South Circular Road, Dublin, Ireland; August 1999-June 2000; My share: 375 Euros/month
When the cab driver dropped me off at my new home, he warned me about the neighborhood. “Oh, no, love, you don’t want to live here,” he said. “It’s not safe.” He pointed down the road to Dolphin’s Barn, rough and drug-ridden. I was 20, nervous, and excited. I asked if he thought I’d be okay. “Oh, love, I’d move if I were you,” he replied. I’m glad I didn’t. I shared the narrow house for 11 months with an Italian guy named Corrado who played the organ at the church down the street, and got perfumed love letters from a girl in Hungary; a German heartthrob named Jens who is the only person I know who looked good in leather pants, and two French guys, Christian, a broody smoker of Gauloises who gave up on trying to learn English, and Benj, fussy and rigid, who made a cleaning schedule for all of us to maintain, and cooked cassoulets that bubbled in the pot for hours. We had family dinners once a week. At the first one, all of us strangers, we talked about the stereotypes of each housemate’s home country. What they say about leaving a place in order to know it turns out to be true.

Baltimore Ave, Philadelphia, Pa.; September 2000-May 2001; My share: $600/month
I shared this off-campus row house with six others during my senior year of college, including the Irish boyfriend I brought back to the U.S. with me. It was a good block to live in, and was away from the buttoned-up soon-to-be investment bankers that dominated the college where I went and mostly hated. I logged a lot of hours on the stoop. Late in the spring, closing in on graduating, I sat on the stoop with a housemate in the early mornings, and watched the Amoroso’s bread trucks drive by as they made their roll deliveries for all the steak and cheese subs in the city. We went to bed those mornings when the light shifted to gray.

Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Mass.; November 2001-June 2002 $0/month
After graduating, I lived at my grandmother’s sixth floor apartment in Cambridge. It looked over the Charles River, which curved below her balcony and the Boston skyline some miles away. There was a garbage chute. It was not a comfortable time (I was dumb, young and looking for jobs), nor was it a comfortable place to live in—in the sense of being surrounded by objects that were not my own. There were rules. The beds, for example, were not for lovemaking.

Sunset Street, Mission Hill, Boston, Mass.; June 2002-August 2002; My share: $525/month
The summer I started working, I sublet a room in Mission Hill with a couple whose names I don’t remember and a music theorist named Kyle who came from the South and was gentle and strange and drank for three days straight, while pacing in his room, talking to himself, listening to Smashing Pumpkins and Eric Satie. We watched The Seventh Seal together and, on moving out, he handed me a letter which was filled with kindness and concern, and made me grateful. I came home from work and drank tea, sweating in my bedroom while the sun went down behind the buildings.

Hillside Street, Mission Hill, Boston, Mass.; September 2002-December 2003; My share: $325/month
It started out as a post-college dream: A big, old beautiful house with a swing on the front porch, and flowers and vines that spread and wrapped. A huge kitchen, a dishwasher!, a back porch, a living room with huge windows, long drapes, a sweeping staircase. A friend of a friend lived there, he and five others, seven of us all told. I had the smallest room, tiny, with a dormer window. Some of the original roommates moved out, new ones arrived, dynamics changed. Things soured when I found out that one of the housemates, a grad student at the Harvard School of Public Health, had been taping sexual encounters with unknowing women and holding screenings for the rest of the guys in the house.

Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Mass.; January 2004-March 2004 $0/month
I was back at my grandmother’s for a stretch of strange months after fleeing Mission Hill. I don’t remember when the front door of the building was locked, and you had to be let in by the doorperson, but I do remember coming home often, late, and drunk, and standing in front of the sliding door, knocking to wake up the doorman, who was asleep in his chair at the desk.

Amory Street, Cambridge, Mass.; April 2004-September 2008; My share: $700/month
I moved in with my greatest friend Jenny. The two-bedroom place just outside Inman Square was on the first floor of a typical Boston triple decker. The rhinoceros of a landlady lived with her cowering husband on the third floor, and her screaming tirades could be heard even in the winter with the windows closed. Jenny and I laughed a lot of the time, had short, spontaneous dance parties which were a specific joy, and went out together every Monday night. I sat on the toilet while Jenny showered, and vice-versa, and we’d chat about our days in the steam. We called it a Boston marriage and made a pact that some day, if we end up widowed, we will share a home again which will involve secret underground tunnels.

Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan, N.Y.; October 2008-January 2009; My share: $900/month
My young brother Sam, a senior in college, had a vacant room in his apartment. I rented it out for some winter months, desperate and scared, with a mattress on the floor, having quit my job of seven years, and having no idea what was next. His other roommate, a high-end cocktail waitress, came clomping home in high-heeled boots at five or six in the morning, and I loathed her the only way you can when someone wakes you up again and again in a time when sleep does not come easy.

Pembroke Street, Somerville, Mass.; April 2009-June 2010 $1,150/month
This was on the third floor of a crumbling old Victorian with slanting ceilings and good breezes. I loved this apartment, and had it all to myself. A professional jazz pianist from France lived below me—the music trickled up the stairs, and it was a pleasure to hear him practice. I ran into him on the porch one afternoon. His wife had had a baby just days before, and he looked tired. I told him congratulations, and asked how it was going. He shook his head and said, “It is difficult. The baby, it looks like a rodent.”

