I have recently learned from news reports that the rental vacancy rate in Montreal is high enough that landlords are offering incentives such as a month of free rent to woo prospective tenants. Of course, I immediately began to regret renewing my current lease. While my apartment is ideally situated, and the building OK, with a pool and gym, as well as rooftop terrace, I pay $605 ($610 after September) for a 16th floor studio with one window, no balcony, and a view mainly of the high-rise next door. By Montreal standards, this is somewhat pricey, but there was a real shortage of rental units a few years ago, and I have fresh memories of near-homelessness on a couple of occasions, as well as 2 months spent living in the downtown YMCA (now demolished) in the Fall of 2000, where I was stuck on a floorful of refugees (not that there's anything wrong with refugees) awaiting housing, with a decrepit communal bathroom on the floor, at night the sound of what I thought was rain outside my window, only to learn it was other residents pissing from their windows in the middle of the night. I was damn near hit in the head a couple of times. When I looked down into the courtyard in the morning, it was littered with garbage, including but not limited to water bottles filled with urine. I mean, the rooms didn't even have a sink to piss in. And everytime you left your room, you had to take 2 keys, one for the room, the other for the bathroom. The room doors swung shut, behind you, and locked automatically. So if you didn't have your key, you had to go downstairs and have a handyman let you back in. Also, I was on the sixth or eigth floor, but the stairs were not accessible, so you had to take the elevators, which took absolutely forever.

So, suffice it to say, experiences like this have left me extremely cautious and wary of the whole process of moving and finding an apartment. Perhaps a bit too cautious and wary. But it makes sense, when you consider that it took me over a year of fairly active searching before I found my current pad, after living in a shoebox with a communal shower shared by everyone on the floor (albeit with my own toilet and sink). But I do wonder if I could use the current situation as leverage and try to upgrade within the same building: move to another unit, perhaps one with a balcony or a better view, for the same price or maybe slightly more. I know the apartment next to me, also a studio, is vacant, and while it has no balcony either, it is wider than mine, which is long but narrow, and it has a better view, but less closet-space. Then again, while I gripe about closet space, as my good pal Albert pointed out, most of my belongings are in boxes or on my floor at the moment, and have been since I moved in 19 months ago, and there is no reason to believe I am suddenly going to become more organized in a new apartment. But part of me also wonders if I just want to change units because I have never cleaned my apartment, which is now getting pretty dusty, and the one next to me is freshly renovated.