Documentary : Need a Home in Belfast? But Which Belfast? : * Better check out more than the rent and the view. In this strife-torn city, you want to be on the right side.

As I stood with newspaper in hand, shivering in the icy Irish air, my thoughts filtered back to the last time I’d been in this grim situation: In a city I knew only too well, but flat broke and homeless. It was the Los Angeles of three years ago. Then, a scan of the classifieds revealed a land of stunning residential choice--virtually none of it affordable south of Ojai.

But now, in search of a home within this city of half a million Protestants and Roman Catholics, price was to be no object. Belfast rents run from rock-bottom to reasonable, because nobody much is scrambling to live here. Also, as a journalist who must travel on both sides of the sectarian divide, my chief concern was to find neutral ground--a notoriously elusive concept in Northern Ireland.

Because Belfast is highly segregated along political-religious lines, your neighborhood often makes a statement about your tribal allegiance. People here commonly will inquire about where you live to try to smoke out which “side” you’re on. I don’t want to be identified with either side.

A few blocks can make a world of difference. A two-mile walk takes you past barren housing estates rife with soldiers and paramilitary domination and into leafy-green Tudor communities where the Northern Irish “troubles” seem a million miles away. Which Belfast should I live in? Despite working here off and on since 1988, I still didn’t know. In the end I let my meager finances and street sense guide me.

I soon felt as if I had when shopping in the Soviet Union. Prices certainly are low, but there’s little on the shelves. I needed either a small apartment--”flat,” in local parlance--or a room in a flat to be shared with strangers of unknown hygiene and humor.

I faced competition from scores of others drawn to Belfast’s institutions of higher learning, and together we stood at the Queen’s University notice board, casting competitive sneers as we scribbled details from the same dogeared ads.

One caught my eye: a room to let for 60 pounds ($110) a month on Palestine Street. It lies between Queen’s and the River Lagan in an area known as the Holy Land because of its road names: Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo. It is a mixed district of early 20th-Century row houses--mixed not just in the usual Belfast sense of Protestants and Catholics but also of locals and students because of its proximity to the university.

The closer to Queen’s, the more students there are; the closer to the river, the more locals--in this case mostly Catholic. It seemed neutral enough, I thought.

I walked beneath a tower of scaffolding and rapped on the door. A sandy-haired man with a stubby mustache answered. He introduced himself as Eamon--a typically Catholic name. His course of study at Queen’s confirmed his origins: Medieval Irish literature. His roommates weren’t in. As he poured two cups of tea, I asked about the scaffolding. “Och, all them pipes? It’s a mess all right.” Why are they there? “The workers put ‘em up.” For what? “Well, you’ve got the odd brick falling on your head now and again.”

He showed me the available room, whose ambience was dominated by the smell of someone’s fermenting socks. “Davey’ll be moved out Tuesday, or sooner if you want in,” he said simply.

They had no phone: “Too much bother arguin’ over who pays what.” No shower either: “There’s fine hot showers at the physical education center about five minutes from here.” Heat? “Well, we’d have no problem if you brought your wee girlfriend over! . . . Actually we’ve a bit a’ coal but nothin’ to light it with.”

I asked about the area’s safety record. Eamon noted that the nearest big supermarket, across the Ormeau Bridge, is in Protestant territory. A group of loyalist youths last year singled him out as a stranger, quizzed him on his name and religion and chased him into the river.

“I thought sure the mad Prods were gonna do me. I don’t go down that way any more,” he said, lighting his last cigarette after I refused it. “But seein’ as you’re American, they’ll leave you be. Just don’t tell ‘em you’re Shawn. Say John.

“I’ll not be kiddin’ ye,” he continued. “This place is bare-bones. But for 60 quid you can’t beat it. And we’re all decent lads.”

He nearly had me convinced. Then he showed me the “bathroom”--a toilet in a cinder-block closet in the back yard. “Ye’ll not be sittin’ out there for too long readin’ a good book!” he said, then mumbled something about money coming in for a new loo next spring.

Eamon was out of luck. So, for the night, was I.

I found temporary digs with Conor, a part-time bartender in one of the rowdier pubs on Belfast’s “golden mile” of shops. The next day I picked up copies of the two main morning papers: the Belfast News Letter, a tabloid with a Protestant loyalist slant, and the Irish News, a broadsheet with a Catholic nationalist audience.

The News Letter had an ad for a flat to share on the mostly middle-class Protestant east side. An old lady answered my inquiry, her voice soon laced with suspicion at my accent. By the time I’d mentioned Shawn, American and writer she had heard enough. No IRA sympathizer was getting her loyal Protestant flat, no sir.

The Catholic classifieds offered a two-room house on Springfield Road in west Belfast, for 125 pounds ($225) a month. It sounded suspect, but until the afternoon Belfast Telegraph hit the streets, it was the best of a bad lot being offered.

The estate agent for the property handed me the keys, said it had “basic” furnishings and insisted on not accompanying me. It seemed his dread of the Catholic ghetto was greater than his fear that I might steal something. I hopped into one of the republican-run, black jitney cabs that shuttle up and down the Catholic Falls Road. Along the way a woman passenger with several children on her hands set one on my lap.

We hit a traffic snarl, so I paid my 45-pence fare and got out to find a funeral cortege making its way up the road. Four men carried the casket on their shoulders. Police armed with submachine guns and soldiers in full battle gear diverted traffic and kept an eye out for IRA snipers.