Putnam Avenue, Cambridge, Mass.; June 2010-now; My share: $625
I share this small one-bedroom with my partner Jonah in Cambridgeport, near the river, near Central Square and all the ne’er-do-wells, near Harvard Square, and just across the BU Bridge from Fenway Park. We cook meals, and talk about moving, but it’s hard to leave: There are parks and good neighbors, and we can walk most places that we need and like. Our rent is low for this part of town, and we can’t afford to live in a bigger place around here. It feels like the first home of any real permanence of my grown-up life, a small place with plumbing troubles and bright walls and good smells. There is the sense, already, that once we do leave, this place will be looked back on as favorite and best.

Nina MacLaughlin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She’s working on a book about leaving journalism to be a carpenter to be published by W.W. Norton.

Oshawa, Ontario: $850/Mo. for Room and Board
The first place I lived that wasn’t my parents’ home was an on-campus residence at Durham College. The first suite I was put in was open concept, which meant there was a 1.5-meter high by 1.5-meter wide dividing wall between two beds. My suitemate was a girl in an “Intro to Design” program who stayed up until 5 a.m. drinking (often times my gin), watching Friends, and sleeping with her boyfriend. This sucked. I stayed in that room for two months, and then moved to a private suite with a girl in my program, who really loved her parents. She’d call them every day, spend two hours on the phone with them, and then drive home every weekend to see them. The move was probably the worst decision I could have made.

Living in the new building put me closer to my hard partying engineer/sports management/dental hygiene friends. And while I had way more fun in the new building playing drunk-parking-lot football, drunk soccer and mastering Kings, I drank all my money away and ended up moving back in with my parents with a huge amount of debt, and a 30-pound beer baby.

Billings Bridge (Ottawa), Ontario: $0
While living at my parent’s house, I met a guy who had a pretty sweet apartment near Billings Bridge in Ottawa, about an hour walk from downtown. The best part was that it wasn’t my parents’ house, and was near a bus line that brought me to work. I probably spent four days a week at his house, and was all set up with my own pillow, toothbrush, and loofah. Sometimes I would stay for a week if he was away, and watch the cat until he got back. He asked me to move in with him, but I was allergic to his cat, didn’t want to spend more money on Claritin, and honestly, just liked having my own space. So we broke up.

Val Tetreau (Hull), Quebec: $620/Mo. One-Bedroom
I spent a year and a half at my parent’s house after coming back from the Dirty Dirty (this is what people call Oshawa), getting out of my massive school/liquor debt, and then found a super cute one-bedroom in Hull. Ottawa is also called the National Capital Region, which includes Gatineau, and Gatineau/Hull is on the Quebec side, which makes it a safe haven for drinkers under 19 (and pretty much all acts of debauchery). The apartment had tile floors and a washer and dryer, plus a cute little patio and was a three-minute walk to the beach. I was also about a 15-minute bus ride from the bars and work. The terrible part was that my landlord lived in Montreal and travelled for work, so any repairs I needed (dryer stopped working, door fell off cabinet and a ridiculous influx of earwigs from the poorly sealed windows) were not addressed. I got really tired of being poisoned by RAID, and having to sneak into my parents house to do laundry. I terminated my lease and moved in with a very good friend of mine.

Hintonburg (Ottawa), Ontario: $995/Mo. Two-Bedroom
I was so excited to live with someone I actually liked, and was anxious to get away from the earwigs and have a fully functioning washer/dryer again that I didn’t follow any of my good senses. I saw the new apartment after my friend—let’s call her Mary—had already seen it. Mary told me it was fantastic, and that it was a great location between both our work places. When I went to visit the place, the power was out from a storm, so I couldn’t really see the bathroom/shower stall very well, and then the basement where the washer and dryer was located was pitch black.

What I could see was the huge, bright kitchen, two parking spots, backyard, and lovely front porch. So I said, “Sure, let’s do this—it seems good enough.” We moved in about a month later, and the problems started immediately. If our neighbors upstairs used hot water, our shower was freezing cold, and if they used cold water our shower was scalding hot. I immediately started noticing a new and horrifying bug called a house centipede that ran super fast and crawled out of the walls. The basement was a shit show of horrors: Its walls leaked when it rained, and the ceiling was so low that I had to crane my head sideways to use the W/D, and I always sported a headscarf as I was afraid of spider/house centipede attacks.

But the absolute worst thing was the upstairs neighbors. They screamed at each other non-stop and we heard everything. The woman was unemployed, and when not screaming at her boyfriend, would smoke darts with a fury—the smoke coming into our apartment because of shared vents. She was very confrontational. I planted flowers in the front after speaking with her about placement, and she screamed at me for doing it wrong (it looked fabulous, I must say). She would yell at Mary and me about where we put the garbage can, where I put my bike, and about our cars being parked in a manner restricting her access to the back yard. And if she wasn’t yelling at us about something, she would become nice, stand out front and engage in conversation with us about whatever the topic of the day was, and then would get mad if you told her you had to leave.

