Neighbors from hell

[Hot Pepsi]

I was wondering the same thing.

I wasn't the one who complained. It's considered an "eyesore," but it's on her half of the driveway, so I don't really mind it.

There's a lot of fussbudgetry in our local ordinances, partly because we have a huge student population and certain parts of the towny population are afraid that if you give "the students" an inch, that they'll destroy the entire town. There are a lot of rules to keep the properties rented to students within a particular area around campus and downtown and a lot of rules to prevent too many people from living in a house (because more people bring more noise and more cars and more trouble, or so I've been told all my life).

That isn't entirely without a factual basis, but in my observation, the problem isn't so much with the students per se, but with the landlords. Student rentals could all be nice-looking places with well-kept yards and shrubs etc if the landlords wanted to do that, but they only do the bare minimum and there's not much incentive for their tenants to do that work because they're just temporary tenants - tragedy of the commons and all that. Yeah, it would be nice if they cared more, but they're students and they don't.

There's a lot of NIMBYs around here who complain about the students and resent them and then make a loud show of moving out to the countryside to get away from them. Of course, there'd be no town here at all, let alone one as nice as this, without students. So it's like when people in ski towns or beach towns complain about the tourists. That doesn't excuse criminal or anti-social behavior - though a lot of students seem to think it does - but we need to accept that we were all young once too and that we are one community. And fortunately, there are more than enough people who see it that way. If anything, there are too many people who want to live here. Property values around here are very healthy. There are million-dollar houses right next to frat houses.

[WOM]

Yeah, but a lot of frat houses are Jesus-huge old mansions gone to seed.

[Hot Pepsi]

There is a great deal of variability in the applicable regime and the enforcing authority.

In the US, the absolute worst examples are private "homeowners' associations" that enforce minutiae like grass length and window covering colour in the name of "preserving property values". Buying a house in such a neighbourhood requires one to sign up to a covenant to respect the rules.

This is true.

Where I live, the borough has ordinances, but they are created through the standard, tedious democratic process with public meetings, etc. We did just pass an historic district rule such that any changes to certain houses in the area (not mine) have to be approved by a board etc.* But HOAs are just tyranny, as far as I can tell, making up capricious rules on the fly. My cousin was telling me about the one she has to put up with in their community near Boise. They want to move.

We do have a vocal minority that shows up to meetings who never want anything new to be built, no cars to ever pass by the street in front of their house, all in the name of "preserving the character of the town." "Preserving the character" can be abused as just a vague, but plausible-sounding, way to oppose any change whatsoever. They also think that the University owes us all anything we want to ask of it, but nobody who works for the university ought to be allowed to put any burden on town infrastructure at all.


*Some people said that was going to lower property values while also arguing it was designed to price more people out of living here. I don't see how those can both be true. I don't think either of them really are. The kind of people who want to live in a 1920s/1930s house are usually going to want to maintain its character. And they aren't overly prescriptive like in Nantucket or places like that.

[Hot Pepsi]

Yeah, but a lot of frat houses are Jesus-huge old mansions gone to seed.

As far as I know, all of the frat houses were built as frat houses. It's hard to imagine why rich alumni give so much to their old frats, but they often do.

It's actually going the other way. There's a frat house for sale, because the frat got expelled by the university and its national organization, and the borough is trying to prevent it from staying a frat house. Somebody who had a lot of money could fix that up and live in a mansion.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Once they had had the exorcist in.

[Hot Pepsi]

Sure. That would be part of it, but the cost of that would be peanuts compared to how much it would cost to renovate the places. They look fancy on the outside, but on the inside they look like places occupied by adolescent alcoholics for decades with little oversight.

Apparently the place sold! Not sure who bought it.
https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...5-42265#photo6

[Sporting]

In our old flat we had an Italian upstairs who sublet his apartment to students who thought it was fun to have parties most nights of the week. Opposite we had an hysterical mother who spent her days shouting at her young daughter and whose flat was as filthy as fuck, though not as dirty as the family's who lived downstairs: the woman here was always telling her husband that she hoped he would die of aids. They had to fumigate their flat when they were finally evicted. Then there was a maddish psychologist who had a running battle with the woman who lived opposite her. There was a goth family who always dressed in black, 9-year-old son and younger daughter included. Finally, a rather strange German woman lived upstairs.

[ursus arctos]

How did you split the revenue from the television rights?

[hobbes]

I know. I think it was Blameless' old one.

It definitely wasn't.

[DCI Harry Batt]

The former brick pile in all its glory, right next to my folks slightly neater [former] home.

Right, so there were some bricks on someone's drive.

What next?

[Moonlight Shadow]

It has gone amazingly quiet next door btw...

[MsD]

[ChrisJ]

Point being, you can't cut down your neighbours' trees.

No, but there are so many other uses for an axe.