Good fences, it’s said, make for good neighbours. But not in one of Brisbane’s most public group of apartments where a human-sized fence stands between seven riverfront apartments and a view across one of the Brisbane River’s most picturesque reaches.

The fence in question is both a tale of woe and a tale of caution of the issues ahead as more of us live in a city where our walls are shared and decisions about our backyards are not ours alone.

It’s a reminder that we are becoming less likely to be kings and queens of our castles. Important decisions about how we live will increasingly be made by body corporates, usually acting with best intentions but open to dispute.

And the opportunity for neighborhood dispute isn’t just limited to high-rise living but exists in gated estates which operate under similar rules that govern the appearance of properties even in some of the most prestigious neighbourhoods.

But first, the tale of the fence which is under construction between the ground-level units of River Place and the section of the riverwalk it fronts at the Petrie Bight end of the city.

Seven apartments in the high-rise complex have a very public profile and are visible to the thousands of people who walk, run, cycle and scooter the riverwalk daily. They are separated from the public by garden beds which are owned by the building’s body corporate but have been emptied for safety reasons for several years. Access to the empty pits has been restricted in that time by temporary weld mesh fencing.

Yes, it’s unsightly but it leaves a broken view of the river and the passers-by for the apartment owners. In March, work started on a solution to the ugly fencing, the construction of 1.8 metre high panels on top of the garden bed walls.

The fence, once complete, almost certainly will either obscure or block the ground-floor apartments’ views of the river. Right now, the fence is partially built but work has stopped while the apartment owners seek legal redress to stop it going any further. So far, they’ve had little joy with an application to the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management refusing to grant an interim order to stop construction.

The very busy adjudicator has ruled that the owners have not established the urgent need for the interim order, given their untaken opportunities to make their cases to the body corporate. While this may not be the end of the matter, its progress will be measured by the progress of the fence – still a temporary solution but one of some years to the problem created by the risk of a passerby climbing onto the wall of a garden bed and then hurting themselves falling into the cavity on the other side.

This is a cautionary tale for apartment owners, a reminder that living in shared spaces carries a different level of commitment and different risks to living in a suburban street where trees might grow to block views but fences are unlikely to be erected in your line of sight.

The Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management is a little known legal authority which serves as first stop for many of these disputes. Its rulings open a fascinating window on the issues the neighbourhoods it governs are dealing with.

Sanctuary Cove, the northern Gold Coast estate built 30 years ago with a promise by its developer Mike Gore to “keep out the cockroaches”, is one such neighborhood. Its body corporate has recently succeeded in winning an order that forces a property owner to intensely clean his home and its surrounds which are caked in mould and to either empty or clean his pool which has gone months unfiltered. The waterfront block is in a part of the development where homes attract multi-million dollar price tags.

The less prestigious, but still very nice northern Gold Coast neighborhood of Calmwater Shores, is centre of a similar dispute where a series of mishaps has left an owner with an incomplete home which doesn’t meet the standards of its body corporate. Of particular dispute is the inability of the owner to procure 4-metre high frangipani trees for the front of their block, preferring instead to plant smaller trees which will grow.

This neighborhood’s body corporate has unsuccessfully tried to force the owner to replace their growing trees with trucked-in fully grown trees. The body corporate commissioner has declined their demand.

I wrote for InQueensland a few weeks ago about the value of patience in a world where we often feel we are losing control of our circumstances. The Body Corporate Commissioner might well be the model for what’s to come, not just a regulator of walls and fences and personal disputes but a Commissioner for Patience. Don’t laugh. Someone might hear you.