November 3, 2006
Need a Sketchy-Sounding Place to Live?
If you've ever browsed Craigslist housing ads, you've invariably seen those bizarro room share ads - random, extremely cheap prices ($261/mo), strange symbols in the text (۞), questionable grammar and capitalization, and generic email addresses (usually the name of a European country followed by some numbers). The ads all sound about the same, the houses (or whatever they are) always seem to be in Silver Spring or upper 16th Street, and they offer a free couch to sleep on if you don't have any money. And just in case they don't already sound sketchy enough, the ads have recently been asking potential applicants/victims to send links to their Myspace or Friendster pages, but add "*FACEBOOK IS NOT ACCEPTABLE*". Maybe they don't like the Facebook Feed.
The ads are fascinating because they're annoying clutter and are deleted pretty quickly, yet never fail to reappear. It seems Sisyphean, constantly reposting the same ads after they've been deleted, over and over, every day. Is there really money in this? Is there some sketchy housing concern whose sole business is to write weird housing ads? Or maybe it's one very persistent person who thinks they're helping out by offering people a spot on their couch?
Cheap, temporary places have a purpose — professionals who are in town for a month, newcomers who don't have housing lined up and so on, but there are already ads for that sort of thing that don't reek of robbery. We emailed a few of these places and got no response, not surprisingly.
So who applies to these crazy ads? Has anyone ever visited and lived to tell the tale? Is it some kind of squat? Is it run by the mafia? The possibilities seem endless.
Photo by Flickr user Allison DC
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My favorite is when you click on "District of Columbia" for location, and all these ads pop up in the suburbs (even though there are appropriate sections that VA/MD ads are supposed to go in). Because you know, I REALLY wanted to live in the District proper, but now that I've seen the ad for that townhouse in Woodbridge, or Gaithersburg, I've changed my mind! Seriously, if I want to live in Maryland, I'll click the link that says Maryland.
Even better are the ads that blatantly lie about the rent in the title before "correcting" it in the body of the ad, or the ones that try desparately to claim to be in places they really aren't.
I once got so fed up that I flamed a realtor who had used the price baiting ploy (1550 in the header, 1700 in the ad) AND claimed the apartment was "at" 2nd and U, when in fact it was a good half mile from that intersection.
This same realtor, whose website trumpeted his "professionalism", responded with a thinly veiled threat of physical violence and called me an ass. I ended up forwarding the exchange to his bosses at Coldwell Banker, though lord knows if they even did anything.
Those ads fascinated me, too. Once I responded to one and said I was looking for a place for a male friend of mine to live and gave a nice description of this non-existent friend. Someone wrote back quickly, "Ew, boys are stinky! Don't you have any girl friends?"
Totally weird and creepy. I thought originally it was a front for Eastern European prostitutes.
Facebook is not accepted cause it is restrictive to users. You have to have an .edu address to get a facebook account, at least that is what the deal was the last time I asked my 21 year old sister.
I'm pretty sure those ads are for sites like mikesapartment.com (not, in any way, safe for work).
i'm with T, i've always assumed that they were settings for camgirl websites. perhaps with hidden webcams.
Actually been to one of these places to check it out? I smell an opportunity for some investigative reporting DCist...
Facebook is open to anyone.