Are your neighbors driving you batty? Do you have a neighbor who complains incessantly so that you feel like a prisoner in your own home? Do you complain when your neighbors annoy you, or do you just grit your teeth and put up with it unless it becomes very bad? Have you ever moved to get away from a particular neighbor?

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Answers

In the year we've lived in this house, we've got along swimmingly with the neighbors on one side. (The *other* side had a dog that was loose the day we moved in, tried to bite me, and nearly got a boot in the teeth for its troubles. After barking incessantly and escaping continually to terrorize the neighborhood, it finally did bite someone and was destroyed earlier this year. Though it be a dog, about this I did think "good riddance" and only wished it could have been the owner too.) They're very nice, I made them Christmas cookies, they have a sweet dog and lots of lilacs that are so tall I can enjoy them over our fence.

Because of a peculiarity in their floor plan, our bedrooms overlook theirs instead of their dining room and kitchen and they were, I now think ironically, concerned about whether we would be woken by their newborn's cries (she was born in September and we've heard her maybe a half dozen times).

Their concern about the baby (who is charming and waves to me) has been completely eclipsed by their new-to-them airconditioner, which is incredibly loud and faces the two windows of the four on that side that our bed is under. It looks like a very old model they might have inherited from a relative's upgrade, and allegedly newer models are far quieter (I wouldn't know, never having lived with a/c). It's been three nights now and I'm thinking really nasty thoughts about them, which makes me sad.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

When I first moved into my current little shoebox, I was living alone. My downstairs neighbor was very charming, but strange in a really undefinable way. He was huge, 6'7 or something, and had these huge, blank blue eyes.

About a month after I moved in, he came to the door with a bottle of red vinegar, told me he brought it from France, as a house warming present. He was acting really vague and standing really close to me, and I felt incredibly uncomfortable, and decided not to invite him in.

Then he showed me a cut on his finger, and asked if I had a bandaid. I turned to get him one, and he followed me into the house, and into the bathroom. He took the bandaid, looked around, and asked me if I had any money. I said no and pushed him the hell out.

Over the next month he got creepier. Lots of creepy screams and crying from downstairs, a lot of fighting, a lot of weird moans. Thenone night, he played his music so loudly the floor shook and things fell off my bookcase. I went down to ask him to stop, and he screamed and chased me down the hall. He did it again the next day. I knocked on the floor with a broom. He came running up the stairs, pounded on the door and started screaming things about how I pounded on his ceiling, and he insulted me horribly and then, scared the shit out of me when he started crying madly, hysterically. I slammed the door. But, you know, he turned the music down.

An hour later, a note is slipped under my door: "Don't FUCK WITH me BITCH!" I called the cops, they showed up and he didn't answer his door. Charmingly, I got to file a "terrorist threat" complaint.

This sort of thing happened over and over. He scared the shit out of me, he played his music at unimaginable volumes, he stole my mail and packages. One night, he climbed down from the roof onto my fire escape, kicked my screen in, and then climbed down to his own window and broke it.

And the thing that made it all horribly worse - cops never did anything, and he was my landlord's on-again, off-again lover, now best friend. So my landlord, he was less than receptive to my complaints about this horrible, awful freak.

I couldn't afford to break the lease, and I just sprinted by the guy's door, gave up on the loud music and prayed he'd leave me alone. About 8 months later, he moved out. Thank god.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Not only did that take me all afternoon to write (what with the pesky work interruptions) it took you all afternoon to read! Sorry 'bout the length.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Let's see ... Back in D.C. We lived in a house that had been divided into 4 apartments. A large 3 bedroom, 2 junior 1 bedrooms and another large one, that was either a 2 or a 3 BR.

Ours was a basement and first floor jr. 1 bedroom crammed into half of what was probably formerly a very nice front room with two deep bay windows. Our kitchen/LR/DR was in one bay window, the other was in the other apartment. The bedroom was just beneath the window with the bathroom and only closet down there as well.

The folks in the ground floor 3-BR used to get up to drunken parties every now and then. One night they were dancing across the floor so loudly that we could hear it downstairs. We'd just about made up our minds to complain, when they stopped. We only lived in that place for 6 months, decamping to a large 2BR apt and then a 2BR condo in Virginia.

We didn't have any problems of note there, except for the folks downstairs at the condo, who were from Africa and used to turn their heat up to inconceivable heights. The heat would float upward of course and heat up our place too. To the point that we turned our own heat nearly off. This was nice in winter, but they'd start turning their heat on in September, when it was still quite warm out by my standards. That was a grin and bear it problem. And on the up side, the bathroom floors were never cold, tile or no.

