If I'm in my second bedroom, which I converted into an office, and the neighbors across the fence are in the same room in their home, I can hear them talking. But I've never heard them argue.

Most of the people appear to be youthful retirees so they are around all the time. This means there are no children, except visitors, and no unattended dogs left in yards who bark all day while the owner is at work.

My advice to the LW is size up the place and its residents before signing a lease.

can work well in an environment with external noise such as people talking on cell phones in common areas at odd times or honking outside on the street. It would probably work less well to block out the noise generated by large objects being dropped or someone jumping on the floor in the unit above. Those types of sounds cause involuntary reflexes to kick in since the next one might bring the perpetrator crashing through.

If you live in the heartland, you can usually buy a small cape cod in a first ring suburb for as much as currently pay much per month as rent.

Living in a suburb of Buffalo NY, the mortgage payment on my partially renovated, 1962-built, 1900 sq. foot cape cod is much, much less than rent on a downtown apartment.

But on either coast, I am sure that wouldn't be true so maybe buying is impossible.

Look for a Victorian-era neighborhood which may have "carriage houses" for rent. Carriage houses and detached, one-bedroom gardener's cottages can sometimes be rented cheaply.

Maybe consult with a realtor who can advise you on alternatives to the sardine box style of rental living.

My room faces our backyard, which is next to 1) a house with a pool owned by a couple with several grandkids-who-visit; 2) and a house the owners use as a vacation home. I had my air purifier before either couple moved in (I have a dusty wall-to-wall carpet I can't yet afford to get taken out), and it wasn't until I conked out in a lawn chair out back one summer that I realized the air purifier had enabled me to sleep through some could-have-been-annoying noise. Either item is cheap white noise, and because the sound is steady and unchanging, it works nicely to shut out that which is not. :)

Get an air conditioner. Get several fans. Get a white noise machine. Get a noisy air purifier. Turn enough of them loudly enough so that the level of white noise going in your bedroom is louder (but more constant and thus more soothing & sleep-inducing) than the majority of the noises made by others in neighboring apartments. This will work. I promise.

And have you noticed how many of these letters either trash or support the LW, rather than provide advice? Is that what he is asking for?

The man says he is exhausted, and he is asking for advice. That, to me, sounds like a candid admission that he is at the end of his rope and needs help in resolving this problem. You know, he can't do it all by himself any more, and he acknowledges as much. That alone should make others sympathetic to him.

Why so many (presumably well-educated!) people instead view this as an invitation to shit all over him I will never comprehend. Except that we have one hell of a sad society at this point.

And each of these people think that someone else is "the problem."

as soon as one is available. Then you won't have to break your lease.

The constant noise makes the lease 'non valid' - that is more than reason enough.

I think people should have a reasonable expectation that their upstairs neighbors won't stomp around their apartment from about midnight to 3-4 a.m. every night, and that their next-door neighbor's kid won't stand about *two inches from their door* and bounce a basketball for an endless amount of time, and that their next-door neighbors' grandchildren won't wreak havoc every Saturday & Sunday beginning at 6:00 a.m. Maybe you should also look up the definition of "busybody" in the dictionary.

... I had inadvertently created a problem which generated noise. Another cat, a 20 lb plus male Maine Coon Cat, did not accept my aging spayed female's presence on his turf. Cat fights are not pleasant to listen to; I worried it was disturbing the neighbors, and I was also worried he might hurt her. I couldn't even tell where he lived, he appeared to come up a trail that divides homes facing different streets. But he calmed down and now provides me when a source of entertainment, as most alpha males do.

The happy sounds of life, laughing and singing, are a lot more tolerable than those which reflect discontent and dissatisfaction, specifically arguing and bickering. In my second place in LA, there was a Korean couple who argued a lot and threw things at each other in the next building. Though I don't speak Korean, it was easy to tell what they were quarreling about. A fair number of calls from the neighborhood to the police were for domestic disputes. But you can get that anywhere. I don't miss the regular whirring of the LAPD choppers overhead, but when I lived there they quickly became a background noise. You do have to harmonize with a lot of the noise that is part and parcel of high-density living.

As a landlord, I would not consider noise to be adequate grounds for breaking a lease unless the tenant at least discussed the issue with me. I have no idea what causes thumps at 3 a.m. It might be fixed easily.

Finding a tenant takes time. It costs me one or two months rent every time someone moves out. Only once have I had a tenant ask to leave after a brief stay, and while I agreed to let him go - an unhappy tenant is worse than no tenant - I charged him for the privilege.