2 Ways to Use Craigslist to Find a Cheap Place

Morgan Sully — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:42:10 +0000

So you've just signed up to live for a whole YEAR at poverty level AND you might have even been crazy enough to move to a new city to do this. You're (hopefully!) excited to start your work as a DASCorps member building the capacity of your organization.

But what if you haven't found a place to live yet? If you've just started your VISTA year in a new city, your housing should be a top priority. It's hard to do good work if you're constantly wondering where you're going to live.

In this post, I'll cover 5 tips/tools for rocking finding a place to live. Read on to begin the rocking.

1) craigslist

well duh. Craigslist is almost a given. For the uninitiated, craigslist is an awesome online classifieds service originally founded in San Francisco. It has since been replicated in major metropolitan cities around the world and is used by millions of people each day for finding housing, cars, romance and just about any other things humans can share with each other.

TIP: one of the most under utilized features of craiglist is their search-based RSS feed. *Setting one up is easy:

Click on the 'apts/housing' section (or whatever housing situation you are looking for) and enter in your search terms.
Click "Search"
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the RSS link. You can either subscribe this link in your RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) or simply add it as a bookmark to your browser bookmark toolbar (see the image above for how it looks in Firefox 3 for the Mac).

*A more detailed tutorial of this process can be found on the Get Rich Slowly blog.

2) housingmaps.com

This one is sweet. Google maps + craigslist. If you've just moved to a new city, chances you are not really sure where everything is just yet. When you look for housing on craigslist, the names of the neighborhoods may be irrelevant to you because you don't know where these neighborhoods are in relation to you. Housingmaps.com fixes that.

It has the built in housing search/filtering of craigslist (price ranges, number of rooms, pictures, location) + the marker functionality of Google maps. These two put together allow you to filter the markers that appear on a map to fine tune your search.

Maybe you might get ideas for how Google maps could be used at your organization?

3) listpic

Yet another awesome way that craigslist is being used to help people find things. This lets you browse craigslist visually, so you can see what these places look like.

However, some things to consider: 1) it ONLY searches posts with an image. This may limit what comes up. 2) conversely, by showing ONLY the places with images, it COULD save you some time trekking to the place only to find that it's not agreeable to where you want to live during your VISTA year.

Speaking of trekking, you DID ask your org if they could help out with public transportation, right? We at the Transmission Project encourage you to ask your org about any resources you may need during your year. Living on the meager stipend that AmeriCorps mandates can be tough. Don't make it any harder on yourself by getting burned out trekking across town to run errands, look for housing, let alone get to work.

Teen Digital Storymapping Workshop in Lower Roxbury

danielle martin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:58:12 +0000

I just finished a digital storytelling and mapping workshop that included over 10 youth who stayed creative and excited to share their stories even in 90 degree heat without AC! It's a project I've been working on pretty much since the beginning of this VISTA year, by meeting with folks from the Lower Roxbury Empowerment Coalition, a group of housing developments and non-profit programs who are trying to create inter-neighborhood partnerships and tap into Northeastern University outreach programs. Jayme Bonds, who works tirelessly at Mandela Homes, participated in one of my train-the-trainers this spring and got pretty adamant about me working with youth leaders from her summer programs. We decided to open it up to as many local housing development summer programs as we could get together, and it worked out well. We even got a couple participants from Worcester!

I gathered some MassIMPACT folks and got Colleen Kelly, now former CTC VISTA and employee at Emerson College, to come help facilitate. The group of youth were all girls except for one, well spoken young man George, who all had interesting and personal stories to share. It was a big group for a digital storytelling workshop (over 15 folks working on stories at once) but it worked out fine to split the group into two story circles and we had enough experienced storytellers floating around to help with the one-on-one support. Several of the youth also really excelled at the technical side, so they were finished with their stories by the beginning of the third day. So we had them publish their stories on StoriesForChange.net and help build the Google Map...and then show others how to do it as well. We're hoping to do a few follow-up two-hour workshops over the summer to help support these youth in their quest to teach digital storytelling to other younger residents.

I also owe big thanks to Royal and Paulette at Camfield Estates for hosting, and for Jayme Bonds from Mandela Homes for providing the food. The final stories are posted at StoriesforChange.net http://storiesforchange.net/event/teen_digital_storymapping_bootcamp and all linked off the Google Map at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1015076548696853...
There's also more photos on Flickr.

Digital Arts Service Corps - google maps

2 Ways to Use Craigslist to Find a Cheap Place

1) craigslist

2) housingmaps.com

3) listpic

Teen Digital Storymapping Workshop in Lower Roxbury