In our current place, we're in a divided house -- we've got the entire top floor and the lady downstairs has the bottom floor. We share the washing room and front steps.

At first I thought that neighbor must be cool: she has a cat named Trout, she's in her 30s (read, not a UC Berkeley college student, since the campus is three blocks away), and her place is as neat as a pin. Unfortunately, we've had our share of run-ins with her.

She's asked us to refrain from doing laundry past 10pm, due to noise from the maching which is a fairly reasonable request really, and I didn't mind trying to keep laundry hours to between 7pm and 10pm. But then I noticed that -she's- doing -her- laundry between 10 and midnight ... and said laundry machine also rattles the windows in our bedroom. Not much ... but enough to wake -me- up.

She also frequently forgets to take out her trash bin, put out her recycling properly (Ie in a manner in which the guys will actually pick it up) and never lifts a finger to mow the lawn, yet felt she could put in a flower bed without asking us (the lawn mowers and shrubbery trimmers) if she could do so. I'd been planning to ask her if we could revamp the garden and was going to tackle that as a sort of group project, but instead I have to work around her ugly patch of bare dirt with hideous plants that she never waters.

She's also had some issues with her stereo -- she leaves it on for her cat and often it's rather loud and I can hear it pounding away when I'm at home. Once it was so loud that it was shaking the whole house. We were out and about doing yardwork, but she wasn't home by sunset and the neighbors started to complain. So Sabs pulled the fuse out of the box for her place.

She's also had parties without telling either of us that she's going to be having them, and then she and her friends get drunk and tromp around the house with the music blaring again.

Last time, they were so loud that the neighbors called the cops. Disturbingly enough when the cops arrived, she never heard them knocking -- I know this because -I- heard them and went down to check on who was knocking. They did finally roust her out of her apartment and the music was promptly turned off.

The up side, is that she's gone more than she's at home. And she is nice enough to sign for my pet food deliveries and putting the boxes in the laundry room where I can get them.

I guess I'd just rather have a friendly outgoing neighbor who likes to chat. And she just definitely ain't it. On the other hand, our landlady and landlord are exactly that. Chatty, friendly and sweet. They take care of the horde while we're away and I can stop by just to talk almost any time.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Good lord, Jen. I hereby resolve never to complain about my mostly very nice neighbors.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

I have an ugly naked guy who lives next door. Caught him beating off in his living room once. Vile.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

The ugly naked guy who masturbates used to live in the apartment below mine. It has to be the same one since I refuse to believe that such a creature could be plural.

To tell the whole tale would take all day, but I'll summarize a complex I lived in:
--aforementioned naked guy
--neighbors beating the living shit out of each other and their dog (actually, I've never lived in a complex without having at least one neighbor involved in domestic violence)
--half of our cars stolen by the downstairs neighbor's 14 yo daughter
--manager who threatened tenants with physical violence, and then followed through
--13 tenants with restraining order against manager
--one of those tenants shot under curious circumstances outside my window
--so many phone calls that the police would no longer show up
--the city hosted an intervention that ended with the counselor advising us to move out after the landlord went psycho in front of him
--next manager: staked out by cops for 3 days and arrested for building bombs in manager's office (remember the militia scare? I do.)
--next manager: arrested for stealing mail
--4 yo girl showing up on my doorstep at 10:30 pm because the mother of the 2 yo she was BABYSITTING OUTSIDE hadn't come home and she was hungry

This was in a quiet suburban neighborhood. I don't regret owning a house now.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

I was going to talk about my neighbors, but after reading Jen's, I'd feel foolish regarding any of them as a real problem!

On a generic note, large lawns and lots of trees solves SO MANY neighborly disputes - I will never be able to stand living at close quarters with neighbors again.

(Ok I can't help it... I showed up home on Friday to find my neighbor - who has lost or killed about 20 assorted pets-type critters since we moved in - waiting on my porch because she wanted to know if we TOOK her goats. And didn't appear to believe that I have no desire or use for a goat. But again, once she crossed back over that nice wide swath of lawn and through the trees, she stopped messing with my world.)

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

How topical! I just got an email from my brother today informing me that my father was arrested for "brandishing a firearm."

Seems my folks are feuding with the new neighbors over the property lines. I don't know the details (and don't want to) but the neighbor was charged with trespassing and destruction of property. So I gather that he was in what he considered to be his part of the yard taking down whatever my parents had up, my dad got pissed, a shouting match, and he goes inside for his gun to MAKE the guy leave.

The only good thing is that my brother wasn't the cop who had to arrest my dad - that would have been ugly.

