Cast your net broadly. Limiting criteria, such as where you really WANT to live, will have to be mitigated by the fact that you're going to have to look at more places than the typical apartment searcher. Be polite but persistent. Treat it like a job search. Also, time your search well.
Residents generally give notice to landlords the last week of the month.
Really hit your search hard then. That will help to increase the available pool of vacancies. The last piece of advice I have would be to look at a house sharing situation, where you would not be on the lease. In many sharing or roommate situations, the master tenant would be on the lease, and you would pay rent to them. In many of those situations, you could avoid having to produce a credit report altogether.