I approached one mourner, a man with thick spectacles and tweed cap, to find out who had died. The deceased was a Catholic man of 76 who left a widow, seven children and 22 grandkids behind. Protestant rioters from the nearby Shankill district torched his home in 1969, the year British troops were introduced to the Falls. He had spent his retirement years tending a rose garden in the shadow of the “peace line,” the wall that the army erected between the two camps.

I told my informant that I was looking at a house locally and mentioned the address. “Are ye mad?” he said, genuinely amused. “You live there for very long, boy, and you’ll end up in a box just like that wee fella.” A few hundred yards up, a stretch of Protestant homes, denoted by their tattered Union Jacks, led the way to an iron-walled British army fort, one of a half-dozen in the vicinity.

The cortege soon passed by the house I’d come to see. Its side wall was a jumble of fading graffiti: “Paddy’s a wanker.” “AK-47 from heaven.” “Saddam for Pope.” Its northward windows were solid brick. Those facing south were similarly boarded up. The bricked-up bungalow--between the Protestants huddled around the frontier fort and the Catholics behind their peace line--wasn’t neutral ground at all. More like no-man’s land.

“A fine Protestant family used to live there, but they were intimidated out by the bad ones a long time ago,” the mourner said. “Our own moved in after, but they were robbed repeatedly and had their windows put in by the Prods. Now mostly our side’s wee’uns sit by the side entry there, sniffin’ solvents and fryin’ their brains.

“Don’t think you’d be wise livin’ there now,” he said cheerfully. “But you’re welcome any time to stay at our home. We’re on Forfar Street, that way. It’s safe enough. Ask for Gerry.”

The afternoon Telegraph rekindled my hopes, with two rooms on offer in south Belfast: One off the Lisburn Road (90 pounds, or $165 a month) and the other in what many would consider the Beverly Hills of Belfast--the Malone Road (120 pounds/$220). Much of south Belfast, particularly Malone, was once the preserve of old Protestant money. But in the past two decades the district has taken in upwardly mobile, mostly Catholic refugees--businessmen, doctors, lawyers, politicians and civil servants--from the militarized west and north of the city.

I made a beeline for the Malone offering on Marlborough Park, which was to be shown at 2 o’clock. On the way I walked past the Malone Road army base without even recognizing what it was. Instead of barbed-wire and anti-mortar netting, it sported a spruce-wood facade and a watchtower fit for a Bavarian castle.

A dozen people had already congregated outside the broad Georgian doorstep of the Victorian flat. We stood in the drizzle waiting for the landlord, who was inside grilling the one lucky enough to have gotten the pole position.

The place had all the conveniences I had planned to leave behind in the States: off-street parking, security system, fenced garden, a satellite dish offering an umbilicus to the pulse of American culture--The Simpsons, MTV, Dan Rather and football.

A young man in suit and tie pulled up in a late-model BMW, a tenant home to grab a late lunch. I struck up a conversation at a jog and followed the man inside where he poured me a cup of coffee.

“No offense, but people like you come over here looking for dirt,” said the man, a Protestant who worked in England before returning home to start up his cellular-phone business. “There are two Protestants and Roman Catholics sharing this house. If you’ve got a job in Northern Ireland, this is a wonderful place. You just stay out of politics, and you can be quite comfortable. It’s much safer than Los Angeles I’m sure.”

While we talked, the first person through the door was signing on the dotted line with the landlord.

It was only a four-minute walk to option No. 4 on Brook Street across the Lisburn Road. By crossing it, I left behind the comfy, insulated environment of Malone to enter an entirely different class and community: Traditionally Protestant, blue-collar and wary of strangers.

Former mill workers lived in many of the tidy but treeless row houses. The wives scrubbed the front walk with soap and trimmed their five feet of hedge with only the care that a lifetime resident can pay to a property.

Few of their sons and daughters, born as they were into an era of dying industry and rising conflict, had stayed on. Some had signed up with loyalist gangs and ended up behind bars or buried; many more had gone on to college on the British “mainland” and left Ulster behind for good. The lost generation opened the floodgates to change, as the numerous “for sale” signs illustrated.

I passed a social club with no sign, only an armored door and overhead camera. The loyalist Ulster Defense Assn. ran the watering hole as a members-only affair, as the burly doorman and blast-proof windows made clear.

Brook Street was opposite yet another security-force barracks and next to an Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a stone structure without a hint of decoration. Its neon sign out front warned: “Repent Lest Ye Be Damned.” But I went down the street anyway and knocked on No. 13.

The two men who lived there invited me to help them kill off a bottle of schnapps. Tom, the owner, worked for the city’s health department; Jeremy was studying computer programming at Queen’s. Both were Catholics recently arrived in the neighborhood. The room was mine if I wanted it, Tom said.

I asked if they felt at all threatened in this district. Jeremy thought that an extremely odd question.

“For f---’s sake, where wouldn’t you feel threatened in the north? On the Falls the IRA comes knockin’ on your door. Here it’s the UDA. The whole place is a madhouse! But all the same,” Jeremy said, using a familiar slang expression to describe an engaging atmosphere, “it’s good crack.”

Tom thought my desire to live somewhere “neutral” was even funnier. “You should set a more realistic goal, like getting a place with central heating,” he said.

“Where’s ‘neutral’ in Northern Ireland? You could go crazy looking for that place. I don’t think it exists.”

They had central heating. I kicked off my shoes and made the decision to be moved in by midnight.