beepboopbeep wrote:JDeezy wrote:Regents Poster here...
Great info, thanks to all. Looks like Regents is $~1100-1200 to go without a roommate.
Obviously a personal call, but anyone with any opinions on whether to go with a roommate or not? Looks like it would be significantly cheaper. I like to play guitar (quietly) and spend time alone in my room. Would a guitar fill the apartment with noise?
What kind of rent are we looking at "south of the midway?" What kind of sketchiness are we looking at?
TYIA.
I'll leave the top part of the post for someone who doesn't unilaterally hate roommate situations, but as for south of the midway:
1. It depends
2. It depends
To be a little more helpful, the area has really improved over the last 3-4 years since they put an undergrad dorm at 61st/Ellis. Generally, the closer you are to that, the apartments will be nicer but also more expensive. Studios will probably be 600-800 (Hyde Park studios roughly range from 750-1000), 1BRs 800-1000 (Hyde Park: 900-1500), 2BR 900-1200 (Hyde Park: 1000 to 1800), and so on. For these numbers I'm sort of half spitballing (based on living in Hyde Park for the last seven years) and half looking stuff up on
http://marketplace.uchicago.edu/apartments, which is where most of the small brokers or independent landlords post apartments for rent (note that it's January, and many leases in Hyde Park run August/September - July/August). It's also a bit skewed by the fact that the higher-cost apartments in the area around South Campus are much, much nicer than you'd get for the same price in Hyde Park, so you can end up with a pretty swank place for not a lot of money down there.
The tradeoff is, of course, safety*. A lot of us who've been at UofC for a while remember the UC grad student who was shot and killed at 61st and Ellis a few years back, and will probably never live around there for that reason - but that's kind of a
stupid availability heuristic thing. The campus police do patrol down to 63rd or 64th, I believe. Crime rates for Woodlawn are not good, (
http://spotcrime.com/il/chicago/woodlawn,
http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago ... y/woodlawn), but Woodlawn is a big area and crime around south campus area is probably closer to Hyde Park than it is to Woodlawn levels. If you are living down there I'd advise sticking at least somewhat close to the south shuttle (--LinkRemoved--) to minimize walking distance, though the shuttle routes do change seemingly at whim and on little notice.
Kind of a choose your own adventure, I guess. Personally, not living in Regents, I feel like I haven't made as many connections to the rest of the class as a lot of the Regents people seem to have, and while it hasn't kept me from finding a great group of friends sometimes I regret not being a part of the whole 1L Regents scene. Diff'rent strokes and all that.
*ETA: there are also no grocery stores anywhere near south campus. It's not that hard to take the 171/172 to or from 60th and Ellis, but it is a hassle and will add 30-40 minutes to an already somewhat arduous task.