It got so bad that Mary and I had to strategically plan when we were leaving and coming back to the house. We would listen for movement upstairs, pray that she stayed up there, and then flee the property as quickly as possible. We would sometimes drive by the street and see if she was outside, and then if she was, we’d go shopping or hang out in the park until the coast was clear. We did basically everything we could to avoid her. We talked to our landlord about the smoke and the yelling, which he then talked to our neighbor about. That made everything worse, but the rent was so cheap so we ended up staying for 16 months until we couldn’t deal with the craziness anymore. I have to admit, I had some excellent parties, I was super belligerent and was pissed at the crazy lady, so I would have my friends over after the bar and sit out back and in the house until 6:30 a.m. shouting, drinking, and acting like jerks. We also had a very successful bachelorette party, and an awesome welcome home party for my friend who was back from overseas. If I had better neighbors, the parties probably wouldn’t have been as legendary.

Centertown (Ottawa), Ontario: $644 Studio
I love my current place. There is absolutely nothing I can complain about. The neighbors are quiet, and respectful of my privacy. I live within a 25-minute walk to work, 30 minutes to my favorite bars, and a 15-minute walk from my best friend’s house. It’s somewhat small, but that’s fantastic for me because when I have space ,I become a clutter bug. The bathroom is nice and big, and I’ve a wee fire escape of my own. Another big plus is the huge amount of kitchen cupboard space, which is floor to ceiling and deep. There is a washer and dryer in the building one flight of stairs below me. It’s only a 20-minute drive from all my family members (we like our distance). I pay for electricity and heat, which is no big deal since the cost is minimal, and I also pay for parking which is only $25 a monthe. I’m hoping to stay here for at least a year or more. I’m only on a month to month lease so if I choose to up and drop my responsibilities, I can (unlikely, but so romantic).

Natalie lives in Ottawa with two plants she will surely neglect and kill. Follow her on Twitter @hunezna for deep thoughts on work, food and general Ottawa amazingness.

Where have you lived, Colleen Hubbard? 

Flynn Lane, Middletown, Conn., $0/mo. (I was a kid; rent unknown)
The town where I grew up was a college town, but I lived in the farm part and not the college part. My family had been farmers there and kept subdividing the farmland until my mother and her siblings and their cousins and their kids all had these little plots along the same road. We played in the woods and had lots of pets.

Daddario Road Emergency Shelter, Middletown, Conn., $0/mo (I was a kid; also, it was a shelter)
My mother went bankrupt and our house was foreclosed upon, so my mother and my siblings moved into what was called “emergency housing”—a homeless shelter in the midst of a public housing project. There was a playground and a basketball court, and a pecking order among the kids, who knew how much each family paid for their place. As the kids in one of the few emergency housing units, we paid $0, and everyone knew it. All the beds were covered with rubber mattress liners. We made our mother drive us to another neighborhood to pick up the bus. 

Pamecha Pond, Middletown, Conn., $0/mo. (I was a kid; rent unknown)
The day we went to look at this apartment by a pond, my mother’s boyfriend took us out back to look at the pond and warn us never to go into it because kids could drown there. The day before we were supposed to move in, after we had moved all of our belongings, there was a fire and the building was destroyed, killing one child and disabling another. We stayed in emergency housing for a while more, then moved briefly into an apartment complex with a pool.

Grandma’s Apartment, $0/mo. (I was a kid; grandma didn’t charge rent)
After funds ran low, we moved in with my grandma, and I shared with my sister the room that my mother and her sister lived in when they were growing up. We each had our own closet and there was a mirror held to the wall with nails covered by ’60s  starbursts. It felt very fancy. My aunt’s high school uniform was still in her closet.

Allen Street, Buffalo, N.Y., $600/mo. (my share)
I lived with my boyfriend in an apartment that was managed by the nephew (or great nephew) of The Great Thurston, a famous magician. He was really nice, a talented artist, and the guy who would never feed our cat when we traveled. He said it was because he’d then have to cat-sit for another tenant he didn’t like, but I suspect he just didn’t like cats. He kept a significant portion of our deposit because our cat had left imprints of his body in orange fur in the rug. The other tenant, the disliked cat owner, sent me cat-related holiday cards after I moved and my cat had died.

Greenwich Street, San Francisco, Calif., $1650/mo.
When I moved to San Francisco alone and got a job that paid more than either of my parents had ever made, I was certain that I was rich. Imagine my surprise when a banker later told me that I technically qualified as low income under certain city standards. This was a one bedroom I couldn’t really afford, and because of a boyfriend and roommates and a shared bedroom with my sister, I had rarely slept in a place alone, so I thought that every creak meant that someone was breaking into my apartment. The landlord was an elderly woman who was convinced that I was renting out my parking spot to other people, so whenever a friend parked in my garage, she would lean her head out the window and shout “Who is this one?”

Liberty Street, San Francisco, Calif., $1325/mo.
The woman who lived in this studio before me had a magnificent sense of style and was a crafter who sewed her own curtains. I have/am not. I moved out when the lease lapsed. I wish I’d brought her hand-made curtains with me.

Hinton Avenue, Charlottesville, Va., $895/mo.
A funny thing about moving into a place temporarily is that some people totally move in and other people do not. I do not. I knew I wasn’t going to stay in Charlottesville forever, so the apartment had an air of shabbiness that I never eradicated. It was also pretty expensive for a writer and part-time cheesemonger.

