In 2005, before I decided to move down to San Antonio, Texas, I attempted to find a decent apartment in Minneapolis as I am a city girl and I find country life rather boring. I was living on a farm in Wyoming/East Bethel (the area has 2 town names...If I were to mail a letter to someone I would put my address down as "Wyoming, MN", but if people ask me where I live, I would say "East Bethel"...strange, dunno why but that's how it is there) because I had lost my apartment in St. Cloud and had no where else to go. I wanted to go to Minneapolis as I had no desire to go back to St. Cloud as there are people there I never want to see again and St. Cloud is small enough that it is easy to run into anybody. So, I chose Minneapolis. I made many trips into the city to find an apartment, and what I saw was horrible.
And very expensive. I even tried to find a decent studio apartment.
What I found out is that $800 a month gets you a very rundown small studio apartment with no bathroom of your own in a very rundown building on the 8th floor with no elevator, and the building was built in 1920s, and it was not well kept up. There was one bathroom and one bathtub for the entire fucking building that was to be shared by everybody! EW! The slumlord let it go to hell. Oh, and I believe I saw some prostitutes living there...there were women there in very...skimpy clothes that I could practically see their ass and almost could see their nipples! Ew! I said, hell, no! I continued to make many more trips into Minneapolis to try to find at least a decent (I don't mind older buildings as they are well-kept up and clean and the people there are not nasty) one room studio apartment with a bathroom and a bathtub and shower of my own on the first floor for at least $500 or less. No such luck. All were $800 or even higher for just a crappy RUNDOWN studio apartment in buildings that I can clearly see violated fire regulations (I have a little bit of knowledge of fire regulations as my dad is a firefighter). I flat out refused to live in such shitholes. That's when I decided to just sit on my ass at the farm for almost a year and wait for the money in my bank account to grow so that I would have a few grand so I could afford to move to San Antonio, TX as their apartments there are decent and cost much less. My plan was successful and I am here now. Thank goodness, as I did not think I could tolerate one more fucking minute on that farm with all the 6 other crazy people there (drug addicts and human feral brats). I spent 11 months locked in my bedroom to protect myself cause I had nowhere else to go. I am currently paying $460 a month for a one bedroom apartment with a living room and a kitchen, bathroom, large walk-in closet, patio, etc and we even have two pools and we soon will have a new fitness room (the old one was adjacent to the old management office building that burnt down last year - I suspect arson). They are almost done building the new management building along with the new fitness room, and it is very big and very nice. We also have a tennis and a basketball court as well as a playground for the children. That's a hell of a lot more than I have EVER had before, even in St. Cloud. I paid $460/mo for a decent apartment there in St. Cloud but there was no pool or any of that awesome stuff. So, where I am living right now is so much more than I have ever had in my ten years of renting apartments. One thing...I just wish San Antonio wasn't so large. I AM a city girl, but I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so I am very accustomed to the size of Milwaukee, and it is half the size of San Antonio and still quite large enough for me. It's just harder to get around San Antonio on the bus due to its size. We definitely need subways or something here.
And in Milwaukee, I paid $360 a month for a
house in the ghetto on North 26th and Wells (Hear Again knows what I am talking about). Rent in Milwaukee is not quite expensive even for a decent apartment. I even have seen in the newspaper ads that a two bedroom flat on the south side on (I think) South 13th and National Ave costs $200 a month. It is run-down, but it shows how much cheaper it is in Milwaukee than it is in Minneapolis or other places. $200 a month for a rundown
two bedroom flat with appliances, your own bathroom and bathtub/shower and living room and kitchen and closets and everything else that a standard two bedroom apartment or flat would have, but is just run-down and is in the ghetto on the southside in Milwaukee compared to $800 a month just for a
one-room studio apartment without a toilet and a bathtub/shower of your own in Minneapolis. Huge difference. Even a decent apartment in Milwaukee would go for about $500 to $600 for a one to two bedroom or even a three bedroom depends on where you live in Milwaukee except the Lower East Side where it costs more, the rent there varies big time depending on what kind of apartment you want to live on in that area. My ex's mother had a three bedroom flat on Teutonia Avenue in Milwaukee. It is in the ghetto, but the flat was very well-kept, and had everything you needed. If you want a flat on the Lower East Side in Milwaukee (my favorite area!) it would cost you about $700 to $800 for a three bedroom flat (back then when I was still living there). My friend's mother rented a 3 bedroom flat on Farwell Ave for about $750 a month, and it was very nice, and the Lower East Side is, well, it attracts GLBT people and artists and hippie-like people and well, is very artsy-fartsy and there are a lot of vegetarians, punks, goths, alternatives, etc, living there and that sort of people. That's why I loved the Lower East Side so much. I did live on East Knapp on the Lower East Side for a while, but I did not pay any rent because I had just gotten out of foster care and I had demanded that the private foster care agency let me out of foster care and let me have a place of my own, so the foster care agency ended up placing me in a halfway-house type apartment (nice and very well-kept - it was run by nuns and other such people, and had elevators) and therefore I can't remember the rent there, I would assume it was $300 a month because it was a halfway house, but I had such a wonderful time living on the Lower East Side. Everything was so accessible, and I had tons of fun! I was able to socialize with people that had the same ideals, etc, and it was great. But if you want a very fancy apartment on Prospect Ave, it will cost you $1,000 to $2,000 a month, and the apartments there are very condo-type, and quite large (I have seen them as I had friends whose parents lives in those apartments), and had lots of security. And it is also expensive because it is on the lake or very close to the lake depending on where on Prospect Ave you want to live. Living near the lake was awesome...I could see Lake Michigan from my 8th floor apartment on East Knapp Street.
