Apartment Hunting in D.C.

Posts will be light this week given that I'm in D.C. looking for an apartment. However, if things keep going the way they went today, I may just end up staying in New York. Seriously, how - and why - do people live here?

I've been hearing for years about how there are so many great new buildings and hip areas in D.C. The area that I've heard the most about is Chinatown. When I first lived in D.C. in the summer of 1996, the Chinatown area of D.C. was, for lack of a better term, shitty. Dirty. Run-down. Wasteland. Then, around the time that the MCI Center Verizon Center came to the area, a bunch of new bars, restaurants and apartment buildings have been going up. Everyone I know from the D.C. has been telling me how much better the area is, and how it's the "hot" place to live these days. So I decided to spend my first afternoon in town looking at apartments in Chinatown.

I'm disappointed to report that Chinatown is still a hellhole. Sure, there's a number of new apartment buildings - however, the ones I saw were essentially glorified college dorms, with cheap, drab decor and a bunch of 1-bedroom apartments being turned into 2 (or 3) person homes. Even worse, much of the area is still filled with vacant and/or condemned buildings, and the streets are full of drunks stumbling around screaming at the numerous voices in their head. And the vaunted "hot" bar and restaurant scene? It's pretty much limited to two blocks, and includes at its heart none other than Fuddruckers.

So, um, yeah... Chinatown ain't happening.

Tomorrow I'll probably look in the Dupont/Logan Circle area, but based on Internet research as to available buildings and pricing, I'm not hopeful. That would pretty much leave me with Arlington (Virginia), which has some decent buildings but would essentially make me suburban, which I don't know if I have the fortitude to withstand for a year.

As much as I hate New York sometimes, it's amazing how just a few hours outside of it makes me wish I'd never left.