Farm, Normandy, France, $0/mo.
I worked on a farm in Normandy as part of an off-brand WWOF experience. In exchange for day labor, I had a room to myself while three fellow laborers who were college students from Oxford stayed in the room next door, which had bunk beds. They watched U.S. television series on a laptop and made “American-style” chocolate chip cookies with weird, small French chocolate chips that never tasted right.

Buchanan Street, San Francisco, Calif., $1250/mo.
I returned from grad school and France totally broke and with nothing but a backpack and broken dreams. But a dude friend offered me a spot in his three-bedroom house for $1,250 a month. I will probably spend the rest of my life paying him back for inviting me to move in with him during what was pretty much an impossible time to find an apartment in San Francisco, especially without a job. He also gave me a blanket and a cup.

California Street, San Francisco, Calif., $1650/mo.
That a $1650 one-bedroom apartment felt like a deal is also pretty terrifying, but such is San Francisco right now. I tell people that the building is full of ballerinas and gay men, but that’s not exactly true. There’s a chocolate salesman as well.

Colleen Hubbard is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She is waving across the courtyard to the chocolate salesman right now.

We have all lived places. Where have you lived, Alex Leitch?

Moulton Hall, McMaster University, Hamilton ON, $1300/mo including tuition and food.
Housing 600 19 to 21 year old women, Moulton smelled like a lipgloss factory explosion. My roommate and I were lucky: The room was big enough to house four students, which it would do just a year later, and had two windows, one of which looked over a forest path. I set up a motion-activated webcam to watch the path, which resulted in hundreds of hours of underlit footage of undergrads making out, and about fifteen minutes of them losing their minds at a lost deer. There was a residence requirement of a meal plan twice the price of real food, with no actual food available which had not first been deep-fried. The possibility of living here more than a year never crossed my mind.

Sussex St, Hamilton ON, $425/mo inclusive.
A second floor, two-bedroom flat with not a single right angle anywhere in its construction. The light in the apartment was beautiful, so I signed on without checking the basement. The laundry was down there, through a nasty cellar door with a habit of concussing people and past a load of spiders. My roommate loved house music and romantic twists of fate. I loved not being surprised by large, strange men at odd hours. This personal preference turned out to be a dealbreaker when, after dark one night, I answered a pounding at the front door to a mountain of a private investigator. He brought with him a lady wailing in German who turned out to be my roommate’s long-lost mother. As he shoved past me and my grimy baseball bat, declaring the absolute legality of his entrance to our home, I decided to find somewhere else to live. The laundry situation provided a useful excuse.

Cline Ave N., Hamilton ON, $400, inclusive.
From upstairs to downstairs: Cline St. was a basement set into a hill in an eight-person share with huge windows and no real insulation. My girlfriend and I moved here in terror of coming out to our indifferent roommates. Our rooms were enormous, and the initial promise of a semi-private laundry room bath-and-shower was great for an art student budget. Then the toilet exploded, changing the room to a reluctant-at-best laundry. Advantage to single shower between seven women: experiment with every shampoo and bath product on the market! Disadvantage: Dealing with our upstairs housemates, ever, for any reason, much less the division of washroom cleaning duties. Upstairís rolling battle over utility bills came to a head when one of them, for reasons known only to her strange and private gods, shut off the furnace.

In February.

In Canada.

The water pipes miraculously survived, but our housemate relationship did not. We moved the moment the ground melted.

Despite the melodrama, this was my favourite apartment and best year of college. I recall it warmly when I forget to close a window in winter.

Lower Horning Ave, Hamilton ON, $325/mo inclusive of cable internet and laundry.
A three-bedroom, one-shower, 450-square-foot apartment in the basement of our landlord’s house, located next to a Mennonite church which our landlords faithfully attended. We referred to Lower Horning as The Blue Cube for our series of art-school ragers, as the landlord decided an institutional blue colour provided most bang for his renovation buck. His renovation buck sadly did not extend to proper soundproofing for his ventilation ducts.

The air vent thing shouldn’t have been a problem, but the poor man had for-sure never had a case of the Art Students before. The Blue Cube quickly came to house five: me, my new girlfriend, my old girlfriend, her new boyfriend, and her best friend. Normal people would have moved. Art students are broke. There was a rental boom in the surrounding area that doubled local prices, so for $325 a month, we stayed put. I, as Bad Roommate, routinely used my basement window as a door to avoid my housemates and discussions of chores.

This rental lasted two years and quite audibly took the landlord’s marriage with it.

Universitè de Montrèal, Montrèal, QC, scholarship.
A single room with sink all to myself, on the eighth floor of dorms, in Montrèal in summertime, with no roommates whatsoever. Heaven! The room itself was tiny and probably had roaches. It was hard to tell, since I was never in it: I was out learning dirty bar french and dirtier ASL while walking all over the city. I made friends quickly because itís easy to be friends with people when you know you’re leaving. Thunderstorms saw ten of us piled into a single room, watching John Waters, reading Dorothy Allison, eating cherries and cheese curd, finding out how to be young and gay and strong in French. I was in love with Montrèal like it was a person, so thoroughly in love with the city that it was impossible to go, but my family needed me, and so I went.

