Scott Green

I finally get why people become homeless. My search for a Chicago apartment has made a refrigerator box seem awfully inviting, provided it has central air and a view of the lake.

Finding a place in college was never this hard. When I was an undergrad I picked a real estate company, its sales staff showed me some properties, and I chose the one that smelled least like a train station restroom.

In Chicago this method doesn’t work, mostly because rent is so high I can’t afford the train station restroom itself. Instead I turned to Craigslist, the Web site that helps people find apartments and then stock them with prostitutes.

How the site works is, you browse listings of available apartments posted by realtors who put every adjective in capital letters. People, especially STUPID people, have a DIFFICULT time ignoring CAPITALIZED adjectives, especially if the adjectives are SUPERFLUOUS. So you find a listing like:

“MODERN ONE BEDROOM apartment in GREAT location across PAVED street from PICTURESQUE sanitarium. You’ll love it so much you won’t even notice the ELEVATED subway car that rumbles past your BROKEN window every seven EXCITING minutes!”

Most of these adjectives don’t even mean anything to me anymore. I know what’s up when I see a “SPACIOUS” place listed without its square footage, or a “RUSTIC” one with no specific mention of indoor plumbing.

Last weekend an ENERGETIC leasing agent named Gail gave me a tour of a building I found this way. After viewing a unit with a layout I told her I didn’t like, she showed me a penthouse.

“They’re a little more money, but they’re so different we don’t even have floor plans for them,” Gail said. She took me to the top level and opened the door of the penthouse to reveal: the exact same layout as the apartment we had just seen. “Isn’t it unique?” she asked.

After I explained how the units were identical, she offered to show another. “I think I know exactly what you want,” she said. She led me to the second floor and unlocked a door to: the exact same layout, but with the bedroom on the right instead of the left. She beamed, possibly because the moths in her skull kept fluttering into her cheek muscles.

She led me back to the sales office, and I steeled myself for her well-oiled hard sell. “Would you like to fill out an application today?” she asked, sliding some paperwork toward me.

“No, not really,” I said, reminding myself that, no matter how persuasive her pitch was, I did not want to rent there.

“Well,” she said, “it was nice meeting you.”

Ultimately I enlisted the help of a real estate broker named Abe Sayegh (pronounced “Smith”), a 2007 University of Illinois graduate whose main qualification is that he’s dating my sister.

Abe has shown me a ton of great properties and worked his butt off and done everything in his power to find my perfect place, so naturally I’m still looking.

But searching is still easier with Abe, since he worries about locating apartments that interest me and all I have to do is show up and find something wrong with them. I remain optimistic, though, because he thinks he’s found something perfect. It gets lots of sunlight and is very eco-friendly. Plus it’s corrugated. Its last tenant was a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer.

Scott is a RUSTIC third-year law student. Gail left him a voicemail the next day.