Progress...

So, I had the weirdest phone conversation yesterday. I'm looking for a house or apartment to rent in Socorro, and calling about the ads in the Socorro paper (how DID people get by before the interweb?!). I see an ad for a clean, quiet 2-bedroom house for rent for $500/month. Perfect! I thought. So I called.

Half an hour later, I'm practically convinced I don't want to go to Socorro at all. The woman owns two houses in Socorro, but lives in New York. She goes to NM in the winter to escape from the cold and snow. But she spent most of the time telling me how dangerous Socorro is, and how she won't go down there again, and how she can't believe anyone would voluntarily go there. Bizarrely inconsistent of her, at minimum, seeing as she owns not one, but TWO houses there. Completely weird, if you consider she's trying to rent them out...

I thought about it after I got off the phone, and realized a couple of things:

1) she probably lives in upstate New York, not NYC. I can't imagine anyone from NYC thinking Socorro was dangerous, even if people were getting shot every day. Mainly because there are so few people there that you'd just have to wait a couple of weeks, and all the gang members would be dead.

2) her examples of the dangerous things that could happen were stated in the following way: 'It's horrible. You could even get mugged there. I would NEVER live there again. It's just too dangerous. You can't even go out at night without people shouting at you.' Which could be true. It could also be true that she's had a bad experience that's tainted her whole outlook. AND it could also be true that she wasn't being very smart about where she goes and when, and with whom and in what clothes. I didn't spend four years in Camden, NJ for nuthin'.

3) I looked up the location of the house, and it's located right next to the highway, between the main highway and the business highway, right next to the WalMart. So. Maybe the neighborhood has gone downhill since the WalMart went in. Typically, these regions are pretty low rent.

So, upon mature consideration, I think I won't rent this house, even though she'd let me have a dog. If only because the landlord sounds mostly insane.