Woodbine Heights Blvd, Toronto, ON, $400/mo inclusive.
After school there was nowhere to go and not much to do, so I moved home to I wait for life to come find me. I paid the mortgage in the meantime, sometimes food, sometimes emergencies. My parents are artists. The relationship has never been clear, who is raising whom, who is protecting whom, or from what.

Gerrard St, Toronto, ON, $750/mo inclusive
A former parlour in a former wealthy district, this gigantic split-level single room had its own functional fireplace and an upstairs mezzanine. The kitchen was tiny, the ickle bathroom perfect after a minor renovation. I loved the space. The space was perfect. The rent was perfect. The fireplace was perfect. It was all perfect, except, of course, for the location. Someone was stabbed or shot enough for a public bleed-out on the corner every two weeks. There was a constant presence of anti-abortion protesters across the street yelling at the clinic next door. The junkies, everywhere, always. My personal last straw was a man standing outside my enormous, lightly-barred, heavily-draped windows at 2 a.m., setting string raccoon snares and talking to the critters he was catching. The shrieking was unbelievable, the neighbours unfortunate, so when the recession hit and my parents needed help, I gave up my freedom and moved home again.

Woodbine Heights Blvd, Toronto, $600/mo inclusive.
Two bedrooms, a beautiful garden and private studio in the basement, no mumblers, little violence, about a 40-minute walk or an unreliable bus ride from the nearest anything at all other than the industrial park. This was an acceptable compromise in the face of a brutal recession, but I spent most of the eight months sleeping on various couches in the core of the city—and sometimes in other countries—rather than in the suburbs. When the mortgage was paid down enough to leave, my cat had gone a little feral. She appears to enjoy upsetting my mother with gifts of most-of-a-goldfinch.
The garden is still beautiful.

Euclid Ave, Toronto, $1053/mo inclusive.
The second and third floor of a house, one faux-clawfoot bathtub, in-apartment laundry, dishwasher. My roommate and I moved here after I more or less lived on his bachelor-pad couch for six months. The two levels are separated by stairs, and my bed is in the peak of the roof. There is a skylight which I can clamber out to watch the sky, the CN Tower, and the other hipsters writing music on their roofs. There are many trees. The landlord pays for burnt-out lightbulbs. Although I am still The Worst at being a roommate, this is working out, right up until the next one, and the one after that.

Alex Leitch runs an arts lab in Toronto, ON. You can follow her attempts to build a gun that shoots rainbows at bustedsneakers.tumblr.com. The remains can be found at alexleitch.com.

Granville Ave, “Fort Granville”, Winston-Salem, N.C, $325/mo
That would be a lovely three-bedroom North Carolina house on a hill with a full wrap-around porch, porch swing included. Our landlady, Kay Everhart, lived right next door, and the two properties were connected by a walkway out back. Every month, my roommate Steve and I would argue as to whose turn it was to deliver the check, though, because that path wound through a quarter of an acre of iridescent wind chimes, glass orbs on pedestals, and pinwheel clusters. It was like an oppressive, Hallmark version of Oz. Someone always came back with PTSD.

Decrepit Trailer, Rosebud Indian Reservation, S.D. $0/mo
It belonged to the only white kid in town, who drifted in about seven years earlier and never drifted out. He had been accepted into a firefighter training program and was wrapping up his tenure as a bagger at the only grocery store in town when I met him, and he offered me a place to crash. Cats came and went as they pleased, which was hard because I’m a little allergic. I was going to clean his bathroom for him—but the tub had rotted out of the bottom of the trailer. I cooked him fried chicken every night, his favorite, and he was incredibly grateful. One day he just disappeared.

Slaughterhouse, Granite Creek, Jackson, Wyo. $0/mo
Though “slaughterhouse” might be a little off-putting initially, this is by far the most extravagant real estate in which I’ve ever lived. Remember A River Runs Through It? That movie was filmed right outside the door to my cabin! All of that unspeakably beautiful wilderness, right there. I would hike to work, at a hunting camp down the road, mostly doing dishes. Being put up in the old slaughterhouse was included in my room and board.

Mansfield Ave, Hollywood, Calif. $650/mo
Steve and I ended up finding each other again and being roommates in Los Angeles! Moving into my first apartment in a big city was a delight. I got to learn how to parallel park a moving truck, deflect the advances of hookers, and make friends with the (I’m assuming homeless) neighbors all in one day: A guy who wheeled his cart by the front of our house and stopped to contemplate our moving boxes. The tinfoil helmet he had made for himself glinted in the Southern California sun. “Welcome to the neighborhood! Just a word of advice—look out for the weird ones.” We thanked him. He turned on his boom box and wheeled into the sunset.

Laidley St., San Francisco, Calif. $800/mo
I moved into a basement in a weird part of town where no one my age lived. It was a converted storage space that you entered by going into the laundry room under the building, walking to the end of the line of washers, opening a smaller, secret door, and stepping inside. The fog slowly rolled over the hill behind me and fell in cataracts in front of my tiny window beginning at dusk every night. I would see tourists walking down the street regularly, seemingly pointing directly into my window, but really pointing up and beyond—the houses on the block I lived in were modern masterpieces, featured in the walking tours of several guidebooks. And just a quick jaunt up the fire escape on a cool crisp night, I kept a cooler of wine always stocked and a yellow lawn chair to look down on the entire blinking San Francisco skyline. Last I heard, that basement (without a kitchen) now rents for $1300.

