Under One Roof: How COVID-19 Turned My Apartment Building of Strangers into a Community

Montreal-born journalist Julia Scott interviewed her Oakland, California, condominium neighbours about their pandemic experience in “Under One Roof: How COVID-19 Turned My Apartment Building of Strangers into a Community.” She describes the common thread of fear and sadness connecting all the residents, despite their distance from each other. Judy Rosenberg, a pianist in her early 70s, felt “an overriding sadness,” and shock at the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, noting that “nothing like this has ever happened to my generation” (Scott). However, Scott also observes how residents took pains to prevent transmission among each other.

Katie Stephenson, a pediatric resident at a local hospital, feared that daily exposure to COVID-19 at the hospital would put her neighbours at risk, and attempted to protect them by taking long showers every day after work and maintaining a stringent routine of cleanliness and quarantine. Other residents, like Gina Belleci and Jessica Holt, helped their elderly neighbour shop for groceries. In the process of adapting to the virus, residents began to form more intimate connections with each other, facilitated by online group chats. Scott documents the creative resilience of her neighbours in a condo building during lockdown, demonstrating how togetherness and a newfound sense of community could be an unexpected effect of a pandemic that was otherwise so isolating.