FRUSTRATION!!!!

Why? Why? Why??????? (silently screaming!!!) So we moved to MA and our apartment upon arrival was less than stellar for reasons too many to mention. Okay, I'll mention a few: It is on this steep hill in a ghetto neighborhood, the kitchen floors are nasty, nasty, nasty even after washing them, the closets are scary and gross, half the kitchen cupboards don't shut and/or have mice droppings in them, half the doors don't have door knobs, pipes are exposed, no facet in the tub so either Oliver has to take a shower as a 1 year old or he bathes in the kitchen sink, etc...I could go on and on (seriously) but you get the picture. We also recently discovered that we have a family of mice living with us. SUPER!!!(They are already a man down since Zack did manage to get one of them.) They are quite small and kind of cute, but not really the house guests we enjoy when met in the kitchen at 2am. So the point is that we are wanting to get out of here and we had looked around at the beginning of the month basically since the day we moved in because we decided when we moved in to go ahead and give our 30 day notice to the landlord.
So we hunted and found this great place. Perfect place. We were the 1st to see it and we wanted it and the Realtor said, "it's a done deal." But the owners were out of town at the time, so we were waiting until they came back in order to sign the lease. We were so relieved and excited because the place was nice and perfect for us and it had only taken a few days of hunting to find it. Then Monday of this week, shock horror, we are told that it is not ours and long story short the owner had decided to rent it to a friend that was in a bind. UGH....nice notice. So here we are AUG. 23rd and we are suppose to move out on the 31st and we have nowhere to go, and on top of it all Zack is starting school next week. Sure there are a few crumby back ups that if all else failed we could probably get into, but the problem is that we would have to sign a year lease.
So it's back to the drawing board. For the last 3 days we have been scouring the Internet for apts to rent and setting up appointments to see them. Let me tell you how depressing this is. It's almost obscene how ridiculous some of these places are. They are charging $1,000+ a month for JUNK and that is putting it kindly. Things are duck taped together, closets are non-existent, square footage is small, things are broken and 50 years old, and the neighborhoods are ugly. So here we are dragging a baby around in the car all day looking at disgusting places to live that we can barely afford anyway. It makes the place we are in look better and better which is scary.
Can you believe we looked at a place that was charging $1200 a month + utilities and it had old furniture all over inside it. It had an OLD stove/microwave unit with so many buttons it looked like a space shuttle, it must have been a left over from when they first invented microwaves. Half the counter top was missing in the kitchen and you could barely turn sideways in the bathroom to get into the tub. I don't think they had updated anything since it was build which was probably 50 or 60 years ago. And they guy said they normally asked for $1400 but they wanted to get it rented quickly so they had come down. What???? When I saw it I couldn't even believe they would show a place in that condition, never mind actually renting it for $1200 a month!!!
Wrong, wrong, wrong.....with every place we see we get more and more depressed.
I guess I have ranted enough. I will end with what is the silver lining in it all, And that is: Because we have been looking at maps and driving around 24/7 we have learned the areas and where things are which is always difficult when moving to a new place. I'm not sure the trade of is worth it. So I guess wish us luck in our pursuits.....and hope we don't have a mental breakdown in the process!