Random Gone Right
When Facebook Marketplace Housing exceeds expectations
As spring rolls around, many soon-to-be graduate students are receiving their letters of admission, and current MIT students are embarking on summer internships, research, or vacation after a long semester. Both future and current students, however, face the same dilemma: finding housing for the fall.
New students may face the challenge of having no or very little sense of Cambridge, Boston and Somerville (yes, all three municipalities offer great neighborhoods for MIT students!), and may feel lost when considering the geographic elements which make for good housing: which grocery stores are cheapest? Where are the best coffee shops and restaurants? What public transportation is available? Is the area friendly to bikers?
Current students, while familiar with the physical amenities of the city, have more existential questions to consider. Does this housing situation offer me enough separation from my classes or research to unwind and disconnect? Am I losing too much time to my commute? Should I live closer to my friends? Would my friendship be stronger if I did not live with this person?
Both sets of students often turn to the same resource: Facebook Housing Groups.
Last spring, having read my acceptance letter for the Master of City Planning program at 3am on a cold February night in Tunisia, I also felt the pressure of finding a good housing situation. I needed to answer many of the questions I listed above, having never set foot in Massachusetts and knowing no one from the area.
The Facebook groups I found most helpful were “Harvard MIT Cambridge Housing” and “Harvard MIT Housing.” I wish I could share a little-known hack for sifting through the dozens of posts shared throughout April, May, and June; however, what ultimately worked for me was good old-fashioned scrolling. Simple and at times frustrating, the process took time.
Eventually, I learned to skim posts for key criteria: “Summer sublet” or “annual lease,” price range, single gender or co-ed, neighborhood, pets or no pets. Personally, rental price was the most important variable to me, and so I was able to eliminate posts quickly that were outside of the limit of $1,000 I set for myself. I also wanted to live with other women, but I was open to any locations within a 30-minute walking commute to my department at MIT.
Google Maps is a girl’s best friend for comparing commuting options and evaluating neighborhoods from a distance.
One fateful day in June, I saw a post by a masters student at Harvard for a room in a 3 bedroom-1 bathroom apartment that met my criteria. I followed up with a private message, as I had on a number of other posts, receiving only a 50% response rate. This student, my future housemate, responded right away, and two days later, after a handful of messages, pictures of the apartment, and a short phone call about housemate expectations, I committed to signing on the lease.
I was glad I asked about average utility costs, because gas and electricity payments during the winter months can be notoriously high. Boston has one of the oldest building stocks in the country; more than 50% of homes were built before 1940, and many are not well insulated, making them expensive to keep warm. While I did agree to start paying rent for one month in the summer before I arrived, I justified the added cost by the money I would be saving on the cheaper rent in the remaining 12 months of the year. I also factored the mental load I could release by having secured housing.
As of August 2025, it is also illegal for landlords to require new tenants to pay broker fees. I was relieved that my landlord only asked for the standard one-month deposit and had a history of making repairs in the apartment quickly.
Although I willingly embraced the spirit of adventure when I committed to renting an apartment I hadn’t seen in a neighborhood I had only explored through Google Maps, my capacity for spontaneity was stretched when it came to finding our third housemate.
The person who had originally agreed to sign onto our lease backed out only 5 days before the new lease was set to begin. My first days in Boston, in addition to collecting furniture through Facebook Marketplace and determining my optimal commuting path to MIT, also consisted of fielding calls from interested tenants. Finally, we were connected to a woman just arriving for a one-year fellowship at Harvard, whose housing arrangement had also unexpectedly fallen through. In what I now consider God’s grace, our housing trio was complete.
As it turns out, this meant I would be living with two Pakistani women with impressive paths to Cambridge. I am so thankful for housemates who have deepened my knowledge of Pakistani culture and my appreciation of South Asian cuisines – masala, dahl, and biryani of every variety. While we each have busy schedules that keep us apart most of the day, we have tried to plan outings at least once a month and often find ourselves having impromptu dinners together. From ice skating to the Christmas Market to thrift shopping at Garment District – we’ve never lacked activities to try.
As someone who gets easily absorbed in schoolwork and campus life, living off campus with students from another university gives me opportunities to disconnect and broaden my perspective. While MIT and Harvard may be considered rivals by many, to the students living in Cambridgeville (Cambridge + Somerville), the two universities offer different opportunities to learn and have unique research and course offerings. We need each other for balance and to draw us out of the drama of our particular programs and departments.
If you find yourself searching for housing this spring, take heart! Be patient, stay the course, take risks, and know that random Facebook Marketplace matches can and do turn out even better than expected.
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