Apartment Choice

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

Cheesman Park neighborhood . (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite) residential real estate; house; home; cheesman park; denver; denverite; kevinjbeaty; colorado;" width="1000" height="667" />A high-rise in the Cheesman Park neighborhood . (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite) Denver is really bad at recycling, like only 18 percent of waste gets recycled or composted bad, and part of the reason is its apartments. The city doesn’t pick up from these multi-family dwellings, nor does it require them to recycle, but as an apartment-dweller myself, I had to know more about why not.  After all, a survey from the nonprofit CoPIRG found that 88 percent of Denver residents find recycling is “very important or essential.” Even if the city doesn’t require recycling, apartment residents might balk at the absence of recycling, right? I started with Boutique Apartment s, the company that manages the building where I live. And yes, sometimes residents do request recycling, said the company’s ma...

Verginia Ghobrial-Said feels as though City Hall is stealing from her and her family. It's hard to blame her. In May, she and her husband Ramez Said received their utility bill from Enmax for a whopping $4,070.44. More than $3,800 of that bill is for water that Vergina says her family never used. The 31-year-old investment adviser assistant says she received the usual email from Enmax one morning, informing her that her bill for May 15 was available. When she opened it, however, she was shocked. "I was on my way to work when I read the amount on my phone and it was $4,000," she said. "I thought it must have been an error, but I was getting fast heartbeats until I could phone Enmax at 8:30 a.m. I had two hours of severe anxiety." Those two hours have turned into four months of tears and frustration with Enmax and Calgary's Water Services, with no satisfactory resolution for the young couple and their 14-month-old son, Sebastian, other than a huge bill they m...