Madison is also kind of moderate in the rents, but is a bit more expensive than Milwaukee. But not ridiculously expensive like in Minneapolis or NYC. A decent one bedroom apartment on State Street in Madison goes for about $700 or so, but that area is very much similar to the Lower East Side in Milwaukee and that street does not allow any vehicles at all except for city buses and police and other emergency vehicles. If you want an apartment for lower than $700 I would suggest somewhere else in Madison away from State Street and away from the Capitol. There are suburbs in the Madison area as well that have moderate rent rates as well, and very decent. There is a major university and medical school too, UWM (University of Wisconsin - Madison). Their medical school is extremely excellent and it has a teaching hospital that saved my ex-roommate's life. She was born without an immune system (If I were to explain it, it would take up the entire page) and the doctors there saved her life. That's how good that medical school and teaching hospital there is, if you want to be a doctor. It also is an excellent university for any other majors as well, and it is a VERY LARGE university. (I don't like living in dorms, though, due to prior bad experience at the school for the deaf.) I was supposed to move to Madison with the same ex-roommate I just mentioned and go to UWM but that plan changed when I lost my apartment in St. Cloud and it fucked up all my plans.
I could not move there on my own after that because the rent there was a bit too much for me to handle on my own and I would need an roommate, and she was supposed to be my roommate, so I changed my plans a couple times and eventually chose San Antonio.
I have never lived in Chicago, and even though I grew up an hour north of Chicago (it is between one to two hours to Chicago from Milwaukee depending on where you live in Milwaukee - I grew up in the far south side of Milwaukee almost on the Oak Creek city limits line, about two blocks away), I rarely went to Chicago itself as I did not have much reason to go there but I have passed though Chicago many times so I know what it looks like and am somewhat familiar with it. But I believe the rental rates there are somewhat similar to that of Minneapolis, if not a little more.
I have also lived in Tampa, Florida, but I was a little girl when I lived there, and for a brief period of time. So I have no idea what the rentals there are now. I was only 7 years old when I lived there (one of the happiest times of my life!). My mom had separated from my dad, and had taken me and my sister and we moved to Tampa, but after a while she ran out of funds and could not pay the rent anymore as she did not have a job (she only had a 8th grade education - LONG ASS STORY and it was none of her fault) so it was not easy to find a job. So we moved back to Milwaukee and moved back in with my dad. The apartment we had in Tampa was right on the beach, and that was so fucking awesome.
I also have lived in other places even in several other states, but all of them were rural/country/desert/wilderness areas.
Oh, and I came very close to moving to Hawaii when I was 15. My older cousins (twice my age - they are actually my mother's cousins) on my mother's side of the family wanted to take me in and offered to take me in and even possibly adopt me, and my social worker was trying to arrange everything so I could move there. But even though my dad and his wife had given me up to the state, he had still SOME (about 5%) parental rights, and he refused to allow me to move there, as he hated my mother's side of the family, and went to court to block it.
If I had moved there at that time I would have ended up living in Ewa Beach, close to Honolulu. That would have been so fucking awesome. I am so mad my dad did not allow me to have that experience
and now I cannot afford to move there. Oh well. I don't want to move there now anyway as it is in the middle of the ocean, and quite inaccessible from the rest of the world. I am the kind of person that likes to be able to travel by train (because I can afford the train tickets, but can't afford the plane tickets) and if I moved to Hawaii now I would not able to travel at all anymore and be stuck on the islands. I would not like that.
I have heard that Hawaii is extremely expensive to live in if you are not living on a military base (which is why my cousins were stationed in Hawaii...my cousin Ricardo is in the Navy).
My good friend lives in Knoxville. California has pretty expensive tax.