quarterclever:

OK, so I’m moving to Los Angeles to become an actress for grad school and I’m starting to look for an apartment and it’s incredibly frustrating. Because everyone is giving me completely different advice (that’s a good area of town, no that’s a terrible area you’re going to get shot and die!) and it’s such a big city that it’s hard to know where to start. So I’m turning to tumblr for help. So if you know anything about LA and have some advice, I’d really appreciate it. Both general advice and recommendations for specific apartment buildings are appreciated! Details of what I’m looking for are under the read more section.

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So I do not have LA-specific information, only “What worked for me when I was apartment-hunting in Austin a few weeks ago.” Smaller city, yeah, but I also didn’t know anyone there to start with. I assume you’ve seen WalkScore and Padmapper and found them not to be helpful?

One thing I found useful if you can get the address of potential places and your new work address is to type those into your transit system and see how long the commute is. A short-ish public transit commute was really important to me, and fortunately Austin’s transit system site has a transit planner that lets you see how long a particular bus ride is and how close you are to transit stops if you plug in two addresses. It looks like LA Transit also has such a thing!

This will help you organize potential places to live by transit distance and identify places that are workable even if they do not list their proximity to transit on their advertisements. Apartments.com is good for this, as are most places that are not Craigslist. I had zero luck with Craigslist ads because they never put on anything I needed to know (things like “are you pet friendly?” and “where are you located? Is it near transit?” and “what’s the actual rent?”). They just put on a lot of photos and flashy word graphics, which was not helpful to me. Maybe your area is different, though. 

One other thing I did was literally drive through the areas I was interested in and call people who advertised vacancies and ask what they had. I needed pet-friendly, so I mentioned that then. If they had something that might work for my price range and I had the time to stop by, why not see if it might work? I actually found my second-choice place this way.