Vibe is such a fuzzy word. It’s a catchall for the various things you feel about a place, like how you know this taco truck will give you a great meal, and how you know there’s a dude snorting rails of coke in the bathroom of this Michelin star restaurant. You can read all the Yelp reviews you want, but there’s no substitution for the vibe of a place.
Sarah and I are hunting for apartments in San Francisco. Hunting’s not really the right word, though, since the apartments aren’t exactly mobile. It’s more like foraging. And when foraging, you’d do well to separate out the poison mushrooms from the edible ones as quickly as possible… preferably in a way that doesn’t involve food tasters, ‘cuz those guys ain’t cheap.
When tracking down apartments all you really need to do is spend thirty seconds inside it looking around, and another 10 seconds outside. If it’s close, I like to picture a dinner party and a crime scene happening in the space, then decide which one seems more plausible. If decapitations are more likely than decorations, it’s probably time to move on. And call for help.
There’s also the sad test. Some apartments, like a Noe Valley one bedroom we looked at last week, make the muscles in you face droop, and you shuffle from room to room, until you realize (hopefully) that you haven’t actually signed a lease yet. Instead of living here for the next 12 months, you can just leave and never look back. And send some Prozac to the new tenants.
Yes, in the Great Housing Search there are melodramatic bouts of despair, where all apartments are tiny, dirty, overpriced, and in high demand. You’re afraid you’ll never find a home where canapés will be more common than carnage. But in spite of yourself, you see a studio with a private entrance, a little pricey, but in a good neighborhood and with utilities included, and you know that you could live there.
Come to think of it, the foraging metaphor really doesn’t hold up. Most people don’t live inside a non-poisonous mushroom once they find it. It’s more like trapping. A curious couple wanders into an apartment, full of hopes and IKEA floor plan ideas, and the vibe clicks. Those little details all seem perfect, and the ones that aren’t, seem unimportant.
Maybe that’s what a good vibe is: falling in love with a space, and the potential life you can have there. It might be a trap, but by the time you realize that it’s already too late. You’re already assembling a Bjursta dining table and sending an invitation to the Noe Valley unit so its residents don’t die of sadness.
Ezra Fox, Staff Blogger