In the ghetto…
If Fort Lauderdale is the Venice of America, then the area I’ll be living in must be Rome…that is, the parts of Rome you don’t want to go after dark, where gangs of half naked children pickpocket you for crack money. Okay, it’s not that bad. In fact, the place I finally found to live is very cute! But the places I could have been living in just don’t bear mentioning. Oh, all right then…
Mom and I drove down Thursday morning to scope things out. I’d called up lots of different people I’d found on craigslist and set up appointments to view several places. I’d been told by one of the guys at Citrix that Hollywood was a good place to live. This guy was young, hip, and said he had a few tattoos, so I thought, sure! Hollywood must be where all the cool kids live! Kelly and I had even driven through the downtown area after my interview to check things out and I’d thought it was really cute. Having decided it was the place for me, it was the only area I’d bothered to research online.
When we got there we were a little early for our first appointment, so we went to downtown Hollywood and ate lunch at a Thai restaurant on the Broadwalk. I even took home a menu thinking that when I lived there it would be my new favorite place to get take-out. We walked along the shops, browsed in one of the many upscale galleries then got back in the car and headed for the first house, where my dream of Pad Thai dinners to-go would soon crumble like the stucco siding of the nightmare I soon pulled up in front of.
The house wasn’t very big, and yet there were four mailboxes attached to the side, suggesting that I had only one quarter of a rotting stucco mess to look forward to calling home. A young woman walked us along the side of the house to the rear where a side door was open. Inside, the place was even worse than I’d expected. I was prepared to settle on something small-ish, and not necessarily squeaky clean, but this place was a sty. The floor was a hodgepodge of uneven tiles in varying shades of white, the only window in the claustrophobic bedroom had been painted over, the bathroom was floor to ceiling pink with green mildew accents, and I can’t even remember the kitchen because I hadn’t bothered to examine it after seeing the state of the rest of the house. The only good thing was that it had a sorta decent yard, but just as I was thinking that the woman explained that I’d be sharing it with a “weird reclusive guy” who lived in the rear-most partition of the house. Ummm…no thanks.
After that I was looking forward to getting on with my list of appointments and finding that really great place that I just knew was out there waiting for me. After all, I had to find something and I have always been of the opinion that things will always work out. They just do…right? We were too early for our 4:00 appointment, so I drove us by a house that we were scheduled to see the next day. We couldn’t see a house number, but the house we guessed to be the right one didn’t look too bad! And best of all, it was within a short walk to the Broadwalk. I breathed a huge sigh of relief…until we drove one street over and saw a homeless shelter, several cars with plastic sheets covering smashed out windows, and several rather sketchy individuals who looked like they were making some rather sketchy transactions in broad daylight. Had the house been the Taj Mahal, it still would have received the parental veto.
It actually got worse from there. I’d been told that US-1 was the line of demarcation separating the nice part of Hollywood from the not-so-nice parts. Up until that point we had been looking at places east of that line–on the “nice” side. So, when I saw on the map that our next stop was west of US-1, I was more than a little wary. And as it turned out, for good reason. Once we drove across the highway it was immediately apparent that the crappy places we’d seen so far had nothing on the slums we were seeing then. I turned onto the street designated by the map and crept past an ambling man who was talking into what I thought was his cell phone, but what turned out to be his balled-up fist upon closer inspection. His business suit had thrown me off, but when I saw his lensless glasses it just confirmed that he was a crazy. Continuing on down the street we passed some apartments that looked like they were the remnants of what would have been a sub-standard Super 8 motel…40 years ago. There was random stuff strewn everywhere and some extremely scary-looking people loitering about (I sound so judgmental…they could have been very nice people). We found the house just passed the pay-by-the-hour Lucky Boy motel (no, I’m not joking). It was what would have been called a council house in England, although the council houses I saw at least looked halfway decent….this place was skid row. We didn’t wait around for our appointment; I called and canceled, and then we drove back to Fort Lauderdale and left Hollywood and my would-be Thai restaurant in the rear-view mirror.
