Small family, working at Puget Sound University- apartments? (Tacoma, Issaquah: rental market, houses)

[phillypham]

I'm moving to Tacoma from out of state for a temporary job at Puget Sound. We're a small family looking for a 2-bedroom apartment or small house.

The problem is that we have a small budget; we definitely couldn't go over $1500, and $1200 would be much better. It seems like a lot of the housing around University of Puget Sound is houses, but we'll just be there temporarily.

Kids are just about school age, but we might wait a year for elementary school.

So my question is, where is the safest area we could live in at that price range?

[Kualoa]

UPS is an excellent place to work with beautiful surroundings. Proctor Station is nice but 2 bedrooms go for around $2,700 per month. Located a few blocks from the campus. One bedrooms $1400 per month. Its a tight market and rental prices are going up daily, good luck.

[Wheatridger]

I don't know anything about the local rental market, but I can just say that I would be happy to live anywhere north of Sixth Avenue in the North End. Fine Craftsman-style homes, large and small. May be too pricy for you at first, but there's a strong surge in apartment construction there now. When I was there last week, a half-block of Proctor bungalows were being scraped for a six-story multifamily unit.

The local officials counted 12,000 new residents in Tacoma last year. I'd love to become one of them. Tacoma is the kind of place I'd love in retirement. It shows obvious signs of decades of poverty. Even in the tony North End, street signs are tiny and faded, stoplights look like antiques, and streets are paved with cobblestones and potholes. All is forgiven, however, when you reach Point Defiance Park with its old-growth trees and water views. Enjoy your time there, and take good care of my Junior undergrad next year!

[Wheatridger]

As for safety, don't live in Issaquah, east of the I-5 casinos. Don't even GO into Issaquah, I was told by my airbnb host, a Tacoma native who'd spent a career as a police 911 dispatcher. Otherwise, it's generally safe around Tacoma now. It earned a bad reputation several decades ago, but that ended abruptly when the cops arrested over 100 perps in a single night, and the rest of the LA bad boys split town.

I visited Hilltop, historically the worst place west of I-5, for a down-home BBQ joint that looked and tasted like Memphis in 1975, when I was in college. There was no racial tension there among a small mixed crowd there, just the opposite. The streets were clean, graffiti free and largely empty, with vacant lots awaiting the future.

There remains the problem of reckless driving, which is too common. Tacoma gets a lot of military influence from two huge bases on its border, so young men with musclecars like to cruise through, fast or slow but usually loudly.

That's my take from six visits over the past three years, anyhow. Tacoma's safe, but it's still America, 2017. Best news is, the campus and most of the North End are far above the Tsunami danger lines.