I think your choice of location will be affected by two things:
your expected income
your lifestyle requirements
Prices are going down because of the unemployment and people having to vacate the more “trendy” areas. But it’s still a bit pricey to live near downtown Seattle or Bellevue. But it may be worth the sacrifice if you and your potential roommate are urban people. If you like being out and around, Capitol Hill, Belltown, and Lower Queen Anne are the places to be, however overpriced they are. The University District is cool too. Downtown Bellevue tends to get “empty” after 6:00PM, not much night life. One issue I find most irritating though, parking. If you have cars you’ll have problems in these areas (and Seattle proper in general) unless the building you live in provides it.
Ballard, Fremont, Wallingford, Northgate, Shoreline, etc. are what I classify as the closest “bed-room” communities. They’re close enough to Seattle to be cool, but there isn’t necessarily a lot going on in those areas after 6:00PM.
If you’re a homebody, then all the out-lying neighborhoods have something to offer. Yeah, there are areas to avoid, and yeah Lynnwood is sort of “trailer” as are Kent and Auburn. But if you’ve lived in places like that you probably won’t notice anything.
There seems to be an invisible East-West band that confines the better places; includes Alki/West Seattle through Seattle, Bellevue, and Issaquah. North of South of this band gets progressively “trailer”. Tacoma has some nice areas, but as you get closer to the military bases it tends to get trashier.
Probably the best thing to do is pick one of the outer-lying neighborhoods, live there for a limited time, and explore the area to see where you’ll eventually want to land…
On Wednesday, I heard back from an apartment property I’d been in touch with, and the good news is we’ve got a place to live. :happy dance: The place is in Renton, one of the first neighborhoods we looked at. We’ve got a two bedroom, one bath, 880sq. ft. place, which is roughly 150sq. ft. bigger than my parents’ place (where I’m living now). It should be plenty of room for the two of us.
I’ve got about a bajillion other move-related details in my head, but I’ll spare you all.
Thanks again to everyone who posted. Your input has been invaluable.
Renton huh? Just ahead of the curve. That is the slogan Renton is using for a series of really annoying radio commercials. I work in Renton (the big building on the south shore of Lake Washington, we pop out a brand new 737 every day). Not a bad place to live except for the traffic.
If you plan that tour on a Friday or Saturday, I’d love to join you if you will have me. I am pretty flexible, on most Saturdays especially.
In any case, I think this is the time to plan a PNWDopeFest to welcome Auds and KK. But I planned the last one from here, and I would like to retain what is left of my hair…so can we just go to TD from T again, or Bucca de Beppo? Alternately, someone from Seattle who actually has some knowledge about where to go and so forth could spearhead the “project?”
Just so you know, we won’t be in Seattle right away; we’ll be making a pit stop (jeepers, I almost typed “pot stop”) in California for a couple of weeks. We’ll be in WA around the 20th. And I think we might need some time to get acquainted with our neighborhood and get our apartment together. Me and KK should talk about it first, but tentatively, maybe we could do the tour in early June?
And Scotti, we’d have to insist on you being there.
It’d be great to have a PNWDF, too. May I ask that we wait until midsummer, or have a second one later? silent_rob will be visiting us in July, and it’d be great if he was able to join us. I hope that’s not asking too much, but I’d really like for him to attend a 'fest while he’s here.
I think we would get more people together if we only do one DopeFest, so why don’t we plan it for sometime late July? I think that is when Rob is planning on coming, last I heard anyway. But the Seattle tour we could do much earlier, as soon as you are ready. With Cervaise and katrina’s permission, of course, seeing as how THEY are the tour guides!
Thank you guys and gals so much for offering to show us around. I really like the idea of a tour, since the last time I visited (man, it must’ve been seven or eight years ago), my folks and I were only in town for a few days, and we didn’t get to see much. Went by a lot of cool looking stuff, though.
