jesspgh

I live in Bloomfield (phd student with funding at pitt) and love it here... I currently live with my s.o. in a single family home (three bedrooms, basement, yard, super nice fixtures and appliances, $875/month plus utilities). When I started grad school (four years ago), I lived alone in this neighborhood and paid $500/month (incuding heat) for a huge one bedroom... and compared with my friends who also lived in the Bloomfield/Friendship/Lawrenceville area, I paid a lot even by today's standards. Also think about Morningside, Highland Park, and even parts of East Liberty (near where Whole Foods, Borders, and Trader Joe's moved in) as they are up and coming but still reasonably priced. I honestly wouldn't bother paying Shadyside, South Side, or Squirrel Hill rents... Shadyside in particular is just an overpriced post-adolescent business casual South Oakland. When my partner lived there, we dealt with the same loud party trains, the same rowdy drunkards, and the same amount of litter/broken glass as I did as an undergrad in the student slum neighborhood. The best way to find an apartment in Pittsburgh is to go to a neighborhood about a month or so before you plan to move in and walk around taking down numbers. You can also do the craigslist thing but the rent prices there are very inflated. If I could do it all over again, I'd start looking for a house to buy in Highland Park, Lawrenceville, or Bloomfield since mortgages can be about the price of rent in those areas... And you'll (most likely) be here long enough to build equity. Also, the bus system is decent enough that I survived living in the city (as a grad student and prior to that) for five years without a car. It wasn't a glamorous time in my life, hulking bags of groceries the blocks home from the bus but it worked out fine. There are also campus shuttles for both CMU and Pitt that will take you to the neighborhoods that border campus. I have a car now that I rarely use though it is a lot easier to get groceries. I have laundry in my building so that hasn't been a problem. You can take buses to the retail shopping districts in Shadyside, the Waterworks, the South Side Works, and the Waterfront. You can also take them into the suburbs to go to some of the malls.. And the Trolley (called the T) goes to the suburbs to another pretty nice mall if that's your thing. This stuff will take up the bulk of a day but as long as you don't have a shopping addiction, you should be fine. I never drive to campus.. I always take the bus or walk. A lot of people bike too but I get nervous riding in traffic. I don't know anyone who lives in Bloomfield, Friendship, Squirrel Hill or Shadyside who works/studies in Oakland (where Pitt and CMU are located) that drives to campus. I make less than you per month on my Pitt humanities Teaching Fellow stipend and don't take out loans to supplement my income during the year. I don't have a bunch of money left over for savings or anything but I do go out to eat and to bars regularly, I shop often, I buy organic groceries, and generally have a lovely life on my modest stipend with no trouble. To be fair I pay a little more than half of what you guessed would be your monthly rent, but you can find cheaper places than that if you look in the neighborhoods I listed.