Yet Another Housing Update

This won't be the last housing update, because we still haven't picked a new place. I do know that there will almost certainly be three of us: Philip (current roommate), Mark (another engineer from my Church), and myself. Ever since returning from Christmas break we've been looking at places like crazy. We have until January 31st to move out of our current place, so we are starting to reach crunch time. We are down to the point where we need to just choose a place from the places we have seen. None of the places are perfect, but I think we're down to only having a few reasonable choices. A few of the big factors:

• Price: Housing in Santa Barbara is expensive. We were looking at 3-bedroom houses and apartments. The most expensive ones we saw were $2500 / month plus all utilities. There are plenty that were more expensive, we just filtered out anything more expensive than that. For reference the least expensive place we found was $2000 / month, but most were at least $2200.
• Size: Most of the places just weren't big enough for us. There was one apartment we looked at with a bedroom that was about 9'x8'. I don't consider that to be a bedroom. I consider it a walk-in closet with a window. A lot of the rooms we've seen just weren't designed to have a bed, a desk, and a dresser fit inside of them in their traditional orientations.
• Distance from Santa Barbara: The closer you are to downtown Santa Barbara, the more expensive housing gets. Things get noticeably less expensive as you move towards Goleta. For reference, the $2000 / month place is well into Goleta, but it is also the largest place we've seen (in terms of internal floor space) and is in excellent condition (not the case with all places). Unfortunately, the one person who cares the most about being close to work (because he bikes to work about 4.5 days out of the week) works right in downtown Santa Barbara. The better deals we've seen are well outside of his biking range.

Obviously we are going to have to strike some compromise. As soon as I know what the final verdict is, I will post something about it.