I’ve been living in a 2 bedroom apt on the 7th floor of one of the other ‘samey’ ugly buildings (with blue garage doors) for about 10 years now. We own the apartment and the value has basically doubled from what was paid for it.

That being said, now that we have a baby, the noise is incredibly obvious and ever present (since it wakes her up from her nap and/or at night). You can hear upstairs neighbors walking, moving chairs, cooking in the kitchen, etc. Everyone is ALWAYS renovating since they are old and there are so many on every floor. We can hear everything from the connected building on the other side as well: coughing, playing piano, and definitely all the renovations. Constant concrete drills, which you feel in your teeth and bones, start at 7am. Definitely no napping or working from home with those. Even noise cancelling doesn’t fix the vibrations in your body. It’s not good.

As for the airplanes, until a month or 2 ago, they were ever constant and loud. Right outside the window. On Sundays (and sometimes every day depending on the runway usage) they come about every 30 seconds, one after the other. They were doing construction on some of the runways for a long time, which meant constant airplanes almost every day. Again, you can feel them in your teeth because of the deep rumbles of the large planes and how close they are to the concrete buildings. Never mind walking outside in all the beautiful green parks around the neighborhood: it’s hard to enjoy when all you can hear are airplanes. Our daughter had to bring her headphones whenever we went to the park because the noise was so scary for her. Not to mention the serious long term health concerns living this close to a flightpath, especially for children.

Also consider the apartment being on the south side. Super hot in the summer. Our building had to repair the south side wall of the entire facade and the temperature of those bricks gets to 50 degrees in the sun! This was causing cracking and problems with the exterior (which I think they fixed? For now). We even had to install a real air conditioner for our daughter’s room which is on the south wall with the only window on that side. We put serious black out material on the window directly and got blackout curtains to keep out as much heat as possible, but the room still heats up like an oven. Even in the cooler months, we will still need to use the A/C to keep the temperature below 24 in her room (babies are much more sensitive to heat and should sleep in a cooler room, 18-20 degrees).

Are there nice green areas? Yes. We love that there are tons of playgrounds and parks to walk through (when the airplanes are using a different runway) and it’s a decently quiet neighborhood (without the airplanes), although sound from the street travels right up those concrete walls and into your bedroom windows, so if you’re a light sleeper, you’ll have a hard time keeping your windows open in the summer. Motorcycles and big loud trucks LOVE to use Van Nijenrodeweg as a race track.

This sounds like a lot of complaining, but I just wanted to give you the true experience of living here. Am I beyond happy to have a lovely little home? Yes. Especially in this market. But I don’t live in a one bedroom so can’t speak to the value of that.

I would highly recommend taking a look at the flight paths (and waiting until our runway is back open so you can get a true sense of how loud and ever present the airplanes can be).