another fruitless day

I am so sick of looking for rental houses! We desperately need a bigger place with a yard the kids can be banished to...err, I mean, go out and play in. I don't even care about the bigger part at this point, I just want the yard! We have done drive-bys of literally hundreds of houses and the select few that have fit our needs and budget seem always to be snatched from our grasp just as we find them. Sometimes I hate Florida with a passion. I don't understand why it's okay - even preferred - to have some big ugly square featureless monstrosity of a 3000sf house jammed on a teeny lot of dead grass, sandwiched in a neighborhood of 500 houses just like it with your neighbors, who you'll likely never even meet,  just 5 feet away. When did that become "luxury living?" I don't get it. I know it's hot here, but if they didn't flatten every tree on site to build these homes there'd be some shade and everything would be great. But I guess when you're both working 2 jobs and the kids are in daycare all day and you only see each other over a dinner of KFC, a fight to get the kids to bed, and cleaning, shopping, and trekking to Disney on the weekends, you don't really need a yard. How did we come to this?

The sad thing is that the house owners and property management groups by and large are a worthless lot who don't even have the courtesy to call you back when you inquire about a house. You'd think this casual attitude would just be on craigslist, but it's actually rampant in the real estate circles as well. Way to score some business! This is a time of absolute starvation for realtors with the housing market so dismal - you'd think they'd want the quick money a rental has to offer.

My other option is to go buy a second car (that runs). If DH had a car that got better gas mileage and we took the Blazer, we could go to places like the park and store during the day and being stuck at home wouldn't be as much of an issue. But there's just something about having a real yard where you can set up a swingset for the kids and have a garden and a dog and it all is just a step through your door. It's such a tough decision because we don't really have the money to do both if we want to save anything for buying a house a year or two down the road. I hate decisions like this!