Before I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area five years ago, I never hated my neighbors; any of them. I grew up in apartments in a rural area with other poor, trashy people (I'm not saying poor people are trashy. Middle-income and wealthy people are often also trashy. I'm just saying I lived near trashy people), and neighbors were never a problem. When my mom was finally able to buy a house, it was a little tiny 800 sq foot house that cost less than $90,000, therefore there were a lot of young people in the neighborhood, struggling people, and people who packed ten relatives into one little house. The couple I babysat for both worked at Mc Donald's, okay. Their kids were hopped up on junk food and would frequently exit the house in a whirling ball of screaming fistfight through the torn screen on the windows rather than use the door, while I dejectedly ate a few of their frozen blue ice pop thingies and hoped they wouldn't kill each other on my watch.
When I went to college and lived in apartments, my neighbors never bothered me.
When I moved to Los Angeles, my neighbors never bothered me, except for some stray wisps of cigarette smoke and a few late night yelling fights, but it was rare.
Since moving to the Bay Area, I've hated every since neighbor I've had, in the three apartments we've lived in.
I thought new Miss Downstairs was going to be okay. She has some kind of weird emphysema medicine in the back window of her Jetta, so I figured she's either an invalid or in the medical profession, and if she's in the medical profession she must be responsible, right? Fast forward to her either building a bed or a dresser or both at 2:00 am and possibly installing a disco ball into the ceiling (my floor).
There's nothing wrong with being awake at 2:30 am, but hopefully you'd be coming back from dancing or a bar and you'd simply pass out quietly on your bed, rather than putting your clothes into your dresser and slamming the dresser drawers 300 times.
You know it's time to look for housing where there are no downstairs or upstairs neighbors when you find yourself lying awake at 2:30 am hoping Miss Downstairs will drink a refreshing glass of bleach or have the bed collapse upon her while she's trying to hammer or nail something in, killing her instantly. That's where I'm at.
I feel trapped in crappy apartments by my paltry income and foolish lack of savings.
Or maybe it's living in San Francisco, where $2,000 a month rent gets us (barely) a basic, clean white box, a tree outside the window and a guaranteed parking spot. For less, you can have mold, layers and layers of old lead paint dating back to the Victorian era, a streetcar right outside your window, and a view of the peeling paint on a neighboring apartment's wall. Sigh.
