The secret life of us: From tomatoes to soy sauce, this is what apartment living should be

One afternoon in late summer, my apartment building group chat pinged. It was the neighbour in apartment A, who had a problem: she had too many tomatoes, and would someone please come take some?

I headed downstairs. While handing me my tomatoes, my neighbour in A told me that the neighbour in apartment B, who had got too much celery at the market, had given the excess to apartment A, to be handed out with the tomatoes. Halfway to a salad, I thanked my neighbour, who also told me that these tomatoes were very high yield and as my own efforts had yielded a single, sad fruit, I should keep some of the seeds of this lot and plant them.

As I was going into my own apartment with my bounty, I ran into my neighbour across the hall in C, who beckoned me in. He’d been on our roof watching a movie the night before and had noticed our lemon tree was under attack, so he’d bought us a pest control device at Bunnings. He also showed me his new bathroom cabinets, as we were considering building similar ones.

I thanked him and went up to the roof to fortify the lemon tree, glancing at my phone. The group chat again: apartment K had made cookies, did anyone want some?

This is apartment living as it should be. My neighbours help each other carry heavy furniture up the stairs, they borrow soy sauce, they bring in each other’s packages. We have dinner parties and drinks on the roof and when the weather was warmer, we had a garden party in the courtyard with a barbecue and lawn games. When my partner and I recently travelled overseas for a holiday, our neighbours looked after our cat, and we returned to find an esky on our doorstep from a different neighbour filled with milk, bread, cheese, lollies and fruit, so we’d have something to eat after a 26-hour flight. I’ve found apartment living to be a rewarding lifestyle filled with community, one without the frustrating and expensive issues described by Merrick Morley in these pages.

But there is a key difference between my apartment and Morley’s: mine is almost 100 years old, built in the post-war era to house migrant families fleeing the horrors of Europe. It’s not a luxury building, just a small 1940s block of the kind you see all over Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. Units in it are much bigger than modern equivalents, with two-bedroom apartments a generous 105 square metres and three-bedders stretching to 115. Morley says he can’t squeeze an average-sized couch and an average-sized dining table into his living room; I have a separate dining room, which easily accommodates my 10-person table (perfect for hosting my neighbours!). Even with the limitations of mid-century plumbing, wiring and glass, I don’t have the kind of defects he describes, stemming from cheap, shoddy building practices and layouts that are designed to maximise profit, not house people comfortably.

Without little-used gyms and pools, strata fees are generally lower in older buildings, too. Morley says his strata fees are $8000 a year. Mine are about $5000, and although there is always the possibility of an emergency levy to pay for ageing communal property, in the two years I have been in the building that hasn’t happened yet.

I’ve been in Melbourne almost half my life, but as a native New Yorker, I have always found Australians’ preferences for freestanding houses baffling. Why look after a garden when kids can play in a nearby park with far better equipment, paid for and maintained by the council? Houses feel isolating and inefficient, with fewer incidental interactions between neighbours and no shared costs for outdoor maintenance. And ‘safe as houses’ really should be ‘safe as apartments’, with crime statistics showing freestanding homes are much more likely to be burgled than apartments.

The Victorian government has made it clear that medium-density housing along transport corridors is the way of the future, and if Melbourne is to accommodate 8 million people in 2050, we must embrace apartment living. It’s vastly better for the environment than building more freestanding homes on the urban and suburban fringe, and it allows people to take advantage of shops, restaurants, parks, infrastructure and transport that already exists. People feel happiest when they are connected to their communities, research has continually shown, and homes that encourage interaction and communal socialisation build that community.