My living room is shaking – yes, developers have moved in next door | Arwa Mahdawi

I was feeling smug about fleeing New York for more space in Philadelphia - until I found out about their construction laws

Enjoy schadenfreude? Well, lucky you, there's an oversized slice of it coming up - prepared entirely at my own expense. Earlier this year I wrote about how my family had moved from a cramped one-bedroom flat in Manhattan to a spacious terrace house in (far more affordable) Philadelphia. I have made a very good life choice," I crowed in a column. And, for a while, that seemed to be the case. We luxuriated in all the new space and marvelled at how quiet our new home was compared with New York. Despite sharing a wall, we couldn't hear our neighbours at all.

There was good reason for that: we didn't have any neighbours on one side. I thought they had just gone on holiday; however, it soon became clear that the house next door was empty. What's more, it looked like the tenants had left in a hurry. There was a knocked-over fire pit in the garden, with a piece of half-burnt wood in it. There was a deflated paddling pool hung up to dry on the fence. And, strangest of all, it looked like someone had been digging an odd-shaped hole by the deck. I've consumed a lot of true crime in my life; my imagination went wild. Were the neighbours laundering money for the mob? Had they scarpered under cover of darkness because their bosses realised they were embezzling funds? Had they been murdered? Were they lying dead in the basement?