The Trouble with Apartments

I’ve lived in apartment buildings for the better part of 7 years now. This makes me highly qualified to pass off my opinion on everything apartment related as unequivocally factual.

Where I live now is in a downtown Cincinnati neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine. It’s one of those rapidly improving (some call it gentrifying) neighborhoods where abandoned and run-down buildings are being rehabbed into boutiques and trendy restaurants and apartments. The particular block I live on, 15th, is still very much up-and-coming, and by that I mean I still see grown men urinating on the sidewalk regularly, and on trash night the bins get ransacked and my old mail and takeout containers cover the street like a bum tornado touched down.

This picture is tall as hell, and is by Carlos ZGZ

Anyway that’s not what this is about. I’m going to talk about the mechanics of apartment living in general.

I’ll start with the things that suck

  1. Flights of stairs. We have 4 of them, and they are steep and obnoxious. There are literally no elevators in historic buildings in OTR.
  2. Laundry. You have to physically go outside to get to our shared laundry space. It’s clean and cheap and easy, but if it’s snow or rain or whatever, you’re getting wet, son.
  3. Gated entry. This seems nice (keeps out the bum tornado!), but we don’t have a buzzer. Friends coming over? That’s 4 flights down, to the front to let them in (where they are watching someone urinate on the sidewalk), then 4 flights back up. I’m huffing, I’m puffing, I’m about to blow this apartment down.
  4. Parking: it’s on the street. My car has a million little dings on it now. Broken mirror, dented front panel, cracked bumper. Never have been broken into, though, so that’s a plus.
  5. Downstairs neighbors. Real nice guy and gal. Have older kids. I have a serious mental complex about walking gingerly in residences now. Even in people’s standalone homes — I cannot make myself stop or clomp. If something loud crashes to the floor I feel like I’m back in Vietnam, holding my breath and looking around wildly for Charlie.

Now the stuff that’s awesome

  1. Apartment cost of living is just plain great. No fixing appliances. No mortgage insurance. No snaking drains. They mounted my TV for me. They stashed my fig tree for the winter for me. They actually replace lightbulbs that I can’t reach.
  2. It’s safe as shit. I don’t care what people say — there are only 8 units in our building. All my neighbors are young parents or young professionals. It takes 3 different locked doors to get to our unit. I’m never ‘alone’ — if I screamed for help (or god forbid Xtina screamed for help) someone would be there, poking their head out the window. Everyone knows us.
  3. It’s walkable to literally everything in the city. With a RedBike stand 200 feet from our front door, everything in the entire city is accessible within 10 minutes. Living in the suburbs you literally just can’t get anywhere on foot. Sorry, losers :-)
  4. We share a bedroom wall with this other guy. Sometimes he watches Family Guy or something else and starts giggling. And he has one of those kind of goofy laughs that also gets us giggling. And then we are all three giggling to ourselves in bed. He probably doesn’t know about that, actually. Don’t tell him.

Overall, apartment living is great. It has it’s downs for sure, and I think you can come up with a pros and cons list for literally any place you want to live. Right now, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I never sit in traffic. I never have to scrape ice off my car. I get thousands of steps in exercise every single day just by virtue of walking. I see the city. I never have to worry about the water heater or the dryer or yard work or paying the water bill.

Anyhow, that’s about all I can say about that.