Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I live in a condo. (It’s so tiny, it might as well be an apartment, but never mind.) There are sixteen units total in my building, three other units in my immediate portion of the building, and two directly across attached by a staircase. It’s an odd layout--the six-unit sections are offset and attached to the four-unit section by the corners. There is a courtyard in the center, and every unit has at least one window that looks into it.

I feel as though I could be explaining the layout better, but I’m honestly not sure I can, short of drawing a diagram, and I’m sorry but I can’t be arsed with that at the moment. Just know that there are sixteen units in my building (out of the sixty-four total in the complex), we all can see the courtyard, and the residents, myself included, know each other by face if not any further than that.

I have lived in my unit since 2014. This February marked the fifth anniversary of my purchase of the property. It was meant as a starter property--a two-to-five-year property--but I quite like it and don’t really want to move any time in the near future, so I’ll sit on it until something necessitates my leaving. This is the longest I have lived in one place since I moved out of my parent’s house to go to college back in 20::COUGH::. I have seen neighbors come and go--there are a decent number of renters. I have been watching the guy who owns the unit across from me let it out as an Airbnb in direct violation of the HOA bylaws but never mind. (It’s annoying. We can’t seem to catch him at it in a way that would let us really take him to task for it.) I know my directly-upstairs neighbor. I know the lady across the courtyard at the top on one side.

We all try to look out for each other. It’s not as though it’s a dangerous neighborhood per se, but we have a substantial transient and homeless community at our end of town, a large number of them with substance abuse issues, and things like car and mailbox break-ins and non-residents using our laundry facilities and people sleeping behind our storage sheds aren’t exactly uncommon. (And there’s also the raccoons, but I keep telling everyone that they’re more afraid of you than you are of them and if you just act big they’ll skedaddle.) Anyway, we all tend to do our best Gladys Kravitz impressions on a regular basis and make sure we all know if something out of the ordinary happens.



We actually had a weird thing happen the other day. I could hear voices outside my door--two male voices--and they seemed just to be hanging out there, which was weird because the only thing out there is the mailbox and the stairs, neither of which are particularly interesting. One of them was doing the ‘hacking up a lung’ cough, too, which was more than a bit disturbing. It went on for about twenty minutes, and then my phone pinged. It was an email from the lady across the courtyard at the top.

“Who are those guys outside your place?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to go check.”

I popped my head out the door and could still hear them, but not see them. It sounded as though they might be up on the first landing. I was torn between going to see and just calling the local non-emergency police line, but then my immediate upstairs neighbor came home and flushed them out. Long story short, it was kids smoking weed and trying to stay out of the rain, but still, a bit of nosiness and communication can go a long way towards keeping people informed...and getting teenagers and their horrible, smelly pot to go indulge elsewhere. (Seriously. This is California. There is no excuse for skunky weed.)

Of course, all of this is an extreme departure from how I grew up. We had neighbors, yes, but there wasn’t exactly a sense of community. Everyone mostly kept to themselves unless there was something wrong with one of the wells or the county was coming out to pave the roads or whatever. That distance was definitely assisted due to the fact that all of the houses sat on 1+ acre lots, which meant that your neighbor’s driveway could be a bit of a schlep.

These days, my neighbors are quite literally on top of me. It’s odd, though, how even when you share a wall with someone you might not ever see them. I have never seen the man who owns the unit directly next door to mine. Not once. I know he exists because sometimes I hear his front door, and other neighbors have reported seeing him, but to me he’s still a complete mystery. The same goes for the man who bought the unit across and up top--never seen him, either, but I have it on good authority that he is, in fact, a real person.

I was expecting the ‘mystery man’ syndrome to continue with the fellow who just bought the unit upstairs-and-over-one from me, but as luck would have it, I saw him getting into his car yesterday when I got home from work--and I know it was him because I know which carport belongs to that unit on account of the fact that I was good buddies with the person who used to live in that unit before her landlord decided to sell it and completely ruined my life!

Now I have no one to feed my fish and get my mail when I’m away. No one to toss my packages over my fence into my patio. No one to go out to breakfast with every so often. ::sniffs::

I wonder if I could just convince the new guy that it’s his responsibility now because there was a hidden clause in his contract saying that he was in charge of vacation fish-feeding for the strange lady downstairs. Might be worth a try?