Apartment Living Should be More of a Community

Hola y’all! There are a number of reasons that people choose to live in apartment rather than own a home. The primary one is probably because they can’t afford a house or can’t get financing, but I’m sure that there are lots of people out there who prefer apartments because they’re much less hassle. If anything goes wrong you just call the manager and they send maintenance over to fix it. Okay, some places are better at this than others, but that’s basically true.

People like to claim that renting is just throwing money away, but I don’t know if that’s really the case. If you add up all the expenses of owning a home over 10 or 20 years including all the maintenance, lawn care, plumbing, carpeting, flooring, renovations and interest I doubt you’ll EVER get all that back. All you will have is a decade or two of spending too much of your free time doing Honey Do Lists. Who needs that?

There are some downsides to apartments too. You don’t have as much room to spread out. You can’t do any renovations. You don’t normally have an area to do any gardening. You don’t have as much privacy as a home. And, in most complexes you have to park outside year round. Worst of all though is the fact that the complex usually doesn’t do any snow removal when you have a Great Ice and Snowstorm of Death like we had over the weekend.

Granted if they ran the snow plows through the parking lots everyone would have a big pile of snow behind their cars. Since most apartment dwellers don’t have snow shovels this could cause some problems for folks. They also don’t normally shovel the sidewalks. They claim that if they do so and someone falls and hurts themselves they could get sued. That’s bullshit. Anyway, this time they did shovel. Not much, but they came by after the sleet turned to snow and shoveled the sidewalks a bit.

I got to thinking though; there are twelve apartments in every building, six per side. If each resident would buy a little shovel and some salt, we could clear our sidewalks pretty easily. Hell, Sunday and today as I was going out to clear off the cars and check on things, I was busting the ice and clearing it off the sidewalks with just the heel of my shoes. Check out the sidewalk in front of my building versus the one next to us.

See what a difference a resident who cares can make? Think of how fast and easy that would have been with a few people to help me out? We could have knocked that out and been back inside watching football and drinking beer on Sunday in no time at all. Hell, if we didn’t have the snow we could have done some shoveling early on and then spread some ice melt and it would have been even less effort.

So why don’t we? Well, most people don’t help out their neighbors like that nor do they like to work as a team. And, worst of all, most people take the “It doesn’t bother me to have an icy sidewalk, so why should I go to all that effort for someone else.” That makes me sad.

Then again, maybe my neighbors WOULD be willing to do this and are sitting around thinking the same thing. Maybe the only reason we don’t all get out there and work together is because I never talk to any of my neighbors and don’t know them at all.

Nawwwww …. They’re assholes.

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