living in cambridge

Got a call today from the Cambridge Human Rights Commission about a housing discrimination complaint I filed last May.

Ah, public policy. Isn't that what I'm here to study? Massachussets passed this wonderfully well-intentioned family-friendly legislation to protect children from lead exposure. Well, it ain't so wonderful. The law requires landlords who rent to people with kids under 6 years of age to remove the lead from a unit - or at least encapsulate it. The unfortunate result is that noone wanted to rent to us once they found out we had kids. We got comments like "oh, you wouldn't want to walk up 2 flights of stairs..." or more commonly we'd get shut out of our search - a double wammy since we were doing most of the searching from California.

When Chris was out here interviewing for his Nieman fellowship he did quite a bit of housing searching for us, but we decided after the fact that we really wanted a furnished place. I finally found a 3 BR at a reasonable price (well, if $2200/month sounds reasonable) in a convenient neighborhood. My friend Joel looked at the place, connected with the landlord's daughter, as did I via e-mail exchanges. When the landlord called me to hash out the details, she turned into a nasty beast upon hearing that we had kids - she accused me of abusing my kids if we moved into her place and that it was illegal for her to rent to us. It's actually the other way around, she was obligated, but of course, that didn't mean squat. To make a short story long, she was so rude, mean and just plain wrong that I filed a complaint. The call I got was to set up a mediation hearing date. Yikes. It's easier to do that kind of complaint from far away - I'm not up for a face to face, nor feel like I have the time, but I somehow feel obligated to follow through with it. I don't really need another thing to add to my plate. The cool thing is that we can ask for her to pay for her own sensitivity training....

Well, we ended up finding a furnished place not too far from this 3BR - unfortunately, it's only a small 2BR but the kids had their own room at home, so it's working out fine - except now I'm all paranoid about the lead in this place!

Our neighborhood is fabulous - I'm a 20 minute walk to the Kennedy school, which is on the south side of campus, but we're only about a 7 minute walk to the north side, so I get to walk through Harvard square on my way to class. I'll also be able to walk Liam to preschool on the way to class, as it's only 3 blocks away. Three blocks in the other direction is Inman Square, a funky neighborhood of fun shops, cafes and restaurants. So much is walkable - post office, library, lots of parks, even a Whole Foods, though I'm still trying to track down the local co-op...