Living in a high rise is a unique experience. When most of us picture ‘home’, we think of a single-family house with a yard, a driveway and neighbors nearby. Houses are either one or two floor structures in most cases, with the occasional attic or basement mixed in. The car is parked right outside, easily accessible. We’re always a few steps away from the yard, the street and our neighborhood. Those of us living in single family houses, or even small apartment buildings and condos, don’t give much thought to their day-to-day experience at home. Why would we? We’re just living. Well, living in a high rise is ‘just living’ too, but there are certainly differences when compared to the single-family home life. In this article, let’s talk about some advantages and disadvantages of living in a high rise!
What Is Considered A High Rise?
This often depends on where the building is. For instance, a 10-story apartment building is considered quite tall in many parts of the world, particularly outside of major cities. In terms of New York City standards, for example, a 10-story building is not only extremely common, but is totally dwarfed in comparison to many other residential high rises. Heck, the new Central Park Tower is a dizzying 1,550 feet tall – that’s over a quarter of a mile high!
For the sake of this article, we’ll refer to a ‘high rise’ as a building that’s at least 15 stories. Admittedly, this distinction is an approximation. For the majority of readers out there, there’s a reasonable chance that a 15-story residential building is considered ‘high’.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about some advantages and disadvantages to living in a tall building.
There are many pros and cons of living in a high rise, and part of our mission on this blog is to discuss as many of these differences as we can. For now, we’ll go through three big-picture advantages and disadvantages to consider.
Advantage No. 1: Tall Buildings Have Great Views
This one is obvious, but it’s a huge advantage to living in a tall building – the views are great!
My current apartment sits about 300 feet off the ground. On a clear day, we can see as far as 25 miles away with surprising clarity when there’s not much humidity. Storms are visible in the distance way before they reach us. Entire weather systems can be seen moving across the sky. Sunsets and sunrises are always remarkable.
Even when we lived on the 7th floor of a building, our views spanned several miles.
While this totally depends on where the building is located, what’s around it and which direction your views will face, every day feels like heaven for people who love a great view. If this sounds like you, you’ll never get tired of having amazing views.
Disadvantage No. 1: Getting To & From Home Takes More Time
One of the best parts of living in a single-family home is being able to walk out the front door and jump in the car, enjoy the yard or take a walk.
That’s not exactly possibly in a tall building!
Living in a high rise involves accounting for logistics in everything you do.
For instance, my building has several elevators and over 400 apartments. For a period of time, we’ve had a couple of elevators out of service. In turn, it can take as long as 10 minutes just to get an elevator down to the main floor. The same thing happens when returning home.
In addition to this, getting to the car (in a garage) takes another few minutes. When bringing home a bunch of groceries or supplies, this takes a bit more time and effort as well.
Leaving home on a whim is certainly possible – it just takes more time. In turn, we tend to coordinate our daily ‘stuff’ so we only come and go once in a day. In short, the logistics of leaving home and coming back take a bit more time – as much as 20 extra minutes round-trip in some cases.
Advantage No. 2: Many High Rise Buildings Feature Amenities
In the previous section, we mentioned that the logistics of coming-and-going can take a bit of time. The good news? Depending on your building, you may not have to leave to do certain activities.
The high rise building I live in features a pretty decent gym. Heading to the gym involves a 5-10 minute drive (or more) for many people. For us, it’s just an elevator ride. This makes squeezing in a workout much easier on a busy day or when crappy weather is demotivating.
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Other amenities our building has are outdoor gas grills, a ‘hangout’ room with a pool table, couches and other cool features, a computer room and a few other conveniences. Many other buildings offer pools, a concierge, theater rooms, rooftop spaces, dog ‘parks’ and a variety of other amenities.
Many high rise buildings are more like high rise communities, not just a building to live in.
Disadvantage No. 2: Resources Are Shared
As said, living in a high rise building is really like living in a high rise community.
In the suburbs, we share roads and sidewalks with our neighbors, but live separate lives for the most part. We interact with our neighbors when we want to.
In a high rise, it’s a bit different. The hallways, staircases, elevators, lobby, parking garage, mailboxes and amenities are all shared. Even the trash and recycling areas are shared.
The general concept of sharing resources is not bad in and of itself. I personally don’t mind it. It does become problematic when others don’t acknowledge this act of ‘sharing’. Some people leave the gym in disarray. Others make a nasty mess in the garbage room. Trash or spillage in the hallway happen somewhat regularly.
Shared resources are only great when everyone who’s sharing them is considerate of the community, too!
