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Renting an Apartment in Aloha
What You Should Know
Aloha is a census-designated place and an unincorporated community in
Washington County, Oregon, United States. Its name is similar to the Hawaiian
word, aloha, although the place name is pronounced e-lo-he instead of a-lo-ha.
As of the 2000 Census, the population was 41,741.
Aloha is considered by its residents as one of the few remaining "affordable yet
desirable" housing markets left in the Portland metro area, and is a desirable
market for working families due to its proximity to a number of major Intel
campuses, and the Nike world headquarters. While the neighborhood currently
consists of mostly single family, low density dwellings, higher density
dwellings have become increasingly common due to the Portland metro area's Urban
Growth Boundary, and the recent extension of the MAX (Metropolitan Area Express)
light rail line along Aloha's northern boundary. Aloha is served by two school
districts, Beaverton and Hillsboro, which both consistently rank high on school
performance evaluations.
According to Oregon Geographic Names, the origin of the name Aloha is disputed.
Some sources say it was named by Robert Caples, a railroad worker, but it is
unknown why the name was chosen. Aloha post office was established in 1912, and
another source claimed that the first postmaster, Julius Buck, named the office
Aloah after a small resort on Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin. Supposedly the last
two letters were transposed by the Post Office Department during the application
process. However, the local pronunciation has remained Ah-lo-wa rather than
Ah-lo-ha.
Aloha has been, for most of its existence, a rural community. With the increase
of suburban development in eastern Washington County starting in the 1950s,
Aloha would have become another indistinguishable block of housing when Intel
bought land in 1974 at the intersection of the Tualatin Valley Highway and 198th
Ave, which became the first of several plants Intel has built in Washington
County between Hillsboro and Beaverton.
An attempt at incorporation in the early 1980s failed at the ballot box. Since
then, Aloha's location between the cities of Hillsboro and Beaverton has made it
vulnerable to annexation battles between the two cities. Agreements in 2005
between Beaverton and Washington County have limited Beaverton annexations in
the Aloha area for 10 years.
Aloha High School opened in 1965, and received its first major
remodeling/expansion in 2006. There are rumors saying that the former mascot for
Aloha High was the "Pineapples", but according to yearbooks from 1965, the
mascot has always been the "Warriors". Aloha is also home to the Magee Brothers
Beauty School.
Basic Apartment Information
An apartment (or flat in Britain and most other Commonwealth countries) is a
self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building. Apartments
may be owned (by an owner-occupier) or rented (by tenants).
Some apartment-dwellers own their apartments, either as co-ops, in which the
residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or
in condominiums, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the
public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but
large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment
connotes a residential unit or section in a building. Apartment building owners,
lessors, or managers often use the more general word units to refer to
apartments. Units can be used to refer to rental business suites as well as
residential apartments. When there is no tenant occupying an apartment, the
lessor is said to have a vacancy. For apartment lessors, each vacancy represents
a loss of income from rent-paying tenants for the time the apartment is vacant
(i.e., unoccupied). Lessors' objectives are often to minimize the vacancy rate
for their units. The owner of the apartment typically transfers possession to
the occupant by giving him/her the key to the apartment entrance door and any
other keys need to live there, such as a common key to the building or any other
common areas, and an individual unit mailbox key. When the occupant move out,
these keys should typically be returned to the owner.
Apartments can be classified into several types. Studio, efficiency, bed-sit, or
bachelor apartments tend to be the smallest apartments with the cheapest rents
in a given area. These kinds of apartment usually consist mainly of a large room
which is the living, dining, and bedroom combined. There are usually kitchen
facilities as part of this central room, but the bathroom is its own smaller
separate room. Moving up from the efficiencies are one-bedroom apartments where
one bedroom is a separate room from the rest of the apartment. Then there are
two-bedroom, three-bedroom, etc. apartments. Small apartments often have only
one entrance/exit. Large apartments often have two entrances/exits, perhaps a
door in the front and another in the back. Depending on the building design, the
entrance/exit doors may be directly to the outside or to a common area inside,
such as a hallway. Depending on location, apartments may be available for rent
furnished with furniture or unfurnished into which a tenant usually moves in
with his/her own furniture. Permanent carpeting is often included in an
apartment.
Laundry facilities are usually kept in a separate area accessible to all the
tenants in the building. Depending on when the building was built and the design
of the building, utilities such as water, heating, and electric may be common
for all the apartments in the building or separate for each apartment and billed
separately to each tenant (however, many areas in the US have ruled it illegal
to split a water bill among all the tenants, especially if a pool is on the
premises). Outlets for connection to telephones are typically included in
apartments. Telephone service is optional and is practically always billed
separately from the rent payments. Cable television and similar amenities are
extra also. Parking space, air conditioner, and extra storage space may or may
not be included with an apartment. Rental leases often limit the maximum number
of people who can reside in each apartment. On or around the ground floor of the
apartment building, a series of mailboxes are typically kept in a location
accessible to the public and, thus, to the letter-carrier too. Every unit
typically gets its own mailbox with individual keys to it. Some very large
apartment buildings with a full-time staff may take mail from the mailman and
provide mail-sorting service. Near the mailboxes or some other location
accessible by outsiders, there may be a buzzer (equivalent to a doorbell) for
each individual unit. In smaller apartment buildings such as two- or
three-flats, or even four-flats, garbage is often disposed of in trash
containers similar to those used at houses. In larger buildings, garbage is
often collected in a common trash bin or dumpster. For cleanliness or minimizing
noise, many lessors will place restrictions on tenants regarding keeping pets in
an apartment.
In some parts of the world, the word apartment is used generally to refer to a
new purpose-built self-contained residential unit in a building, whereas the
word flat means a converted self-contained unit in an older building. An
industrial, warehouse, or commercial space converted to an apartment is commonly
called a loft.
When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of a landlord's family
member, the unit may be known as an in-law apartment or granny flat, though
these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters
rather than family members. In Canada these suites are commonly located in the
basements of houses and are therefore normally called basement suites.
Staying in privately owned apartments rather than in a hotel is quickly becoming
popular with travelers.