[Dailydrool] Adopter from MA--apartments

[Elizabeth Lindsey]

> ... and is an apartment renter she says she has a fenced yard??? I  
> do not know a lot about MA never been there but in Kansas City we  
> have no fenced yards in apartments  unless you call a deck a fenced  
> yard.


I sent a reply to Chris but then thought that perhaps other rescue  
groups might be interested in the apartment question. There may be a  
tendency when a prospective adopter says they live in an apartment to  
visualize a complex with multiple units in a series of blocks set  
around parking lots, with maybe a pool off on the side. But sometimes  
an apartment is part of a regular house. Old Victorians are often  
divided up into apartments by floor because they're too big for a  
single family to keep up with these days. My mother used to rent the  
first floor apartment of an old house. From the street it looked just  
like a house, but inside it was divided into three apartments by  
floor with a regular internal staircase. Her address was 304 Park  
Avenue, Apartment 1.

A lot of the houses on my block are brick bungalows built in the  
1920s that were turned into apartments in the 1970s. Most of them  
have been turned back into single residences as part of the  
gentrification process, but some have retained their apartments.  
Across the street and next door to me are bungalows that have  
finished attics serving as apartments. You reach the door by going up  
a metal fire escape on the side of the house.

The people in the bungalow apartments on my block have access to the  
fenced-in backyards behind the houses. They have to take the dog down  
the fire escape and through the back gate, but they're able to let  
their dogs use the yards. The woman who used to live in the apartment  
of the house next to me had a large, overweight lab who eventually  
had to go to another home because he could no longer manage the steep  
fire escape steps. But while he lived in that apartment, I'd often  
look out my back window and see him hanging out in the fenced-in  
backyard with his human. The landlady for that house is admirably dog  
friendly.

So if someone submits an application for a basset and gives you an  
apartment address you're concerned about, ask for a description of  
the apartment and the building it's in. It may turn out to be a  
favorable set-up, such as the first floor of a turn-of-the-century  
Dutch Revival house with a dog-friendly landlord.

Elizabeth