It Takes a Village to Live Together as Apartment Neighbors

Athena Dixon on how small acts lead to big connections

Sunday mornings in the laundry room of my apartment building are a microcosm of the dynamics of its residents. At 8:30 on Sunday morning, three of us stand between a bank of industrial size machines—washers to the left and dryers to the right. One of the dryers is disconnected, and presumably out of order, and a pile of someone’s laundry is stacked and tumbling off one of the others. It’s clear another resident got tired of waiting and the mountain of baby socks, bras, and t-shirts were taking up precious space and time. I understand the pile even if I would never be bold enough to take someone’s items out and replace them with my own. It’s about courtesy and good manners.

The machines run via an app that notifies the user each time a cycle ends so the pile of clothes, now clearly cooled and wrinkled, is a sign someone doesn’t care about fair use of this amenity. The three of us standing between the machines laugh about the time-stamped photo I took when I entered a few minutes ago and interrupted them talking about the pile. I wanted proof it wasn’t me that moved the items in case their owner wants to tussle about it. After I lock my phone, I select a pair of machines as far away as possible to avoid potential conflict and for further protection.

There’s been an onslaught of people moving out in the last few weeks—four units have emptied if I haven’t missed anyone while at work. There’s already less than 40 apartments so each departure is a hole. The dynamics and connections shift more than you’d expect with each change. Noise levels rise or fall. Friendly hellos in passing slow or speed up. But something like the laundry room really shows the pulse of how people get along. It’s an indicator of whether people care that they impact someone else even if it is something as small as a pile of clothes atop a dryer or an unclean lint trap.

I’ve been in the building since 2016; the man now moving a load of wet clothes to an open dryer was here before I moved in; the woman standing with us has been here just about a year. It was him who knocked on my door to tell me that my car had been hit and totaled overnight and I needed to go assess the damage. It’s her, and another neighbor across the same hallway, that bring my packages up from the lobby and place them in front of my door to lessen the possibility someone will steal them. That same neighbor uses her doorbell camera to make sure I make it safely off to work each morning, often before the sun rises. It’s not nosiness, it’s community care.

The air in the laundry room is thick and smells like dryer sheets. A thin layer of sweat starts to bead on my forehead but I keep chatting. We gossip about those who’ve moved out and why.

“She told me that her new downstairs neighbor was really mean and filed a lot of complaints about them, so they were moving. They were here before me,” I say.

“The other lady told me she doesn’t like the new people moving in. It’s not a good mix. Things are going downhill.”

Most of the complaints circle this idea. The new residents aren’t mean. They’re just detached. I’m not friends with the neighbors from the laundry room, but we’re threaded together by a social contract that wants to make sure we are all okay. And I kind of agree. The new tenants, while mainly younger than the three of us, don’t seem to show much interest in niceties. But in some ways I can’t blame them. The building they’ve moved into isn’t what it used to be. It’s difficult to get to know the people who share the four floors if there are no common spaces besides the laundry room and lobby. You can’t really look out for someone if you don’t have the occasion of meeting them outside of fire alarm evacuations or passing in the elevator. Still, us older tenants have managed to do that in small ways. It’s just getting more difficult to maintain those connections.

I think the unraveling of the building’s community started with a table in the lobby and only continues with the piles of laundry in the building’s basement, the elevator hogging, and the occasional package theft.

The wrought iron and glass table used to be a hub. On any given day it was where packages waited to be collected; where dry goods were left for those who needed them; sometimes clothing or baby items like diapers appeared in reusable shopping bags; and one day there was a bowl of condoms for the taking. People left what they had and took what they needed. Some mornings I left items and by the time I came back down the elevator for food delivery they were gone. It wasn’t uncommon to have a chat at the table or give a knowing look at someone scooping up one of the items up for grabs. Unlike the laundry room, these items weren’t points of contention. They were meant to be shared. Until, one day, the table was gone.

A message came from the property manager to avoid leaving unwanted items in the lobby. That was it. No real explanation, just a thin thread of community snipped. Perhaps someone complained about clutter; maybe a coveted item was snatched by someone else first (maybe it was the brand-new Ninja air fryer I scored one morning); maybe it was something else. No one will ever know. It doesn’t really matter. The ripple effect was the same. Packages are now scattered beneath the bank of mailboxes with little care. No one shares food. There are no little trinkets of joy. Very few people linger.

The heat in the laundry room gets worse as the dryers head into their 60-minute cycles and the washers start spinning. The three of us head back to our apartments one by one, but when the cycles end, we are back standing between the machines. The man chuckles when I walk in like he did the first time. He says, “You missed it! They came down and we got to fighting about that laundry.” The pile is still there, softly collapsing onto itself, but none of the clothes have fallen to the floor. I think it was him who made sure of it as the dryers tumbled and other people moved things in and out. And that’s the point, right? Care. Community. He could have just ignored a sock falling or a bra slipping between the machines, but he didn’t. Instead, after I tell him he must have won the fight and share a laugh with him, he turns to me and asks if he should move the clothes back into a now empty dryer.

When the woman returns to get her clothes, she checks in on the noise level in my apartment. She knows the neighbors who’ve recently moved in next to me have been driving me a little bit crazy and I’ve been thinking about moving out after all these years. But the noise has gotten better, markedly so. Why? Because she spoke with the neighbor when I wasn’t home about an issue she was having with them and it came up. Our small cluster of apartments, four of them grouped together, is quiet, she told the new person, and we look out for each other. We don’t have to be friends, but we need to know each other’s names, look for warning signs, and make sure we are all safe. She’s right.

Social media has gotten one thing right recently. In my scrolling I come across creators saying that everyone wants a village but no one wants to be a villager. True. You can’t expect collective good works if you aren’t a part of the collective. It’s the small things that create the village. When someone left the bags of rice and beans in the lobby it made sense they took the bottles of perfume as a trade. The bowl of condoms, while a little unexpected, was still an act of care. So were the clothes and diapers. The car seats and strollers. The trial size luxury beauty products. All of it meant that someone in the building was acknowledging another one of their neighbors in that space needed or deserved something they could provide without asking for anything in return.

No matter if it’s a sweltering laundry room, a lobby, or at 2 a.m. during a fire alarm evacuation, the important part is the people present and the connections between them. In a world that’s increasingly splintering, it’s time to get back to basics, especially in our shared home—a safe space where people look out for one another for human reasons, not profit, content, or praise.

Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.