Apartment search reveals strong downtown rental market

When I returned to Columbia after years of living all over the country, I wanted to live downtown. There’s just nothing better than living within a few blocks of Columbia’s best restaurants, memory-inducing college hangouts such as Shakespeare’s and CJ’s, and the University of Missouri campus, where I spent five (or was it six?) years in school.

While I knew it might be difficult to find a place without that “lots of students have lived here” feeling, I was optimistic. Rumors abound about new developments and the renovation of old buildings into new, high-end living spaces.

One friend said it would be easy to get a great deal downtown because the loss of student rental income makes Columbia landlords a little overeager.

Boy, did he turn out to be wrong.

My search was short but intense. At first, I just asked around: “Where can I find a nice apartment downtown—you know, where an adult would live?”

Friends Judy Baker and Ken Jacob gave me a few names to call—developers with property downtown. But none of these fellows had anything available. The same was true about recommendations from my banker and from someone with the Columbia Chamber of Commerce.

So I picked up a newspaper and pored over the classifieds. At first, I tried to look for words indicating quality: “hardwood floors,” “central a/c” and so on. But I quickly settled for any listing described as “downtown” or even “near downtown.”

It turned out that “near downtown” often meant “less than one tank of gas will get you there,” so I narrowed the search criteria… again. All told, reading the paper gave me what seemed like three possibilities. None were actually available. In Columbia, apparently the word “available” can easily mean “available in the fall but not today.”

Next, a little Googling led me to www.DiscoverTheDistrict.com, the Web site for Columbia’s Special Business District organization. My hopes were lifted by its list of 14 individuals and leasing companies with apartments in The District (covering 43 square blocks of downtown).

Soon, I would be lounging in my new (to me) mid- to high-end apartment.

Would you believe that 14 calls netted exactly one available unit?

I knew from the price—half of what I was willing to pay—that this would be a student apartment. But it was downtown, just two doors down and up one flight of stairs from Lakota, my all-time favorite coffee shop. It had a window overlooking 9th Street, with all the hustling and bustling and life that drew me downtown in the first place. Plus, there were absolutely no other options.

So I’d made my decision, sight unseen. As long as there wasn’t a chalk outline of the previous tenant in the middle of the living room floor, this would be my home for a year or two, until I could find something to buy.

That decision held as I walked around what would soon be my one-bedroom breadbox. It isn’t anything grand—and I won’t be entertaining there—but it is good enough for now. And my concerns about the strength of downtown Columbia’s rental market are gone.