We were staying in the plush Riverside Hotel right on Las Olas in downtown Fort Lauderdale with a view of multimillion dollar yachts cruising along the canal outside our window. When we checked in it was a bit of a shock after the squalor we’d seen earlier. It’s boggling to me, the disparity of wealth in the world…although on a world-wide scale I guess I have so much more than the majority of people in the world even if I don’t have a yacht. Hmm…makes you think. Well, that night I was pretty miserable, even though I wasn’t starving to death or dying of AIDS, although I feel ashamed about it now, looking back on it like this!
That evening Mom and I went to look at another house in Sunrise that was okay, but was in a rather dodgy-looking building with dimly lit hallways that conjured images from movies where young women usually end up in body bags. At the end of the day I was still no closer to finding a place to live.
I stayed up late that night poring through online ads, bookmarking potential places and checking locations to make sure nothing was even remotely close to Hollywood! Instead of worrying about trying to find the most fun place to live, I gave up and started focusing entirely on safe, habitable places to live. I found several prospects to call the next morning, and went to bed feeling physically exhausted and emotionally spent.
The next day things started looking up! I called up all of the places I’d found the night before and spoke to a guy who told me that although the listing I’d called about had already been rented, his agency had several other properties to show me if I came by their office. I was excited about letting someone else do the looking, so we went there first. The agent we talked to was very helpful and came up with a few places to show me, even though I was discouraged at first that he wanted to show me condos in converted apartment complexes. I was hoping to find something with character, and after having lived in apartments throughout college I was looking forward to some place a bit more private. At that point, however, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get in the car and be chauffeured to my next home…which is exactly how it happened as it turned out.
The first place he showed us was really cute. It was off a main road, so it’s convenient to get to I-95 and the Turnpike, but it’s secluded enough that you wouldn’t even know it. The condo he showed us was on the second floor, and when he opened the door my mom and I were both so relieved! I knew right away I could live there by virtue of the fact that all the walls were intact and there was no mildew, no evident crazy neighbors, and no scary halls in which attackers could lurk. Hooray! It was a good size for a one-bedroom–about 860 sq. ft.–with freshly painted walls and clean carpet. The kitchen was a little dated, but nothing that I couldn’t live with. The best part of all, and which probably sold me on the place, is the view. Just off the screened-in patio is a tree with bright magenta blossoms that frame the view of the lake that’s only about 15 feet away. It is so, so pretty! It’s a little bit pricier than Orlando…okay, maybe a lot. It’s more than double what I paid in Orlando (and even London for crying out loud) for an equivalent type of place, but I guess that’s just how things are down there. With signs of last year’s hurricane Wilma still widely apparent in missing signs, broken awnings, and ubiquitous blue tarps slapped on roofs all over the area, it’s not easy to forget that property insurance in this part of Florida is pretty darn high.
Although I was fairly certain I was going to go with the first condo the agent had shown me (after seeing a couple of other less favorable prospects), I had an appointment with another place that I wanted to see before I signed any papers. Mom and I went to one more place before calling it quits, which had a very nice apartment, but which lacked a washer and dryer or even just the hook-ups–amenities I had my heart set on. The trip was not in vain, however, because on the walk over to view the model, I saw my very first wild iguana! I didn’t even know we had those in Florida, to be honest. I’d seen pictures of them from when my family went on a cruise to Mexico last year, but I’d never seen one before. I had my camera in my bag and I was dying to whip it out and take a picture, but I decided against making an idiot of myself in front of the apartment rep. On the way back, I’d changed my mind and decided I didn’t care and I was going to take the picture after all, but the iguana was gone by the time we walked by again. Sigh.
After seeing as much as we could stand to see, I was finally ready to settle on the condo with the view. I went to the bank, cleaned out my account (and part of my British one), bought some money orders, and went back to the agency to sign the papers and hand over the deposit. After that it was a long drive back to Gainesville. I couldn’t even feel relieved about finding a place because now I have to worry about moving all my stuff back down…what little bit I have left after selling off most of the furniture I owned before going traveling last summer! Whoopsie. On the bright side, I’m not starving to death or dying from AIDS…could be worse!
Tags: Florida, Fort Lauderdale, moving, Travel
Administrator
Leave a Reply