I'll take an occasional dog bark or lawn mower noise (usually during the day time) instead of traffic noise, sirens, yelling, loud music, wondering if my car will be vandalized, etc. And aren't modified compact cars more of an urban thing? Mostly SUVs and minivans around here.
It wasn't occasional dog barking, it was constant, going on for hours.
Add to that one neighbor who had a stupid pit bull that got out a lot, and bit two people.
On top of that, at one place I had neighbors across the street who had some stupid friends who drove up every day to pick up someone and honked their horn until that person came out of the house.
No, modified compact cars are a suburban thing. It's hard for a young person to modify their car when they don't have a garage. You can't modify your car with some POS muffler in a high-rise.
My girlfriend lives in a high-rise in a city. While there are occasional sirens and the regular sound of the subway train, there's no real traffic noise (not close enough to the freeway for that, this is pretty low-traffic residential), and certainly no yelling or loud music, and with the parking being in a parking garage with keycard access there's no worry about car vandalism either. I don't see any shitty modified compact cars there either. Overall, she seems to have less annoying noise than I had to deal with in my suburban homes that I used to live in. I'll take train noise over barking dogs any time. I don't know what the problem is with so many Americans that they just love the sound of dogs barking their heads off for hours and hours. But I only have seen this in suburbs and rural areas, never cities.