Once my wife and I arrived in Chicago, we began frantically searching for an apartment. We cruised through low-rent neighborhoods scribbling down phone numbers from For Rent signs, pouring over classified ads, and we even went to an apartment finding service.

This free service is provided by the Apartment People. We stopped by their downtown office, filled out a form indicating where we wanted to live, that we wanted a three-bedroom apartment, the amenities we had to have, and the rent we wanted to pay. We were assigned to a squirelly looking middle-aged agent with a curious moustache, glasses, and the voice of a radio DJ. This was Bruno.

Bruno decided to completely disregard where we had indicated that we wanted to live. Instead he opted to look about ten miles north-east where the rents tripled and the apartment space shrunk proportionately. He tried to impress upon us that he had lived in Chicago for thirty some-odd years and he had been with the Apartment People for quite a while and he knew where the good places to live were.

After a grueling amount of time searching the computer database, we got into Bruno’s car for a ride I can only equate to a New York City cab ride. I’m not sure I could even tally all the traffic rules broken. We saw a number of miniscule apartments that Bruno would laud as “true gems” despite the lumpy, stained, blue, commercial berber carpet, and ceilings that did not permit an upright posture. He broke into a property because the key wasn’t working (because he had the wrong address) and had us chased off the property by mad dogs and screaming homosexuals.

These were very disheartening experiences, but the worst was seeing Chicago’s segregation and racist attitudes first hand. Neighborhoods are primarily singular in ethnicity. The white people live in one area, the blacks in another, the hispanics in yet another, etc.

Bruno, being a real estate agent of sorts, was not allowed by law to tell us about the safety of an area. But, as you can tell, Bruno held little regard for the law. He wouldn’t show us properties in Logan Square or Humbolt Park as we had requested because, according to him, it wasn’t safe, it was “gritty.”

We had been staying in Logan Square for the last week and it was perfectly safe. The only thing that would make it “not safe” to Bruno is the fact that the population is primarily hispanic and black. He would only show us properties where “[we] were the population.” We have been wrestling with that phrase trying to decipher it. Is everyone in the area unemployed and white? Does everyone in the area have an art degree? We decided that it really means that the area is populated by well-off, yuppy, white folk.

Once we abandoned Bruno and began searching on our own, landlords have been happy to wheel and deal with me on the phone because I annunciate. They are willing to drop our rent because we’re white. This same racism is so bad, we even visited an apartment where the Indian landlord told us that the apartment building was great because it was “98% caucasian.” I guess we could have brought it up to 100% whiteness.

We found our apartment on our own. It’s the size we wanted, for the price we wanted, in the area we wanted. We’re probably the only white people on the block. But we’re happy to not be the population.