Fun fact: Illegal meth labs and large illegal grow houses over the years have been found almost exclusively in single family homes as opposed to apartments.

Fun fact: The vast majority of sex offenders reside in single family homes and not apartments.

Fun fact: Dead lawns and cars parked on grass are rarely found at apartment complexes, the same can’t be said of single family homes.

Fun fact: Rarely do apartment dwellers play music that can be heard three blocks over.

No, this is not an exercise to dis single family home dwellers.

It’s pointing out the absurdity of those that chose to trash “the type of people” that rent apartments when they speak in opposition to a complex being built near them even if it is a block or two away.

Trashing “those people” came up Tuesday when the Manteca City Council was weighing plans for a 59-foot high, 4-story, 44-unit apartment complex on Wawona Street between Airport Way and Fishback Road.

To their credit, the assertion that apartment dwellers are somehow a lower class of people didn’t come from those living on the north side of Wawona in close proximity to the project.

Instead, it was an observation made in the single family home neighborhood built in the late 1990s with street names such as Rail Street, Depot Drive, and Box Car Drive.

The gentleman opposing the project spoke of the traffic the apartment complex would generate among other things such as “the type of people” who would rent there.

To be clear, they are the type of people who can afford to pay $2,000 plus a month in rent.

Someone who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years and who are still paying on a mortgage are more than likely paying a lot less than $2,000 a month.

And for the record, when the neighborhood was going through the approval process, some residing in existing subdivisions to the east and south spoke out against it.

Why?

The lots and yards were too small and as such they’d generate too much traffic, and because the homes were somewhat smaller and the lots were referred to as being substandard as they were less than 6,500 square feet the neighborhood was destined to eventually become a haven for renters.

Renters, of course, are supposedly less than desirable neighbors coming in a notch or two above apartment dwellers.

One can only imagine if someone proposed building a modular home park near existing homes.

It would be nice for once if people simply say they don’t want development and cite things such as traffic, the elimination of open space or farmland they don’t own or pay taxes on, and so forth without painting people that rent apartments as members of the underbelly of society at best and criminals at worst.

One of my favorite encounters of all time was back in 2006.

A woman, after a City Council meeting where she spoke out against a condo project on Pestana Avenue that was proposed on vacant land between the Sandpiper Village apartments and the Heritage Ranch subdivision, stopped me.

She wanted to add to comments she made before the council.

In a nutshell, it was to emphasize “the problem with people that lived in apartments.”

Well aware of the checkered past of the Sandpiper ownership and management, I responded that was an incorrect view on the overwhelming vast majority of apartment dwellers and that you’d likely find just as as large a percentage of people, if not more, living in houses with problematic behaviors.

I then asked what see thought of the nearby Laurel Glenn Apartments just a few blocks away from the new home she had bought a few years prior after living in Fremont.

She had never even driven by it, as she used Pestana exclusively to reach either Yosemite Avenue or Louise Avenue to go to and from work or run errands.

The woman, near the end of the exchange, asserted that those living in apartments were “not like you and I.”

It was an intersecting observation given I was living in a Laurel Glenn apartment unit at the time.

I get people don’t like change.

I get that people don’t want housing nearby that may “overlook” their property.

It is no different than three decades or so when once rare two-story houses where popping up in new subdivisions backing up to homes in older neighborhoods that were 99 percent single story save the occasional second floor addition over a two-story garage.

What I don’t get is how myopic they view people by their mode of shelter or whether they rent, own, or — in the case of most people — those who “own” their homes making mortgage payments to the bank that owns the actual deed.

Rest assured, in the past I’ve lived next to neighbors from hell that not only lived in a house as opposed to an apartment, but also were “owners.”