A New Lease On...

In a twist on the New Year's phrase, we took out a new lease -- literally -- on Friday. We don't move until July 1, but in Ithaca's overheated rental market, the good places seem to go early. Ithaca is a double college town, with very little else to put it on the map, and the housing market is absolutely dominated by students. Whereas some 70% of America's real estate is owner-occupied, with the other 30% rented, Ithaca reverses that with some 70% rentals. And amenities like laundry hookups -- essential for us with two boys in cloth diapers, but quite rare in the student-oriented market -- seem to disqualify 90% of properties from our consideration before we even look at them. Last year we started looking for a new place in January, and never found the right one. This Fall, we really only saw one place that appealed to us enough to overcome the inertia of our current home, and we decided to take it.

Certainly there are a lot of good things about our current home, and we have been happy here. We have wonderful upstairs neighbors, and have become accustomed to the building's quirks and foibles. But the absentee landlords resist any improvement that isn't legally required of them, unless it will make them more money in the short-run, and I worry about the condition of this 19th-century house in another couple of years. By contrast, our new landlords won a community award a few years ago for re-modeling and beautifying a vintage apartment building, and the complex we'll be moving into looks like their bid to win the award again.

The unit is an increase in space for us, has lots of storage (we've never been able to fully unpack in our current home), has tile in the bathrooms, and the boys' bedroom will be removed from both the noisy kitchen and the living room. It shares a backyard that should be a nice sheltered place to play. The only scary feature is a free-standing flight of exterior stairs that initially gave us fits as we imagined toddlers falling between the rails. But the landlords will help us put up safety netting, and I realized that they are well constructed and situated for keeping them ice-free. Overall, we are optomistic that this place will be worth the increased rent and the trouble of moving. 

Posted by Matt on 1/01/2006 11:02:00 PM