- t

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Wow. H, that wasn't the complex you lived in over here in MY neighborhood, was it? Doesn't sound like it. I hope.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Lynda! Half asleep this morning, I heard a very long story on the radio news about a goat that escaped and terrorized the neighborhood and leapt 6-foot fences in a single bound. I'm thinking it was your neighbor's goat, on a crime spree, heady with the sweet taste of freedom!

Anyway, thank you for the neighbor story commiseration. It was two years ago, and I had forgotten how awful those months were. I still get that nervous-stomach jump when I see a really tall guy going into my building. Makes me a lot more tolerant of the parties and the weird, noisy baboon sex my neighbors have every ten minutes.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

I've been thinking about this. I've lived in scary apartment complexes. I've lived next to thieves. I've lived next to (and downstairs from) people who were so noisy that I thought I would lose my mind. I lived across the hall from a drug-dealing prostitute who didn't clean her litter box for six months (and yes, she saw clients in there). I've lived near frat boys and I've lived near couples who beat each other up.

But in terms of my personal unhappiness, my last downstairs neighbor was the worst. I don't know if it was because she was such a thoroughly obnoxious person, or if it was just that I was ready to not have downstairs neighbors anymore, or if it had to do with the fact that the complex was so tightly-knit. We all socialized a lot, so it was impossible to get any space.

She didn't steal, she was occasionally loud but far from the worst I've experienced, and she wasn't disgusting and dirty. But thinking about her still makes me feel sick to my stomach, even though it's been three years. I'm still getting used to the fact that she isn't always somewhere down there under my feet.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

And I thought I had it bad because of the upstairs neighbor who stomps around at all hours and allows his bathtub to overflow periodically (usually in the middle of the night), causing a miniwaterfall in my bathroom.

I live across the street from a bar. The patrons are youngish hoods who, when leaving the bar after last call, pee on all the cars parked on the street and break the outside mirrors. I parked my car on that street one time, and my mirror was broken. They have an open mic night on Wednesdays and blast the neighborhood with horrific renditions of pop tunes until well into the wee hours. There are apartments on that side of the street, and I can't imagine how loud the noise is over there.

The worst people I ever had to deal with were the upstairs neighbors at the condo. They had horrible screaming fights. They said terrible things to one another. It made me very uncomforable. I was always waiting for the sound of violence. They threw stuff, but I don't think they hit one another. It's so hard to look at people straight in the face after you've heard them telling one another how much they hate each other.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

My neighbor's dog does the same thing sometimes, Beth. Barks incessantly, that is. Usually I just walk up to the fence and talk to him soothingly for a minute. He calms down and stops barking for a while. Sometimes it works longer then others. Sometimes I lean out my door and say, "For the love of god, be quiet." That works too.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Beth--Nope. It was in Carmichael. The one in midtown also had domestic violence issues, but is most famous for that hideous family that sat outside of our living room (and my bedroom) window all day long, seven days a week. They looked in our windows, peeked in our mailbox and shopping bags as we walked past, and never said a word, just stared.

I've now been thinking of this as well, and of how influential living in complexes has been. My mother has never lived anywhere that shares a wall with another family, and sometimes I feel like a lot of her attitudes reflect that. She trusts strangers a whole lot more than I do. Living next to people that beat each other also jaded me on calling the cops. More often than not, calling the police got me in trouble--got my tires slashed, me threatened, the person I was trying to help beaten more. I stopped calling unless it sounded like someone was about to die. Living next to psychos also made me a really good neighbor. I'm quiet and overly conscientious and think way too much about my neighbors. I just don't want to ever be one of the people I've had to live next door to.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

Ah, the joys of communal living...To begin with, you have to understand that I didn't have neighbors within over an acre of property until shortly after my eighteenth birthday. So when upon moving into the dorms, I was confronted with a very new situation. I still say my roomates were worse than my neighbors.(at least during my freshman year.) So I will skip my first 7 months of college. During March of my freshman year, I became an RA in the second largest female dorm on campus. I have all sorts of stories related just to that, but I will try and stick to the people who actually lived next door. During my first 3 months in this lovely dorm. I lived next to the chain-smoking party room. The chain-smoking thing wouldn't have been overly bad if we didn't have drop ceilings that allowed their noxious fumes to decend into my room. Now don't take this the wrong way, I grew up with a smoker, I have lived with a smokestack of a roommate. The problem was that this was anywhere from 2-6 girls smoking nonstop 24-7. Factor in my asthma and the screaming- giggling parties at 4 am and I was one pissed lady. They also had this lovely habit of knocking on people's doors and prank calling people at odd hours. *Note to anybody out there in a similar situation: Don't prank call your neighbor when your living in a dorm. Unless she is mostly deaf and very stupid she will hear you talking through the paper thin walls* Then for the entirity of the last two semesters, I have lived next to the Rap City Music Palace. My windows shook on a regular basis. And don't even get me started on indoor speaking voices girls. There were actually bets running on how many times I would write her up for noise violations alone at one point. Ah yes, so I am the official neighbor police and I have many, many more stories where those came from, but I have to start dinner now. (Anybody want me to come and write up their neighbors for them?) -Meg

