Eve Fairbanks: Caution: D.C. apartment hunt can result in identity crisis

At least a few of these new arrivals have chosen Washington over that plum Condé Nast job in New York or their drummer boyfriend’s digs in San Fran, for one reason: They believed Washington would be a cheaper place to live.

A young city with plenty of cheap pads! All-you-can-eat fajita specials at Tortilla Coast! But, alas, they’ll soon find out they were wrong.

Washington is the worst rental market in America.

I don’t mean according to the standard metrics we use to measure rental markets, like vacancy rates or increasing rents.

Washington doesn’t look that bad by the numbers: In its 2006 survey of most expensive rental markets in America, Forbes still ranks Washington just 13th — behind New York City; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Honolulu; Boston; Northern New Jersey; Stamford, Conn.; Nassau-Suffolk, N.Y.; Orange County; San Jose; San Diego; and Oakland.

But Washington is the worst rental market in America if you take into account the more human elements of renting and relocation: gunning for a place, wheedling for repairs after you assured the landlord you adored it, dealing with new roommates.

And while it might seem that the more expensive and competitive a rental market, the tougher it would be on the nerves, this simple calculus isn’t true.

It’s just toughest in Washington.

Here, the apartment search — which has peculiar, harrowing qualities that inflict their unique type of psychological damage no matter what city you’re looking in — takes on a distinctive Washington edge.

Everything is political and personally competitive.

I have this hypothesis because my lease in Mount Pleasant just expired, and I spent the summer searching for a new apartment. Looking at an apartment — or, especially, a room in a group house — here becomes an exercise in social and political positioning.

Bring cookies or a six-pack to a housing interview.

If your roommate is of the opposite sex, case out the prospective landlord for family-values tendencies (my roommate and I were rejected by one because we weren’t married).

Be prepared to be quizzed as to whether you are liberal-friendly, lean conservative, care about the environment, eat vegan, agree with the stances expressed in The New Republic, or watch “Project Runway.”

Don’t believe me?

One representative Craigslist ad I saw recently expressed preference for a multiculturally sensitive tenant with radical politics, into healthy communication and an “intentional” environment.

“It’s up to you to give us an idea of who you are,” the ad read.

And that’s very important: I know someone who left her group house after months of living there because of political differences.

In Washington, status is based not merely on wealth or contribution to the community, but on a faux meritocracy of constructed persona where people battle for stature by trying to strike just the right combination of superficial eccentricity, fundamental normalcy and relentless self-promotion.

This, in turn, is the posture you are trying to strike as a renter.

After months of searching, I achieved a Washington apartment not based on my credit, but on a lengthy e-mail I sent to the landlord extolling my love of music and interest in politics and the South.

All this probing is nerve-wracking. But, at its worst, it even can lead to a sense of lost identity. Tweaking your image is always a part of looking for a rental place, usually involving slightly inflating your paycheck.

But looking for an apartment in Washington, I may, at times, have answered yes to almost any question — socialist? Libertarian? Healthy communicator? — landlords posed to me.

And why not? It was up to me to give them the right idea of who I was.