RENTAL ROULETTE

Riding with a recent college graduate on the hunt for elusive prey: a decent, affordable place to live

- CRISTINA BOLLING

ERIN HAMPSON steps onto the balcony. “Ooooh,” she says. Around the corner are breweries, shops, and restaurants that cater to young professionals like her. She imagines living here, in one of the 406 units of 1225 South Church Apartments in South End, and thinks about how much fun it’d be and what that would cost her: counting rent and fees, close to $1,400 per month, the limit of her budget.

A recent college graduate, Hampson has spent the last two years with three roommates squeezed into a snug two-bedroom apartment near American University in Washington, D.C. Now, like so many other young professionals who move to Charlotte every month, she has her first real job, a paycheck, and the possibility of the glorious freedom that comes from living on one’s own.

When we meet in late January, she’s living with her mother in the Matthews home where she grew up, but the 45-minute commute to her job at a health care nonprofit in Myers Park is getting old. So on this brisk afternoon, I join her to see what apartment hunting is like for the kind of renter these complexes are presumably being built for.

Spoiler: It’s a hassle. The process started days earlier, when she downloaded the Apartment List app to her iPhone. It works remarkably like a dating app: She plugged in personal information (job location, salary, desired features and amenities, and projected rent budget), and the app delivered a list of options, which she swiped right to pursue or left to dismiss. She picked four complexes to explore in four Charlotte neighborhoods: South End, Plaza Midwood, Elizabeth, and SouthPark.