I had the opposite problem. When I lived in a condo previously, I had the poor luck to live next to a shitty neighbor who would have parties at 5AM on Monday morning because she didn't work. The fact is anyone can get unlucky and have a shitty neighbor, but at least when you rent if the hassle is bad enough you can much more easily up and move.

Sounds pretty cold. I've had neighbors come over to introduce themselves, some even with welcoming gifts when we bought the house and moved in. I'd hate to just shut myself out of the society like that.

Tangential, but I have lived for 10 years in the same apartment and I have never interacted with my neighbours. Not even once.

I probably wouldn't care because there would be no way to detect if it was happening, without me standing outside my door all night like a sentry.

Sure, I'd be annoyed if some of the guests came and went at all hours of the night and that was waking me up regularly, but that could happen just as easily with more permanent neighbors, and I'd be able to do just as little about that.

That is a problem in some places. In fact, I have never seen my neighbor but I do hear him occasionally at wrong hours.

I don't know if it's that much of a difference than some random wildlife waking you up in the wilderness. Would you feel like you lost your solitude? In my case I do feel annoyed and disturbed, but why should it make me feel like I am now not alone? No one is interacting with me, unless I take others going about their business as a personal attack for some reason, surely not their intent?

But yes I think your argument is sound (sorry couldn't help it), I hate noise and in fact bad soundproofing is why I want to move.

I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap.

But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.

You've obviously never met my neighbors. But noise is just one example; far more annoying when I was in an apartment was someone smoking below my balcony on a hot night when all I wanted was to open the windows.

And I suppose you'll tell me that filtration systems could take care of that, which is true, but staying locked in a closed apartment is, as has been recently shown, terrible for your health, physically and emotionally.

It's no use, I shall keep my yard and clear, dark skies where you can see the stars, and wildlife.

There's over a thousand people living in my building, and a lot more in just a few hundred meters around me. I have very similar experience with my divorce, but I don't think I would be able to effectively communicate with this community, or to trust all these random people.

If you then give out keys to dozens/hundreds/thousands of other people to come over whenever they want and tell them "Make yourselves at home", you can't be surprised when they start calling you out for shitting in plastic bags in the living room and leaving them there for guests to find.

You can try to kick them out, but you'll find it difficult at this point, and you'll lose a lot of your friends in the process.

Choices have to be made: do you stick to your guns, or do you choose to reevaluate how you're living your life?

I was not a nice person at this point, and my intentions were to have somewhere to sleep out of the rain.

I did at one point live in actual squat where people had broken in, the breaking in part happened before I got there, but I lived there for I guess what was the greatest summer ever. That was in a different city. I got out before the eviction happened, but what happened was that the landlord eventually figured out there were 7 hardcore kids squatting in this basement apartment and he came over and told them they had 24 hours to get out before he called the cops.

In that location, the cops would have come, and the cops would have kicked the kids out that day, like literally kicked them out. Kicked their asses.

In the other situation I describe, it was in a different city. Crime central. The cops weren't coming. Not to kick me out of a squat, not to kick me out of an apartment that somebody maybe had rented way back when. Not for anything. I could have set up a meth lab. Cops weren't coming.

My meaning is, if you're a landlord, you're signing up to deal with this shit, know what you're getting in to. In some places you just call the cops. In some places, $1,000 to get rid of a non-tenant like squatter me would be getting off super cheap. It would be a business decision.

They're allowed to, sure. But in practice the expectation is that these are the exceptions, not the rule and apartments are typically constructed with that expectation in mind.

> Are you going to get all pissy if your neighbor works odd hours and gets home at 3am every night?

No, where did you get that impression? My neighbor, who works odd hours and gets home at 3am every night is a considerate person and has a long term relationship with me, his neighbor. And that's why he tries not to slam the door and he doesn't invite his 4 drunk friends over to his digs for 24 hours.

> If you're talking about a residential area with single family homes, how likely is it you're actually going to hear or notice someone entering or leaving your neighbor's house in the middle of the night?

I'm not talking about 'single family homes', I'm talking about apartments in just about every major city where AirBNB and such are getting people very upset.

> "Partying until 3am" is possibly a problem. That's what noise ordinances are for.

Yes, except that if your 'neighbors' change every 24 hours they don't give a damn about their reputation they will just do it until the police shows up and then do it somewhere else the next day.

I live that way and rather enjoy it. If that sounds so terrible to you, I suppose you should move elsewhere instead of turning the neighborhood I live in into the one you'd like to.

There's plenty of room for everyone.

120 years ago family and neighbors would just show up. Communities weren’t compromised of strangers who only slept there. Maybe we’ll adapt by getting to know our neighbors and being less exclusionary about our homes as time goes on.

Because my upstairs neighbors are assholes.

Has it, really? Unless you're talking about AirB&B, staying in a complete stranger's house while they're there has definitely not become commonplace for me or any of my circle.

I’m sure it does — to you. It sounds like a one sentence horror story to me.

I enjoy living somewhere small enough that I have an active role to play in my community’s basic needs, including serving as a volunteer firefighter, while still being remote enough that I don’t need to intrude on my neighbors (or request their approval) to largely live the way I want to live — and vis versa.

If that is true, I very much respect that ...

Anyway, I suppose you know, that people usually adopt to their enviroment. So if you see not so nice changes in your ethics and livestyle, you should probably reconsider your home ...

Not really. Maybe for the particularly extroverted individuals, but I'm quite aware of people, both older and younger generations, who would love nothing more than to have nothing to do with anyone disturbing the peace of their homes.

Folks out in the countryside especially have such a tendency; people go out to live in the country in part because there's less god damn humans to deal with compared to city life.

I'd like you to meet my neighbors (both above and below) from the last time I was unfortunate enough to have to live in an apartment.