Hillgirt Circle, Oakland, Calif. $925/mo
Two whole floors, a huge office, a cute bedroom, a giant patio, plenty of parking, all in a happenin’ part of town for a price that didn’t kill me- what could go wrong, right? First, rats got in. And raccoons began living in the walls. And our landlord upstairs gutted his living room and turned it into a massive hydroponics operation. We sought ways to legally break our lease until one day water just came pouring down through one of the light fixtures in our living room – gallons and gallons rushing through the electrical wiring – and almost soaked my entire (irreplaceable!) record collection. We were out within a week, for our safety.

Monte Vista Ave, Oakland, Calif. $1,300/mo
Present day, in the nicest apartment I’ve ever had. It’s just a tiny studio, three floors up. Two entire walls are made up of windows, and I’m surrounded by trees. I need to get screens for my windows – I used to just leave them open but I’m so close to the canopy squirrels started running in and out at will. I wake up to birds chirping. Coffee is a 3 min. walk away. I can get to my beloved San Francisco in 20 minutes. And as small spaces demand, I’ve purged every unnecessary object from my life. I have only what I need, and everything that I need, and it feels great.

Eve O’Neill is an editor at Yelp. She stares out windows.

We have all lived in some places. Where have you lived, Jamie Wiebe?

Evanston, Ill., $596/month
My first apartment, rented during my junior year of college. Comparing it to a shoebox would be awfully cruel. For the shoebox. We had to jump over one couch to get to the bathroom, and our “kitchen” was three feet from the other couch, but at least my window had a pretty view of a giant tree. And a bike rack. My roommate and I once threw a party for my ex-boyfriend’s birthday, and even with half the furniture shoved in our bedrooms and everything else squished against the walls, we could only fit fifteen unfortunate souls. Luckily we had a porch for the smokers—and the firemen, who came mid-party because our stove was leaking gas. Again. They did not accept our offer of beer.

Austin, Texas, $600/month
Residency placement in Austin! Austin is the best. Unpaid residency is not the best. Cats are the best! My roommates had two, who functioned as furry, shrieking alarm clocks. I got a $50 rent discount because the lady I subleased from was skipping town to move in with her boyfriend. I was happy because it was a house—a full house, with a backyard. It is the only house I’ve ever lived in that wasn’t owned by my parents (or divided into separate apartments). Having just turned 21, I was delighted to find it along a bus line that ran straight to 6th Street (bars! beers! giant margaritas!), and less delighted that the bus stopped running at midnight. I also know it was exactly four miles from downtown, having walked the whole distance at 2 a.m. after losing my friends, failing to flag a taxi and having my phone battery die. I told them I found a “secret cabbie hotspot” when I showed up two hours later.

 
Upper East Side, Manhattan, $735/month
For most of my post-junior year summer, I was living large: free housing and an internship that paid $10 per hour! I ate so well. I saved nothing. I bought my breakfast every morning, which seems insane now. Then my internship was extended (yay!), Columbia kicked me out so their “students” could “use the dorms” (boo!), the housing stipend I had been promised turned out to be a lie and I wore out my welcome on my friend’s couch in Harlem. Luckily, another friend had a kinda-cheap-for-New York sublet two blocks away from Two Little Red Hens, which seemed fantastic, until my waistline and wallet weighed in. My room had a great fire escape for people-watching, and was extravagantly huge (it would be split by two people later) and decorated like a boho fairytale castle. I lived here for a month and came out convinced I had bed bugs. It turned out I had scabies (who gets scabies?), but the repeated high-heat dryer cycles ruined half my clothing.

Evanston, Ill., $600/month 
Another subleased apartment, because I knew I would be away for the last quarters of college. Why rent? Before moving in, I was warned repeatedly about the crazy lady upstairs who did jazzercise at 6 a.m. and yelled at my (wonderful, subdued) roommates for being too noisy. I was really hoping for a blow-up but nothing happened. It was in a fancier, “real-people” building, not the half-rotting wreck of an apartment/group house most people lived in. It had a fireplace and a dining room where I would sit and read for classes while drinking tea and French pressed coffee. You know, like a grown-up, except for the fact that I spent most of the quarter skipping class and subsisting off of Burger King kids’ meals. I shoved most of my belongings in the basement when I moved to Edinburgh, but some boxes mysteriously disappeared while I was gone. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough.