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

I rented a condo unit that had the upstairs neighbor from hell. It started the day he moved in. He was blasting his stereo at 11pm on a weeknight. I walked up and knocked on the door to ask him to be quiet. I saw his shadow walk up to the peephole, but he didn't answer the door. But he turned down the stereo.

This happened every night for a week or so. But one night I went up, he wouldn't answer the door and wouldn't turn down the music. I called the cops. He wouldn't answer for them either, but he turned it down. The cops came into my bedroom, which was under his living room, and could hear him walking around, so they just cut the power to his unit. He claimed he wasn't home and it was the burglar alarm that was playing the music. Yeah, whatever.

Then he was quiet for several months. During which time I renewed my lease, but had a clause written into it that if he started up again and the HOA continued to ignore the problem that I could break the lease without penalty.

Then one night he had a live band in his unit at 2am on a Tuesday. He couldn't understand why that pissed people off. The final straw came when he and his girlfriend had a screaming match in his garage, which was adjacent to my master bathroom/bedroom. I went out and told him to please shut the fuck up. He got so pissed off, he spent the next two hours throwing things against the wall and beating on it with a hammer. He claimed it wasn't him. From then on, everytime he entered his unit, he'd very deliberately stomp across the floor over my bedroom. That went on for weeks and I didn't get any sleep at all. It was like living under the Telltale Heart.

The good news is that his stupidity allowed me to break my lease and buy a house. I have one neighbor now who parties on the patio (right next to my bedroom), they have a barking dog, and their visitors are ALWAYS parked in front of my house. But at least I can't hear them stomping.

-- Anonymous, July 03, 2001

I just felt compelled to add that I really do like my neighbors. All of them, including the ones with the barking dog. I live on a great street with great people. And I'm not just saying that because some of them read this.

-- Anonymous, July 03, 2001

Addendum to my first post in this topic: So the a/c window unit from hell, twelve feet from our bed, has been going for nearly a week now. Monday, housepainters began to attack our trim, using a pressure- cleaner first. Female neighbor came over with the, I guess, reasonable request that we tell her when the machinery is going to be used so she can take the baby to her mother's for the day. (The painters think they'll be done with the entire job by the end of the week and the pressure-cleaner's already back at the rental center, woohooo!) Rich acquiesced but didn't take the opportunity to say, "Speaking of noise..." For which I can hardly blame him; how do you even do that?

-- Anonymous, July 03, 2001

Lisa,

They probably really don't know it's loud. If they're inside when it's running, they probably don't hear it, or don't register how much louder it is to you. And the solution may be simple.

When we bought this house, the a/c unit (for the central air) was loud; we heard it, but only after it had run a while (like, maybe, a couple of weeks) when we happened to go outside that side of the house when it was on. We were horrified. The a/c repairman found that there were a couple of problems, one which couldn't be fixed, but one which could (something was loose, I can't remember what) and it did reduce the noise some. (Ironically, this one was struck by lightning later and was replaced by insurance.) A unit which is making that much noise is probably (note, not definitely) working properly or efficiently, so having it checked out could save them money in the long run.

Since they are very conscious neighbors, maybe you could just go over there one day when it's hot and the a/c is running and ask them if they knew it. You could preface it nicely, with, "I realize there may be nothing you could do about it, but I thought I'd ask, since it's so near our window." I can't imagine them not understanding that (from the way you've described them). If it turns out that it really cannot be fixed, but they try -- or go to the efforts to have it checked, a nice thank you note or something would go a long way to show them that you bear them no ill will for something beyond their control, and just may help with other needs in the future.

On the rest of the examples above, I am horrified. I thought my nasty, horrible, mean neighbor from out last house was the pits when he sawed down an entire line of 30-year-old mature shrubbery because he'd decided to put in a fence and decided they were in his way. He knew they were on our property line (he was a city surveyor!). He killed our privacy and then put up an ugly fence. He later decided his yard didn't drain properly and since our yard backed up to a canal, he would just dig a ditch through our yard. I looked out the window one morning and there he was, shovel in hand, having dug a trench 20 feet long and counting. I would have liked to say he was crazy, but he was just a pain in the ass. But my jerk barely holds a candle to some of the rest listed here.

