Small, two-room apartments can be found that make housekeeping very simple, and inexpensive; while some luxury apartments provide for lavish living without the responsibilities that go with having a house of your own to look after. Many good apartments between these extremes are available that will provide reasonable living space without too much expense, that will still be easier to keep up than a house. In an apartment you wouldn't have to mow the lawn, or trim the shrubs, or spray the roses, and someone else waters the flowers, if any.
Garbage collection, water, heat, and sometimes electricity are all included in the monthly rent. Only one bill to pay and nothing that requires a thought on your part, and no responsibility for the looks or upkeep of the place. If you want to be out of town for a month, you do not have to arrange with someone to water the lawn.
Just don't have any children or pets, and keep your parties quiet, and send your guests home by nine o'clock in the evening; go to bed early, and don't get up singing in the early morning. Don't play the saxophone or your hi-fi, and keep the television tuned to a low level. In fact, the less you do, the better you will get along in an apartment.
When the sink gets stopped up, the manager will call the plumber, who always seems to be away on his vacation; meanwhile, you wash the dishes in the bathtub. If the people in the next flat do not follow the rules, complain to the manager, who will try to keep them quiet; but after listening to their story, he will ask you to move.
There is no vantage point like the apartment next door for keeping track of the neighbors; when they come and go; who comes and goes with them, and at what awful hours, and what disgraceful things they do. Of course, it is well to remember that when you look in a goldfish bowl, the fish also look at you.
All kidding aside, for families where both the husband and wife have steady, full-time jobs in business or industry, where they both work so hard that they don't have time or energy enough left to keep up a house, they are surely better off in an apartment, as it does save work and responsibility.
If a house is just a place to sleep, a place in which to eat a hurried breakfast, and a starting point from which to rush off to work, a place to return to after a late show, to tumble into bed, and to get a little sleep before another hurried breakfast, then off to the rat race again for another day, and a repetition of the same routine, then do not buy or build a house. By all means rent an apartment; it will save you work and worry and will fit your needs much better.
One way to get luxury living without having to own and service all the features yourself is to buy an apartment in a group where the apartments are individually owned, but the swimming pool, tenni3 courts, barbecue, and other recreational facilities are owned cooperatively by the group of people living in the apartments. An individual family might find it too expensive to maintain a swimming pool, for one or two uses a week, but it wouldn't cost too much, in either money or effort for a group of fifty people to keep up a pool.