Edinburgh, U.K., $620/month
I sent my study abroad company a lump sum and they produced this flat (I had no choice in the matter), located directly underneath Arthur’s Seat, which is this really awesome mountain-hill-cliff thing I only climbed once, despite planning to do so no less than eight or nine times. Most of the semester was spent engaging in typically Scottish activities, like drinking liters of Strongbow and complaining about the weather. The light switches were funny and it took me three days to figure out how to turn on the shower. Once, a man followed me home from a club and offered to pay me for my “services.” I had to strong-arm the door closed, then I ran upstairs and locked all the locks. Coincidentally, the flat was located on a street called “Hermit’s Croft,” which is what I became after that incident, and also after spending all my money and maxing out my first credit card.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, $600/month
Naturally, the place to move after having a terrifying stalker-ish incident in a European city is a Craigslist sublet in Bushwick. It was actually awesome! My roommates were never home and I had an amazing view of the Manhattan skyline from my ginormous window. Things I did not have: an AC; money to buy an AC; a ceiling fan that did anything more than whirl aimlessly; anything to block out the 4 a.m. noise from the cars playing rap at full volume, extra bass. Amazingly, considering this was last summer, when temperatures shot into the 90s and didn’t move for weeks at a time, I survived, mostly because I couldn’t afford to buy bedding. Being unemployed, I spent most of my days in Little Skips down the street drinking iced coffee or lemonade, stealing their Wi-Fi for job-hunting and feeling out-of-place (I didn’t own jorts yet).

Astoria, Queens, $950/month
“Move to Astoria!” my friend said. “You’ll love Astoria!” she said. “Astoria Astoria Astoria!” she said. I didn’t want to move to Astoria, because: Brooklyn, but also didn’t have the energy to look for an apartment for longer than a day. So Astoria it was, and guess what, dear reader: I love Astoria! The best Greek restaurant in NYC is five blocks away, and we have a massive Czech beer garden that Mint graciously tags as a “charity” whenever I spend money there. It’s a little far from the train, and I’m still upset I can’t get a cat, and I’m convinced the apartment’s just a wee bit overpriced, but my bedroom is huge, and my adorable landlord gives us lamps and nightstands and fake flowers and we have a backyard with a grill. Astoria is the best.

Jamie Wiebe checks facts for a living. She posts pictures of all the animals not allowed into her apartment on her blog.

We have all lived in some places. Where have you lived, Rebecca Pederson?

Downtown Santa Cruz, Calif., $730/mo.
My junior year of college, I moved off campus and into a former bed and breakfast with 12 other people. It was dubbed the “Green Monster” because it was green and monstrously big, and also because the landlord acted like a troll you’d find hiding under a bridge. She’d stop by every Wednesday to tell us we were terrible human beings, as well as to make sure we were all complying with her very lengthy rental contract. I didn’t think the “absolutely no personal belongings in the communal areas” clause was to be taken that literally … until she threw away all my refrigerator magnets a week after I moved in.

West Hollywood, Los Angeles, Calif., $0/mo.
I spent the summer between my junior and senior year of college living in LA on my best friend’s dime. The plan was to write a Gossip Girl spec script that would jumpstart our soon-to-be prolific writing careers, but instead we wound up fighting viciously for three months. When we weren’t on each other’s last nerves, we were avoiding our super creepy downstairs neighbor, who would always try to lure us into his apartment with promises of “good wine” and episodes of that John Adams HBO miniseries. Against all odds, we actually completed the spec script. It wasn’t very good. We don’t speak much now. 

Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, Calif., $750/mo.
I lived in an apartment across the street from a seedy motel where the local prostitutes sometimes knocked on room doors to solicit their services. I shared a wall with an obese woman named Lori and her equally obese dog named Florie. Lori would sit outside my window at 6 a.m. and blow cigarette smoke into my bedroom while having yell-conversations with the neighbors under our balcony. On the other side lived an emancipated minor who threw nightly, Popov-fueled parties that often ended with me using a hose to spray down 16-year-old boys as they puked on the hood of my car. I had a headache for nine months straight.

Seabright, Santa Cruz, Calif., $400/mo.
My dog and I moved in with my boyfriend, his three housemates, and their three cats after I graduated. My presence messed up the house feng shui; the cats peed all over everything, which my dog responded to by pooping in the kitchen every day. The cats also all had fleas, which gave my allergy-prone dog a horrible skin condition that triggered her epilepsy, so we spent a lot of time and money at the vet getting steroid treatments.

The Mission, San Francisco, Calif., $725/mo.
The first apartment my boyfriend and I moved into solo! It’s really a two-room studio, and there are a few dime-sized holes in the floor so you can see directly into the garage below. Also, some of our neighbors are a little weird and possibly have unchecked mental illnesses—one of them stole the battery out of our car because he incorrectly thought we had vandalized his crappy beater—but we have a backyard that’s big enough for chickens, so it’s cool.

Rebecca Pederson is an editor at Yelp. Her Aunt Leslie loves her blog.

We have all lived in some places. Where have you lived, Stefanie Christensen?

Downtown Charleston, S.C., $400/mo.
This was a two-story row house with six bedrooms where I lived with all of my friends during our senior year of college. It felt very idyllic, which is ironic because I got mugged a block from our home. Pictured here is the open-all-night seafood restaurant at the end of our street.

Arlington, Va., $1,000/mo.
This was my very first solo apartment and I managed to pay way too much for it out of leftovers from my college savings account (NB: don’t do this). I lived here for six months while earning $8/hour at a fellowship which involved, basically, getting ancient public TV-types their lunches. From the outside, my building looked like a mental institution in Soviet Russia in that it was grey and foreboding. But: It did have garbage chutes.

Upper East Side, New York, N.Y. $1,360/mo.

