No sign of our awful renter neighbors leaving any time soon

hope everything works out ! great post

This is exactly why i have not gotten into the apartment rental business. Too much trouble and grief.

Makes me feel better about my last “awful” neighbor… they would just leave the windows open when the weather was nice and then proceed to have loud and lengthy love making. I remember one night walking past their home and there was a crowd of about seven neighbors standing under their second floor window gossiping about them (while they were in the act, of course). Finally someone got sick of it and yelled at them to “finish up, we’re getting bored out here.” Can you imagine?

My current neighborhood is pretty quiet.

In our neighborhood, we have beautiful homes up and down the street.

There are two very crappy, and I do mean crappy, homes that are a super blight.

One is a rental. The other is an owner-occupied.

The owner occupied has a theory that the more worn and tired (and rotting) doors, windows and roofs are, the more charming.

Evidently he read a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, House of the Seven Gables, and fell in love with the idea of a yard and building falling down on itself.

The renter actually isn’t in charge of the upkeep of his place.

The lawn is just hardpan, and the backyard is used to bring cars in from the alley to work on and let rust. (the renter IS responsible for that.)

Occasionally the renter in the dead of night has his friends push a junker out of the back yard and onto the street, and parks the vehicle, sometimes in front of our home.

Eventually we have to call the city to come get it.

There is no evidence that the car was a piece of junk from our neighbor’s back yard, and we just keep calling the city. They keep removing the junks.

And, OF COURSE, guarding the junks in the renters back yard are dogs, loud dogs.

He says they are his children. But children are trained and aren’t left in the backyard alone all day to do what they want.

In other words, uncaring neighbors who are ignorant are not a phenomenon that is exclusive to any one place.

True, it is more common among the poor where they don’t have the money to live within their property lines. If you have six kids and a 1200 square foot home, your neighbors are going to be living with your kids as well.

And, if one complains that building access for the poor in a middle class neighborhood is going to cause blight, the politicians yell, “Where is your compassion.”

I ask, where is your common sense?

Beth