My husband and I have been leary of our new neighbors ever since they moved in – in mid-September.
Oh, they seem nice enough when we talk to them, but then they do the opposite of what they told us.
For example … the night that they were moving in, the new guy came over to our backyard for a few minutes to talk to us and he warned us about this guy who lives just down the street from us … telling us that he breaks into houses and that he’s a crack dealer. Ok … good to know … but ever since the new neighbors moved in we’ve seen them going to that house about three times a day!
My husband who likes just about everyone he meets decided almost immediately that he didn’t like the new neighbors. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt since they seemed nicer than the last renter next door whom I called the Redneck Neighbors. But I guess our gut instincts were correct.
Last night Chris and I took our dog out for a walk. Normally Chris takes her alone when he comes home from work in the evening, but he asked me if I wanted to walk down to the East York Civic Center (only a few blocks from us) to see the huge crowds lining up for the H1N1 flu vaccinations. We didn’t plan to wait in line ourselves as we’ve decided to wait a couple of weeks and see if people start having bad reactions to the injection as it hasn’t had much testing yet … and well if you read my last post I’ve been having a lot of reactions to medications and even foods this year so I don’t want to take any chances. Anyway … going for a walk would give me a chance to break in my new Naot shoes right?
So we’re walking along and a car goes by honking at Chris. Chris waved and said that it was a guy he knew from work. We decided to take a side street and as we walked along the car came back and pulled up beside us. The guy said that he’d been hoping to talk to my husband for weeks as he wanted to tell us about our new neighbors but didn’t want to come to our house and be seen by them.
He told us that he’d lived in the same building as our new renter neighbors – hereby to be know as the Skanky neighbors. Well before they were kicked out for not paying their rent!
He told us that the guy had just got out of jail three months ago and that he didn’t work for the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) as he’d told the people that own the home next door. His wife who said she was a social worker hasn’t worked for about two years either. What do they do then … rob houses and do drugs. Yep.
The guy is so low that he robbed his parents house while they were on vacation .. I think that’s what landed him in jail but I could be mistaken. he also broke into his own sister’s house!
Apparently, when not breaking into houses, they sit around their house doing drugs day and night. Everything from crack to cocaine to percocets and oxycontin. He’s apparently into the oxycontin and she does 15 to 20 percs a day.
Now I don’t know if all of this information is true, but Chris knows the guy well that passed it on to us and he has no reason to lie as far as we can tell. Plus as far as I can tell they aren’t working. I stay up late at night because of my pain and I see their lights on as long as ours are. Sometimes when I’m up particularly late, say 4 or 5 in the morning their lights are still on even as I’m heading for bed. People who work don’t stay up to all hours day in and day out. I have no idea how they cope with caring for their three kids!
Obviously the home owners didn’t check out their renters references. If they had he would have found out that they didn’t work where they said they did – or at all, and that would have been enough to decide not to rent to them.
Now we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. We want to tell the home owners what we know about their new renters (and that they’ll likely default on rental and bill payments as we were told that that’s what they do too), but the home owners are sooooo stupid that they’ll probably tell the renters everything we tell them and tell them that they got that info from us!
What would you do?
For now we’ve decided to just wait and see what happens. If everything the guy told us is true they probably won’t be able to pay the rent soon and that will get them kicked out. That’s what we’re hoping for now anyway.
In the meantime we’re making sure our doors are always locked and that’s it’s clear to anyone looking at our house that someone is home. I mean – if the guy is so low that he’d rob his own parents and sister I’d bet that he’d rob his neighbors too if he thought the house was empty for a while.
I share your horror story about far-from-stellar neighbors. In my condo complex we have situations where owners are forced to rent their places because they may haven taken subprime loans to purchase the units and are burdened by the spike in the mortgage payments. We have a rule where out of the 50 units in the complex only about 15 are allowed as rentals. I know we’ve exceeded that number. Many owners are angry because there is no pride of ownership usually from renters and the quality and security of the community is jeopardized. Granted many of the current renters are very nice people but the Board’s reluctance to enforce the rules on renters creates problems with our investments. I know these are extraordinary times in our economy and it’s tragic when someone loses their home but we need to think about the overall welfare of the association and of the owners that did follow traditional financing procedures. This issue usually comes up because of the few bad eggs (renters) that have no respect for the privacy of others.