[blparent] Baby on the Way! Now, Where to Live?

[Allison]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you very much for all your feedback! 

We think we've decided to rent an apartment in the city where we live now.
It is a bit expensive, but the lease will be a year and we can reassess our
priorities after baby is here and is several months old. While we realize we
could probably make it work in a more suburban area with fewer transit
options, we think that the city we're in now is the best idea for us at
least in the shorter term. In addition to apartment hunting, we looked at
house rentals, but the bidding wars in this town are just unbelievable! I
had no idea it was this bad. We honestly weren't finding any house rentals
we liked as well as the apartments we looked at, and the apts have the
advantage of being lower maintenance. Still the decision process has been
interesting to be sure. 

Judy's story about nearly buying a house in a location that she later found
to be unwalkable is very similar to our own unfortunately. Thankfully, we
realized the issue before making an offer, but it was a close call. I'm
wondering how other blind parents have approached house buying? How do you
research the walk and transit options in a new area? We thought we had done
our research, and we had asked the opinions of both our realtor and my dad,
and gave them specifics for what to look for, and still... it was only ever
sort of helpful. We found that explaining walking and transit accessibility
to sighted people to be very challenging. Not impossible, just more
complicated than we'd imagined. In the end, we actually found one of our
most helpful techniques for determining public transit proximity was using
an iOS app called Transit Times. We used it to virtually plan routs from the
house and apt locations we would be visiting before we visited. That gave us
at least a basic idea of how close each location was to the nearest transit
stops. That, combined with a site called walkscore.com, were fairly helpful.
Even then, we've still consulted the opinions of various sighted people like
my dad and various realtors/apartment finders along the way. Basically we
used a variety of techniques, which I suspect most of you can relate to. I
feel we have been about as successful with the house/apartment finding
process as we could be, and even so, it was a fairly inefficient process.
So I'd love to know what techniques have worked for others in the past. 

Thank you all though for your parenting perspectives on the living place
decision process. I read everyone's posts with enjoyment and appreciation. I
love the collective wisdom and experience in this group.

Best,
Allison