The Stars and the Cookie Jar

* with apologies to just_showtune  who has seen this already...

t's densely populated where we live, and our needs are very specific: a building or single-family rental must be walking- or bus-distance to the Metro railway, must accept dogs, and can't have a significant mold problem. (Since we live in a malarial swamp, this can be hard to find.)

We pay an average amount for the place we live in now, but our rent will rise in February and we have no idea by how much, since the first year, we got a discounted rate, and this year, we've just paid what the rent would have been without that initial discount. We have a lot of space, and a washer/dryer in the house; but we'd like to live closer to friends, work, and shops. [Okay, full disclosure: if I wanted to spend the time and money to utilize the buses that DO run evenings and weekends, and just shove that into my schedule, I could get around fine where we live. It just. Takes a while.]

There's one building that fits all our needs. Count 'em! One. However, savings overall for this building would be around $900/year purely in rent, and movers -- we have enough crap now to need movers, who would have thought! I used to be itinerant! Peripatetic! --- will cost around $750.

N would save about $170/month in commute costs, but general consensus (from friends who live in the complex, and from internet reviews) say utility bills in Prospective New Building can be horrendous. Our utilities right now are... meh.

So what do you do, gentle readers, when your options run the gamut from meh to meh?

ETA: One selfish reason to want to move to Prospective New Building: closer to our local friends. Door-knock distance to some of them, in fact.

ETA 2: Moving to Prospective New Building will not save us any commute time. That's just the way Metro wants to do things.

ETA 3: Walkable-distance real-life amenities (grocery store, CVS) are the same both places.