« A Newspaper Finally Gets It Right | Main | How (and Why) the Daily News is Put Together »
June 10, 2005
Dealing With Neighbors
I grew up in an urban neighborhood. The narrow houses were placed on narrow lots. Our windows looked into our neighbor's windows. With no air conditioning back then, windows stayed open much of the year, so everybody heard everything. On my block you found the usual assortment of characters: The good kids and the bad kids, the good parents and the bad parents, the drunks, the fighters, the church-goers, the young and the old, those working and those unemployed, the nosy ones and the ones you never saw or heard. In other words, what you would expect to find in any typical neighborhood. Within those confines, all neighbor-to-neighbor problems were handled directly, with outsiders called in only if it involved violence or a serious crime. It was just dealt with or lived with.
Neighborhoods are rapidly disappearing and being replaced by community associations. Municipalities long ago figured out that they could place a greater tax base on a smaller piece of property and ignore most of the services they would normally have to provide that tax base, so I don't expect to see many neighborhoods like my old one being built in the near future.
What has also disappeared is the ability to deal with neighbors. For some reason, when you move into an association, you find yourself thinking that they should take care of typical neighbor problems. Problems like noise, pets, kids, parking, etc. Even though I know better, I find myself thinking along those lines. I live in a very loosely governed HOA. My house sits on a curve near the entrance, so the kids coming home on Friday or Saturday night find it convenient to dump their empty beer cans, hamburger bags and whatever, out of their cars and onto my lawn. After 14 years, I've gotten a little tired of cleaning up other people's crap, so I thought about going to the association. Why that thought crossed my mind, I really don't know, but it did. I knew they couldn't, or wouldn't do anything, just as I knew the police wouldn't do anything (I tried that route a few years ago).
I realized that I had forgotten how to deal with these issues. I knew that I couldn't do what my parents used to do - march down to the home of the kids who did it and ask their parents to take care of it, which usually would end the problem. Today, you're more likely to have the door slammed in your face, just ask any teacher about parent's reactions to their kid's problems. So what to do?
The frustration level of people to the insensitivity of others has grown in proportion to their inability to deal with it. So, if you're a board member or manager, and an owner comes to you about a problem with their neighbors, it's probable that they really don't know how to deal with it or don't expect to get any results on their own, and are simply looking for some authority to help. They need the neutrality of a third party to intervene. Because the association controls so much of what goes on around them, it isn't unreasonable to expect them to think you should be handling these problems also. Often you can't or shouldn't, which only heightens the frustrations.
There are no easy answers, society has changed significantly since my neighborhood days, and the way we resolved things back then wouldn't work now. If someone's found a good way of dealing with the idiot neighbor, I wish they would share it.
Posted by joewest at June 10, 2005 4:09 PM