workable public transit, but I've heard it's a little iffy and things tend to get more expensive close to it.

Also, I don't need a whole house- I've tended to live in houses that have been broken into units, which would be ideal. A bedroom, bathroom, and living room is fine for me- I would even be happy with a studio or efficiency. I don't need a ton of space like in the previous AskMe.

I don't have many qualifications for the neighborhood. I'm a single 30-year old woman and am fine traveling to the bar/food scene. I do like to work at coffee shops so having those around would be a nice bonus, but I have a feeling that won't be too much of a problem.
posted by quiet coyote at 8:49 AM on January 23, 2016


U Dist is pretty nice to live in, even if you're not at all involved in the school. Very very walkable, I love it. I'm currently paying $1200/mo for a 2br apartment in a modest 6 unit building a couple blocks off University Avenue. I dunno if it's a pet-friendly place, I don't have any.

The coffee shop situation in the U is not bad either. There's a bunch of options.

It's slowly turning into a bunch of giant complexes though, there's like a dozen block-sized ones that have been being built over the past year or two and are starting to open up.

Commuting downtown via bus is about a half hour, that should change soon once the light rail extension opens in a few months. Where's your job?
posted by egypturnash at 10:08 AM on January 23, 2016


Response by poster: Sorry, I should have stated explicitly that I want to live near the U because that's where I'm working.
posted by quiet coyote at 10:12 AM on January 23, 2016


There are relatively fast and frequent buses between Lake City and the U district. Lake City is (or was, when I lived there) a total nothingburger of a neighborhood, but it may still be in your price range.

I'm surprised Greenwood is still potentially affordable-ish; when I last lived in Seattle everyone and everything from Ballard was getting pushed up to Greenwood, and I would have expected it to be completely unaffordable to mortals by now.

Greenwood is far and away a more interesting place than Lake City is, so if you're finding that prices in the two neighborhoods are comparable, go with Greenwood. I've got an irrational dislike for east-west bus commutes in Seattle — the buses tend to get stuck in traffic and move at a glacial pace — but it looks like the 48 bus line from Greenwood to the U district is relatively frequent and relatively fast these days. The only serious transit-related problem I found with living on the west side of the north end was that getting to downtown/capitol hill/points south of downtown and capitol hill takes forever. This is slightly less of a problem along the Lake City corridor, because there's express buses that go down Lake City Way to 125th and then take the freeway to downtown.

Keep in mind that there is no rent control whatsoever in Seattle — although there are prominent elected officials pushing hard for rent control, it's currently illegal at the state level. As such, wherever you live, expect your rents to go up dramatically year by year. The year I moved away, my landlord jumped the rent on my apartment from 800 dollars to 1350; they can do this, and they will do this, especially in neighborhoods that are getting "discovered" by the wealthy classes. (a quick craigslist search reveals that 1bdrms in the building I was living in for 800/month in 2012 are now going for 2100/month) So when you're drawing up your budget, keep in mind both what the rents currently are and also what they'll likely be a year or two from now, and make room in your budget for the possibility that you'll have move farther out each year.

Good luck out there.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:17 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


UW is getting a light rail station. It could open up more options for you.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:58 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


unfortunately, the light rail station that's opening soon is down by the stadium and the med center, so if you're a new incoming assistant professor in anything but the med school, light rail from the south isn't going to be useful until the station at Brooklyn st. opens a few years from now. Moreover, the closest affordable place along the light rail line is Rainier Valley (parts of Beacon Hill are affordable-ish right now, but they won't be affordable at all a year from now), and commuting on light rail from Rainier Valley takes significantly longer than taking the 48 or the 372 from Greenwood or Lake City does, even ignoring the leg of the trip from the stadium to the main part of campus.

If you were buying instead of renting, I'd recommend Beacon Hill or Rainier Valley, but as a renter the far north end probably makes more sense for you right now.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:08 AM on January 23, 2016


also, try to network with professors/grad students at the UW; sometimes they can point you to sub-market-rate housing that never hits craigslist, stuff run by comparatively friendly landlords that has been "in the family" for your department for years. If you're an assistant prof, your department really should be giving you some help here; the UW, like other state schools in expensive cities in states with education-hostile state legislatures, is having serious problems with recruitment and retention specifically because the rent is too damn high.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:19 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Greenwood - right now two bedrooms are 2500. The 48 bus from 85th to campus is about 40 minutes for me door to door.
There are bars and lots of walkable food.
posted by k8t at 11:24 AM on January 23, 2016


Besides Lake City, you might get check out Ravenna and Wedgwood, and perhaps along Sandpoint Way NE of campus. A quick Craigslist search turned up a a few options there. Wallingford and Fremont are worth checking but are more expensive. YCTaB's suggestion about networking within your dept is good. I found my first place in Seattle by checking listings at the Hub.
posted by sapere aude at 11:26 AM on January 23, 2016


Seconding the rent control issue. Lots of friends were happily living in places and then the rent close to doubles. Sometimes a new owner comes on the scene. Sometimes the owner realizes that with the boom, they can get away with these prices.
But I hear it happening all the time.
posted by k8t at 11:26 AM on January 23, 2016


If you are incoming faculty please feel free to private message me.
Also seconding retention. Assistant professors frequently complain about how challenging the housing situation is and how quickly it changed. Faculty that came in as recently as a decade ago even don't understand how bad it is.
İ can't afford to live in a good public school district, for example.
This retention issue is hot. There is a big discussion of unionizing versus letting the administration try to convince the state that us faculty could easily move elsewhere and that salaries need to increase.
posted by k8t at 11:30 AM on January 23, 2016


I live in Seattle and work at UW, but I commute by bike so focused my apartment hunt to neighbourhoods along the Burke-Gilman trail. I live in Ballard, which I would not recommend if you're planning on a bus commute. The 44 bus sucks.

Some random thoughts:

Your budget is possibly a little tight, although maybe not--we pay a little more than that for a huge (to me) 1-bedroom with a backyard. I think it's underpriced but don't tell my landlady that. I found that in Seattle and in other similarly hot rental markets where I have apartment hunted previously, I have been able to find great apartments for less money than I was expecting by being ok with older properties (not run down or unmaintained, just old) rented by individual landlords. Maybe I've just been lucky though.

I'm not the hugest fan of the U district as a place to live because there are So. Many. Students. (and all the associated issues that entails with landlords trying to pull fast ones on people). But plenty of people I work with live there and are fine with it.

My coworker, who just moved (in the U district) so that she could get a dog had a hard time finding a place that was ok with dogs. The place she ended up in had a huge list of breed restrictions as well. I can shoot her an email if you want to see if she has any pointers towards dog-friendly places in the neighbourhood.

One thing that is totally bizarre about renting in Seattle (compared to other places I have lived) is how quick everything moves. Tenants don't need to give more than a few weeks' notice and so landlords want to rent a place right away. When we came down from Canada we didn't even have US cheques in our name, so we rented a furnished place for 2 months while we got our bearings. I think that was the right decision.

The furnished apartment was in Greenlake/Ravenna so I took the 48 bus for a while before I got my bike. It was reasonably quick. It's also a walkable distance depending on where you are going on campus and how much you like to walk. I don't have a sense of the rent prices there but it might be worth checking out,

I don't have a car but I hear that as university campuses go UW isn't actually that bad for parking. But I have no idea how true that is...

Good luck, and hope you find somewhere suitably awesome to match your dream job!
posted by quaking fajita at 12:02 PM on January 23, 2016


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