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Comment by sangli | Hacker News Reader

No way. Rural areas are over romanticized. I never understood rural life or even suburban.

If you can afford a house in the city, great. Otherwise, living in an apartment, you're constantly at the whimsy of your neighbors. They can easily be people who like to blast loud music for hours or who otherwise make a lot of noise. In practice, these people often cannot be reasoned with and the only solution is to move. I've been living in apartments my whole life and, while there were multimonth or even multiyear periods of quiet, on the whole it's purely a lottery (as neighbors change, or their kids grow and turn into obnoxious teenagers etc.). Now I'm planning on escaping it all by building a house in a village outside the city.

Annoying neighbors is not a city only problem. I have seen more videos of fights between suburban neighbors on internet than between apartment dwellers.

As someone who has lived in the burbs most of my life, this stuff is way more of a problem in suburbs. So escape it you either need to buy a huge lot, or go somewhere really rural.

I find it hard to believe that it's more annoying in suburbs.

I currently live in an apartment building of 25 people and am closely surrounded by similar apartment buildings. This means that there are literally a couple hundreds of people than can annoy me at any time - either by listening to loud music, by doing some house renovations, by leaving a constantly barking dog at the apartment, by parking a loud car/motorcycle near my window, by having loud conversations near my window etc. In the suburbs, you get similar factors (+ most likely more lawnmowers and leaf blowers than in my district), but you only need to worry about perhaps 10-20 people creating a nuisance, not hundreds. Not to mention that, in an apartment block, I am often able to hear (over the walls) conversations happening in surrounding apartments, while this is just a nonissue in the burbs.

If burbs people complain more, it might be because they expect perfection (they bear the daily long commute so they want to get real peace and quiet in return), while apartment dwellers just live in resignation.

In apartments, there is a mutual understanding of common elements and that people are living in a shared space. There is also a mediation process through the building management and the board.

In the burbs, is is a wild west with no mediation/arbitration process. There is a huge sense of entitlement on both sides - "this is my property and I can do what I want" vs. "you are encroaching on my property/rights and I will complain/behave passive aggressively about everything".

Everything you mentioned are issues in suburbs as well - often more so:

- Neighbors dog in the backyard barking all damn day.

- Neighbor throwing BBQ/party in the yard w/ music, and loud laughing/talking late into the night.

- Kids yelling/laughing/screaming.

- Teenagers revving cars up and down the streets

- Lawnmower at 6 in the morning

Trust me, I've lived in both. Apartments have a process to handle unacceptable behavior and disputes. Suburbs are way worse - if you are looking for more private space, you need to go rural where houses sit on large lots.

> In apartments, there is a mutual understanding of common elements and that people are living in a shared space. There is also a mediation process through the building management and the board.

Ok, so that must be the difference between US and my country (Poland). Here, there's often just enough people with "fuck everyone" attitude (drunks, depressed people, teenagers with irresponsible parents etc.) to ruin it for everyone else. And also, because the flats are mostly owned and not rented, there is no building management that is interested in maintaining a decent standard of living for everyone.

Yeah, I suppose that is true of some buildings here as well. It really depends on the occupants of the building, and whether it is mainly owner occupied or mostly renters.

So I can see your point.

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