People have kids, crying babies, dogs, cats that knock things over in the middle of the night and schedules that are different from yours. You’re NEVER going to find total peace in an apartment in an urban area. All night I hear the front door buzzer, people running up and down the stairs, a neighbor who sings Whitney Houston songs in the shower, another neighbor who comes home late and is always clattering around the kitchen at midnight – not to mention the summer sounds of cars vibrating with loud music, helicopters searching the streets for who knows what and sirens from all sorts of emergency vehicles. And I live in a quiet tree lined Brooklyn neighborhood! These are just the comforting noises of any urban area, especially in the summer months, and I couldn’t sleep without them.

I went through two bad places, one with an illegal salsa bar that the cops wouldn't close down (it's the first time in my life I looked at a cop and knew he was on the take, not a good feeling), the other with a stompy upstairs neighbor.

In the first case, I'd call the cops, scream, bang on things. The noisy upstairs neighbor I dealt with by ignoring the stomping and getting him to turn down his audio stuff.

But now I'm in a reasonably quiet place (and I live in Brooklyn, it isn't that quiet) and I never complain about any noise ever.

It might well be that LW has regular tolerance to noise, and he's simply had two noisy neighbors.

As a general measure, I strongly suggest a good white noise generator. The power consumption is a fraction of a fan, it doesn't blow dust all over the place, and you can change the sound if you have to.

I had the same issue.. I violated my rule, when coming back to SF, and moved into the first floor of a house. The owner lived above me. Turns out, she liked to get drunk and fall asleep while watching TV.. then at 3 or 4 am, she'd wake and wander around the house for a while before going to bed. If it wasn't the drone of the TV making me angry, it was waiting for her to finish clomping around the house in the middle of the night.

My new apartment has some neighbors who'd party on their porch from 9pm-3am, recounting high school teacher stories. The advantage here? I could call the cops. That was an "evident" problem.. it's mostly subsided.

But, the mistake was living and managing the "anger" within myself. I paid a lot of money for the apartment, and had spoken plainly about my need for a quiet domicile (I'm a single parent). She said the same thing, and couldn't fathom that she was causing me distress. Ultimately, her notion that she "owned" her home trumped any issues I had with noise.

Breaking a lease isn't the end of the world. Find a place that's quiet, that you think you can live in for a few years. I've broken a couple of leases in my day (against my preference) and it's never come up.

Be careful how you present this "event" or "need" to a future landlord. Don't come off as a probable-problem-tenant.

Good luck.

I've lived in maybe fifteen different apartments over the years, some built like shit, some built like fortresses. Most people will try to be considerate, but it helps tremendously to speak to them in person -- i.e., I hope you're not really throwing shoes at the ceiling. And, of course, they can only be as quiet as the building's construction allows. A crappo tenement or dingbat where you can hear every footfall and the murmur of the TV means...that you're going to hear every footfall and the murmur of the TV. Can't be helped. You can ask someone to stop practicing the tuba, but you can't ask them to stop walking around. I raised two kids in a place where you could hear it in the neighboring apartment if you dropped a ballpoint pen on the floor. My upstairs neighbor got it into her head that my kids were noisy and unruly because they behaved -- like kids. She made my life miserable for months, complaining to the landlord, banging on the radiator pipes, stomping on the floor. Of course she never once knocked on the door (we were neighbors for ten years) to talk to me, though sometimes when she would drum on the floor with her little cloven hooves I would go upstairs in a fruitless effort to demonstrate to her how human beings deal with one another. And of course she wouldn't be persuaded that I heard every step she took, and she was an alcoholic insomniac who took some uncertain steps very late at night. Anyway. Sorry about your problem. Sounds like a cheap dump, but stop with the shoes and go up and talk to the guy.

I live in an apartment where the neighbors above me have the most charming of routines. First they start screaming at each other. Then they start screaming and throwing things at each other or just around their apartment, hard to tell just by the noise. Then he stomps out and slams the door. She calls a friend and sobs hysterically and loudly. Then I think she rearranges furniture for awhile. Then he comes back, around 3am and they have loud, screaming sex with the squeaky bed slamming into the wall the whole time. And she shouts some really funny things, my favorite was, "OH MY GOD, YOUR PENIS IS SOOOO BIG!" This happens about once a week. They also have phone sex when he is gone, so I know that my neighbor likes to be spanked. I also know that she has cheated on him, one of the downsides of loudly screaming someone's name during sex is that the whole building knows when you're loudly screaming someone else's name. I also have no idea what either of them look like as we've never met formally, but I know more about their relationship than anyone really should.

There is also the guy across from me who practices the trombone (the irony being that I'm sure he opens the window because it's too loud in a closed up apartment) at night with the window open and the girl next to me who is learning to play the violin (it sounds like dying cats!) and the aging hippy down the hall who grows his own pot and smokes so much of it with his door open that I get a contact high in my apartment. At some point either you have to give it up and move, have a nervous breakdown and get carted off, or develop a sense of humor about the whole situation and a high tolerance for noise. Apartment living is bizarre sometimes, but after developing the ability to go back to sleep quickly, I think it's also hilarious. Except for the violin, but I'm holding out hope that she gets better at it someday. I'm aware that doesn't really help someone who can't go back to sleep quickly, but trying to change your outlook can make the time spent stuck there a little bit more bearable.