New Girl Observation No. 2: Rent

Why is it so hard to move to a new town and find any information on the Internet about where to live, where to eat and what neighborhood feels like a neighborhood? All we get on the Google Search is a mishmash of bad websites, which feature one or two sentences about what’s up. Back in Colorado, I spent a fair amount of time trying to divine with the Internet gods over this information. I found sites like this one

My thoughts on neighborhoods will come later.

We did okay and ended up house-sitting for the winter. We engaged in the full-blown house hunt for a decent rental in the last three months and here are the results.

The cost of renting a house is Anchorage is no joke. There’s plenty of information out there about how the cost of living in Anchorage is only slightly higher than the national norm. (About 18 percent, according to the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation) The cost of housing is 127 percent higher than the average American city. What this means is that it’s difficult to rent a single-family house in Anchorage without promising your first born and $2,000 a month.

Like in every other city in America when you're house hunting, www.craigslist.com is your new best friend. And, as always you’ve got to be quick. I discovered a couple apps that allow you to specify certain search terms (Airport Heights, Government Hill, Downtown) and it, in theory, sends you an email when ads appear with this term. Here's one. I’m only slightly convinced that every ad came my way. If anyone has a better site, I'm still using Craigslist to find some furniture for the new abode. Keyword "vanity".

Also, check out http://www.weloveak.com/ The person that invented this was a genius. It’s another Craigslist-related program that maps out rentals listed on Craigslist. One problem is that it doesn’t update that quickly so you end up calling on the perfect one bedroom downtown and it’s been rented for two weeks and the guy is so sick of getting phone calls that he hangs up on before you can say ‘thanks, do you know of anything else in the neighbo…” click. Talk fast, friends.