Big-City Apartment Buildings
Mostly renters sharing walls in big older apartment buildings, many living alone, with incomes that run from stretched to very comfortable.
Who lives here
Read on the street, not on a spreadsheet.
These are big apartment buildings packed close on dense blocks, and most of them went up before 1980.
Among the people who work, managers make up the biggest share, followed by accountants and financial workers, software and data workers, and sales workers.
For somebody in the building to use their name without having to check it first.
A neighbor you might meet
Invented, so no one is a case studyThirty-four, living alone a couple of floors up, a year into his lease, and doing an office job from his kitchen table a few days a week.
Where it is cracking
Signs, not proof of anythingYou cannot know the reason from the sidewalk.
A sample from the guide
Three pieces of the full textThe rest comes with the guide.
What you'll hear at the door
Sorry. Sorry, just squeezing by.
Sorry, just squeezing by
In a narrow hallway it's good manners and usually nothing more. Offer your name the second or third time you meet.
What tends to backfire
Assuming everyone here is comfortable
You see the degrees and the good jobs and decide nobody here could need anything. Then the neighbor stretching to cover rent, or the retired woman living on a small pension, hears an invitation to an expensive restaurant and says no. Keep your plans at your own table or somewhere that costs nothing, so nobody has to do math before saying yes.
Learn the name behind the wall, then give that neighbor an evening that ends on time.
the guide
What to do this week, what to say, and why the news is good on this particular street.
The full guide carries the four first actions, three real conversation scenarios with the notes underneath each line, a story worth telling here, and the Gospel written into what this street is actually carrying. It is free, and it opens in the browser.