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2001

I have had the worst neighbors and the best neighbors. The worst was a bleached blond goon who was sponging off the thin secretary in the unit at the end of our santa monica motel-style bungalow complex. He decided to refinish furniture as a sideline, and sucked down a six pack a day of fake beer while he set up his wares in the fucking driveway. And his power tools. Morning, noon and night. It took a few visits from the city to stop this.

Now we live in the woods, and the neighbors are pine trees. I thank god every day for the space.

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2001

I live in an apartment, shaped like an L, with my bedroom in the bottom bit. I can see from the living room all the way into the kitchen.

I've had noisy neighbours, I've had slightly creepy neighbours, I've had obnoxious neighbours. But only one neighbour made me get a second phone for the bedroom, a deadbolt added to a door, and a *second* fire alarm, for an apartment with the layout described above.

There's more to the story than I can tell here, but I nicknamed her the Insane Neighbour for a very literal reason: she was mentally ill, and perfectly social, if somewhat strange... until she chose to go off her meds, in February. This resulted in:

- Ranting calls to the phone company about how someone was messing with her line. Furious calls to her case worker about how nobody understood here. Hysterical calls to her boyfriend about why he didn't come to see her anymore, if he'd just come talk to her one more time, she'd never bother him again. Weepy phone calls to various crisis lines.

I know all this because the walls here are thin, and she was very, very loud.

- Endless irrational behaviour. And I mean, irrational.

- Demanding, in the company of her embarrassed case worker, to be allowed to search my apartment. That's when I got the second deadbolt, the extra phone, and the second fire alarm.

- Claiming her boyfriend was Jesus. And the devil. And dead and buried at the end of our street. Insisting that the devil was living in an apartment complex here in town, and that he didn't have a liver, and she'd seen the Xrays that proved it.

Finally, after not having paid rent for three months, she was evicted. You can imagine my relief.

-- Anonymous, July 05, 2001

We are extremely lucky. We live on a fairly small lot, but the people on three sides of us are all nice, and quiet. We have pleasant but fairly distant relationships with all of them, which is how I like it. The people on one side have this totally dead front yard because they're working on stuff inside the house, which would bother some people, but not us.

A few weeks ago the people behind us had an afternoon party with a lot of people laughing and talking loudly in a foreign language. This was very annoying, and made it impossible to enjoy sitting in the yard, but hasn't happened again.

Nobody around here has dogs, thank god, but some people down the block have a parrot that screams. Their house is for sale so we have our fingers crossed.

-- Anonymous, July 06, 2001

So if they'd been talking loudly in English, it would've been okay?

Snark!. Sorry, couldn't help that.

-- Anonymous, July 07, 2001

My worst neighbor ever would have to be an old lady that lived in the cockroach infested apartment building I used to live in a couple years ago. Not only was she our landlady, but she also was our neighbor, and lived in the apartment right above us.

My family referred to her as 'that evil grandmother' (or something like that, I'm not sure how it translates), and the feeling was decidedly mutual. I was never quite sure why she didn't kick us out, I could tell she hated our guts. Maybe she couldn't find anyone else to rent her hovel. We, on the other hand, were just biding our time, searching for a place without mold, cockroaches, and bigger than a closet that we could move into when our lease was up.

Secure in the knowledge that we had already paid an obscene amount of money that would keep us there for a year, she complained about our cleaning habits, the hours we kept, all the hot water we used, our pets, the fact that we turned the heat up in the winter...

Oddly enough, when we finally DID move out, she gave us a box of rice cookies.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

You think _you've_ got neighbor problems.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Hmm. I expected worse. That building sounds no worse than (and in some ways, not as bad as) my first and second apartment buildings in L.A.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Yeah, if they'd been talking loudly in English, it would have been less annoying. We could have understood them, if we chose too, and it would have been less like just noise.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Lizzie, I read your posts the same way I watch children playing on broken jungle gyms- I know I should step in and say something, but I usually just step back, letting nature teach its own lessons.

~

That Piano Guild place just sounds like some poor guy who actually believed a sales brochure. What, and this 89 Cavalier for sale on the used car lot down the street really isn't Immaculate?

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Yup, that sounded like a few of the complexes I've lived in, except without the physical assaults and shootings. All of which, by the way, I would rather live in again than spend another minute in Fresno, where I had to go today for family reasons.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

Wow, I thought the Piano Factory was supposed to be all swanky.

Anyhoo, that's why I'm a member of a tenants union... although I'd like to see us doing more tenant organizing and be less of a service.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001