I moved into a shoebox of a second floor studio. The huge perk of this place was a bamboo-lined private patio area created by the roof of the smoothie place on the first floor. It overlooked the backyard of someone who either got evicted or decided to throw all of their belongings outside. One time my best friend visited from D.C. and we invited over a bartender who was married to a mobster and sat out there until the sun came up. Another time I had a dinner party on the patio and washed dishes in the bathtub because the sink was too small. The cat spent a lot of time eating sticks.

Virginia-Highland, Atlanta, Ga. $800/mo.
I had a dining room! The downsides to this otherwise very charming apartment were that it was A) on a major six-lane road and B) next to a Mexican restaurant that turned into a bar from midnight to 4 a.m.. Lots of fights happened in the parking lot that separated me from the restaurant, and I called the cops a few times when people would start yelling about knives. Once I got food poisoning from the tapas place in my neighborhood. Related: I don’t really like Atlanta.

Eastern Market, Washington, D.C. $1,100/mo.
Back to DC. This apartment had one tiny bedroom and was in the basement of an ancient four-story building whose pipes exploded into my bathroom and kitchen no less than 3 times in the year I was there. The furnace was in the basement too, and once at 3am the carbon monoxide detector went off because the furnace was so dirty it could no longer filter anything. My fellow basement-dweller across the hall called 911 and the firemen came and we sat out on the street together until they told us we were safe. It was February. When I told the landlord, she laughed. Somehow, my cat and I got fleas in this apartment, which caused me to lose my deposit. This was a personal low.

Auburn, Ala. $600/mo.
I have two bedrooms! I use one of them for books and the cat box! I have my own washer and dryer! I can walk to campus! The trade-off is that I live immediately adjacent to heavily-traveled train tracks, but it does not even matter. This is my small-town soulmate of an apartment and the day I re-signed the lease for a second year I was as happy as a clam. I wish the same for everyone who has ever been given fleas by their home.

Stefanie Christensen is a graduate student in Auburn University’s College of Agriculture. She and her cat Hairy S. Truman have been vermin-free for over a year now, thankyouverymuch.

We have all lived in some places. Where have you lived, Julie Bee?

Park House, London, U.K., $400ish/mo.
Self-made summer intern with a teeeeeeny bedroom and shared kitchen in a long-term hostel. The hostel is women only and often is home to survivors of abuse, and visits from my boyfriend are met with a wary eye. Everything is very clean, and my Dutch suite mate is six feet tall and a delight. One night I lock myself out of my room completely naked and the door-woman has to let me back into my room.

Lincoln Park, Chicago, Ill., $615/mo.
Having visited Chicago only a handful of times before moving, LP is the only neighborhood I can remember, so I move here. My dad and stepdad help me move in, and I buy them McDonald’s for lunch. My windows are situated in front of the glare of a street lamp, ensuring that I will never need to turn on a light if I want to read in bed. It takes me a full month to discover that the grocery store down the street has a second level. Late one night, someone mistakes my apartment for their own and tries to get in. I freak the fuck out, but stay for two years.

Lincoln Park, Chicago,Ill., $850/mo.
Moving’ on up—it’s a two-room studio complete with a terrible management company. I choose this apartment purely because it has pretty stained glass window panels in the door. The girl who lived there before me had painted the living room a garish shade of yellow—and couldn’t be bothered to move her furniture out of the way, so instead painting around it. Management takes two months to repaint. The place is so drafty that my curtains flutter even when the window is closed. My new neighbor likes to scream Tori Amos songs at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday. I last one year and stay at the boyfriend’s place a lot.

Sofia Court Apartments, Singapore, $1100/mo.
Yay for a temporary work transfer to Singapore! My company seriously pays $1,100 a month to put me up in a boarding-house style room. I purchase a hotplate and feel depressed. The doorman is sleeping every time I leave for work in the morning. I sometimes find lizards in the bathroom. One night I see a girl in the building across the street dance and strip in front of a webcam. Another night I come home too drunk and pound on the door of an apartment that is not mine.

Lakeview, Chicago, Ill., $975/mo.
It seems like a deal—great location, carpet, dishwasher, fireplace. Freaking fireplace! On my first night, I hear loud awful techno music. As I try to track down which neighbor is playing the music, I realize it’s coming from the bar. Directly below my apartment. The bar that I thought was a restaurant. But no worries, techno is on Saturdays only. The rest of the week is the worst piano-fueled cabaret and karaoke that the city has to offer. My friends, however, are big fans of my “Movies by the Fire” parties, even if they have to sit on the floor. I stick it out for two years and still miss that fireplace.

Wicker Park, Chicago, Ill., $1,075/mo.
It’s spacious, gets good light, and has a deck that always has at least one stray cat for me to feed. A frozen yogurt place opened up across the street. A huge family lives next door and they are always hanging out on the sidewalk. Always. My other neighbors are legit hoarders. Their backyard contains a car, lawn furniture, stone monuments, antique benches, pieces of carpet, and an elaborate system of tied-together ladders that goes from a tree in their backyard to the roof of my building, where they cleared out a space for barbecuing. I seriously love it here.

Julie Bee is an expert at packing and hiring movers. She lives in Chicago with Sherman, World’s Greatest Cat.