My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
It also just gets messy having that many people try to manage a property together. I lived in a high rise for a year. There was constant bickering over who put the wrong thing down the trash chute or
who was using the elevator to move furniture without checking it out first. Everyone had to all agree to building repairs, which was a nightmare, and getting them them done took forever. From my understanding our building was pretty well run, but it didn't feel like it. I loved the idea of high rise life when I moved in but by the time we got out house I was ready to be done with it.
And cockroaches and bedbugs and hoarders and rats and she died but had no family and never left her apartment so we didn’t know until she started leaking into the ceiling.
I won’t ever live in an apartment again after this.
Oh yeah, I use to work at a pest control company making their appointments.
Most apartment complexes just signed up for the year packages to keep the places free of stuff like ants cause that's the big issue where I live. Roaches are rare but bed bugs are also common. Bed bug treatments are crazy expensive too, even for just a single unit of an apartment building, their prices were into the $1000's.
And then for house calls where they got bed bugs, even more money. In fact, most people who had houses who called in for bed bug rates would back out half way through the treatment because they couldn't afford to continue.
absolutely terrible to get caught with bed bugs. If you don't already, get the plastic bed coverings to keep them out.
People attach a stigma to bugs without realizing - you don't need to be dirty or live out in the woods, bugs are just out there and can and will get into your house. The only way to stop that is to be preventative.
Fortunately I’ve found a solution. I’ve been slapped on Reddit for misinformation, but anecdotally I can say with 100% certainty that what I’ve done worked in multiple apartments in separate buildings.
4 of those blower kerosene heaters. Blast those bastards until it’s just hot enough that it don’t melt your records and bam, problem solved.
Bedbugs are worse, but roaches are harder to beat when you’ve gotta get everyone on board.
Some people just consider living with them a part of normal life and they don’t even care.
4 of those blower kerosene heaters. Blast those bastards until it’s just hot enough that it don’t melt your records and bam, problem solved.
Makes sense because that's how some places treat for bed bugs. The pest control place I worked at would partner with another company who did heat treatments on bed bugs for more intense invasions - think homeless shelters that are infested with them.
The issue with heat treatments is that in order to get it hot enough to kill them completely, you end up taking a lot of stuff out of the apartment/room.
I hated going over the lists with people on how to prep for bed bug treatments cause I had to basically ask them about everything in their home in case it would catch fire or just melt.
My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
Loads of people in SFHs lose their homes due to the actions of others. An entire town burned to the ground because their power company was too cheap to trim vegetation.
My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
your entire life is dependent on the actions of others. see: climate change, pollution (air/water/noise/light), road safety, etc. etc.
in the first examples you give (cigarette leading to fire, overflowing bathtub leading to water damage), it sounds like you're thinking of a complex with deeply inadequate fire safety and waterproofing.
for the rest, yes, communities are fractured – some would say as a deliberate means of social control through isolation – and little in the world is going to be improved without fixing that.
What the hell is going on in your apartments, that an overflown tub destroys everything? Is the floor in your bathroom not waterproof? In Europe water damage typically happens with bursting tubes and that can happen in your own home as well. You are typically insured against this.
I feel you. But the same logic has our earth in shambles. Because I keep cleaning MY room / house /city /country by throwing it out to some other city /country /continent (and soon maybe another planet).
also, to reheat a comment from elsewhere in this discussion, calling housing "property" is doing free PR work for those who financially exploit others through control of land: consider finding alternative terms.