Advantage No. 3: Separate From The Rest Of The World
When living in a high rise, being at home can feel like being in your own little bubble. Yes, I know how corny that sounds – but it’s true!
Living up high means quite literally living separately from the rest of the world. What goes on down on the ground level has little to no impact on us, including noise (unless the windows are open).
The appeal of living this way varies from individual to individual. For me, living up high feels good on an instinctual level – I can’t explain it. It’s as simple as feeling comfort and relaxation when being home. This certainly includes the great views.
If the idea of living in your own world is appealing, the high rise lifestyle may be the right one for you.
Disadvantage No. 3: Little Physical Separation From Neighbors
Everything in life has its’ advantages and disadvantages. Living in the mountains means not living near the beach (mostly). Having a sports car means not having the ability to drive off-road. There’s trade offs in everything.
While living in a high rise offers separation from the rest of the world, it also includes living in very close proximity to your neighbors.
My next door neighbor’s entry is literally right next to mine. While we only see them occasionally, we can hear them coming and going all the time.
If someone’s making noise in the hallway, we hear it. When taking the elevator, it often means sharing it with one or more people. It’s hard to go anywhere in the building without crossing paths with someone.
Again, these things are not inherently good or bad – it really comes down to your individual preference. One thing’s for sure though – if you’re living in a high rise, you’ll be physically close to your neighbors.
In Summary
This website will be focused on discussing all aspects of living in a tall building, down to the nitty gritty. As our first official article, we figured it’s helpful to point out a few key difference between living in a high rise and living in more traditional accommodations. We hope this brief over-arching look into living in a tall building has been helpful in the meantime! Thanks for reading.
2 replies on “Advantages & Disadvantages of Living In A High Rise: What To Expect”
Pros of choosing higher floor in high rise building:
1. A nice view of city
Cons of choosing higher floor in high rise building:
1. Recent study reveals that, higher floors have dry weather so you face dry skin issues.
2. In recent past, security team usually conducts fire mock drill once in 2 months. During this time taking staircase for more than 5 floors will always be painful.
3. You can’t grow plants in your balcony as the wind and sun light hits sharply, because of which your plants can’t survive.
4. In high rise buildings, the electric meters of all homes will usually be placed in basements. This means that the length of wire between electric meter and your home at higher floor will be more. Hence the electricity cost will be at higher. (When the electric wire becomes longer, resistivity of the wire increases, then the power dissipated in the wire is going to be larger)
5. Usually the mobile network towers focus the signal towards the ground to 10 floor height. Hence as the floor rises higher weakens the mobile signals.
6. In these covid times or if similar pandemic attacks in future, we should be ready to maintain social distance or physical distance. But it does not happen in lifts as lifts will be crowded most of times. Avoiding lift means taking staircases which is again painful task to reach the ground.
7. Taking lift to reach ground floor will always be time consuming. Lift is like local train or bus. By the time it stops in multiple floors and reaches the ground floor it will be more than 5 mins. Based on my experience, some floors’ lift button will be pressed by kids just for playing purpose. It will be a game for them but waiting pain for the people who comes from higher floors.
8. There may be a chance of loosing important calls and continuity of internet when you are in lifts as most of the lifts do not have cell phone network.
9. Some of the household items cant be brought by lift because of space issue. Bringing these items by staircase is difficult for delivery boys. Also they expect more tips and delivery charges. Can’t imagine bringing ourselves.
10. For groundwater, the construction companies dig more deeper bore wells for high rise buildings. As the building rises higher, the bore well will be deeper to supply sufficient water for bath and drinking as the number of houses will be more. When you go more deeper the water you get will be more harder and we all know that hard water is the main reason for hairfall and skin problems.
11. Some of the articles show that higher floors do not have mosquitoes, dust and noise problems. But, based on my experience, the mosquitos problem at higher floors are same as lower floors. In fact dust and noise will be more in higher floors than lower floors because there will be lesser obstacles to dust and noise to reach higher floors than lower floors.
12. Getting focus of morning sunlight will increase Vitamin D in your body. The high rise buildings do not have access to terrace and only one side of apartment will be exposed to morning sunlight. Hence if you stay longer in these apartments, you will face Vitamin D deficiency in your body. But at the same time in low rise buildings the terraces are accessible. You can go to terrace for morning sunlight and relax.
After reading and understanding all the above points, its up to you to decide whether to go for higher floor or lower floor flat.
Thanks for your extensive input. We haven’t had some of these experiences while living on higher floors, but we appreciate you sharing your experience and thoughts.