Bad neighbours from hell

I suppose all of us at one time or another have had the horrible experiences of living next to bad neighbours. Some of them are noisy all the time or part of the time, especially when you are trying to sleep at night. They either have loud drunken parties, or they have a dog that barks twenty-four hours of the day. I once represented a client whose neighbour broke into her home and stole her cat. Perhaps some of my readers have had neighpours who have rotten kids who run wild and ship shod over their gardens and worse yet, neighbours who push drugs night and day and of course, it is possible to have a biker’s gang next door to you and you are forced to hear the revving of the engines of their bikes late at night.

If you have read my earlier blogs, you may recall the case I wrote about with respect to a small village called Balm Beach in Ontario in which John and Elisabeth Marion built a fence that went all the way to the water so that their neighbours couldn’t pass their property while walking on the beach. Then there is the case of Albert Fulton, the head of the area's neighbourhood watch in Toronto who slashed tires of cars on the street.

Neighbour conflicts are quite common, and most often evolve around property disputes or annoyances, such as noise. But they can be confounding because many people don't know how to staunch the bad blood and resolve them. Typically people deal with disputes by calling the police, or a city councilor. They may hire a lawyer. Less commonly, they ask for mediation.

In this piece, I am going to tell you of a man in the city of Oshawa, Ontario who has to be one of the worse neighbours you could possible have living next door to you. He and his neighbours lived on a street that was dotted with 1950s bungalows with short narrow driveways and grassy boulevards.

The man moved into the area about a year and a half ago. According to his neighbours, he is a bad apple. They claim that they have all had run-ins with this man at one time or another.

One woman said that he goes out of his way to piss everyone off. She said that her altercations with the man began when he started taking pictures of her two boys playing street hockey and swearing at them. Her 16-year-old son said that the rotten neighbour told them that their net had holes in it and that the boys were hitting his car with the black pucks. But the boys use tennis balls or a soft orange puck.

The rotten neighbour used a similar allegation to confront a woman who lives across the street from him. He video-taped her as she stepped onto his porch whose two-year-old toddler had wandered onto the porch. He sternly warned her against trespassing.

The greatest acrimony had occurred with his next-door neighbour who says the man has property line issues. They share a driveway. The neighbour said that last winter, when his small gas operated snow plow blew snow into the tiny space between the garages, the man shoveled it back out on to the neighbour’s driveway.

The neighbours say that after a homeowner on the block cleared the paths of all his neighbours, leaving a small pile of snow on the man's boulevard (which is city-owned), the man took a wheelbarrow and dumped it back onto his neighbours' boulevards. Later, the rotten neighbour gave his next door neighbour the finger. Unprintable words were exchanged. The rotten neighbour called his neighbour’s wife a "fat bitch" and threatened her. Then they found mud on their car and house and suspected the rotten neighbour. They called police. They said there wasn't much they could do.

Arguments with neighbors come in all shapes and forms, but unnecessary noise, unruly children, barking dogs, the leaves of neighbour’s trees clogging roof gutters, fences and other boundary disputes top the list. Behind the headlines where one neighbor is rushed off to the hospital while the other is on his way to jail — over seemingly minor differences like snow-shoveling, loud music or child bullying — lie stories of long-lived trauma close to home, where police didn't help, where the bad guys kept triumphing over the good.

Property line issues - and in particular, fences - are some of the most common problems, experts say. Most of the serious issues between neighbours are really boundary related. People go crazy over inches. Fences along boundary lines can be so fraught they have their own provincial legislation, the Line Fences Act of Ontario which sets out how disputes - over the need for a fence, what type, or who pays - can be arbitrated by ‘fence viewers’. These viewers, appointed by the city, will make decisions for the neighbours. But it's not cheap. In Toronto, the city charges more than $1,000 for the service.

It's quite common for people living with a long standing serious dispute with their neighbors to begin to suffer from debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. They may even become seriously depressed as time goes by and there is no resolution or let up in the unpleasantness. You can find that your whole life is taken over by the incessant worry and strain - as if there is just no room for anything else any more.

Many years ago, there was a man who lived next door to a couple who had two grown children living with them. Every night, the family had noisy parties that went on into the early hours and the family carried on like that for over a year. The authorities didn’t really help. The man had enough. He bought a shot gun, broke into their house while the family was asleep and shot all four of them dead. Naturally he was arrested and tried for their murders. The jury was truly sympathetic when his lawyer argued temporary insanity. Within a year, he was free and he returned to his home where then lived in an atmosphere of peace and quiet.

When I bought my first home in Toronto, my wife and I had a neighbour next door to us who had her two grown sons living with her. They had parties well into the night on weekends. When I complained to her, she said that she couldn’t stop them. When I called the police, it really didn’t help. I finally found a away to stop it. That was to get them to move. The plan was very simple. I would use the event that I read about years ago when the man killed the four noisy neighbours, as my prop.

One day during the summer, I held a small barbecue party on my patio for just one friend. I knew that the next door punks were going to be drinking beer on their patio at that same time. There was a wooden fence between us that no one could see through although our voices could be overheard by the two men on the other side of the fence. I told my guest to go along with my plan and he did. The conversation between my friend and I that was overheard by the punks on the other side of the fence went like this:

FRIEND: When did you finally get released from the Queen Street mental hospital?
ME: Five years ago.
FRIEND: Why did they send you there in the first place?
ME: (pause) I shot four members of a family to death.
FRIEND What would you do that for?
ME: (angrily) They pissed me off.
FRIEND: What did they do to you that would make you want to kill them?
ME: I don’t want to go into the details other than say that I didn’t like them.
FRIEND: And you were released after being in the mental hospital for only a year?
ME: Yep.
FRIEND: Boy. They must have good treatment facilities in that hospital.
ME: I wasn’t insane.
FRIEND: Then why did they send you there?
ME: It was either spend the rest of my life in prison or eventually be released from a mental hospital. I knew I would be released within a year because I wasn’t really insane. I pretended that I was crazy and all the doctors who examined me believed me. Later, they also believed that I was no longer insane so they released me.
FRIEND: Was it worth it?
Ohh Yeah! You can't imagine the thrill you get when you watch the people you are shooting to death with a shotgun, fall at your feet and die.

Within two months, the woman sold her house and she and her two grown-up sons moved away.

There was another neighbour two doors from our home who had a short wave radio that was so powerful; we could hear her talking on it when we turned on the TV. I complained to her and she just laughed and slammed the door in my face. I then called the federal authorities and they sent an investigator to her home. Fifteen minutes later he came to my house and I turned on our TV and sure enough, there was her voice again. We overheard her say to whoever she was in radio contact with;“Some fat pig from the government came over and told me that I can’t use my shortwave radio anymore. How is that fatso going to stop me?” He did. He went back to her home and charged her. The fine was enormous. She moved within a couple of months. We never heard her voice on our TV again.

There was an industrial plant approximately half a block away from us that operated 24 hours a day. We never heard any noise from inside the plant but when shipments were going out after midnight, the noise of the tow motor driving over the metal gates of the trucks and lowering the skids onto the metal floors of the trucks was very loud. Every night it was like waiting for the second shoe to drop.

I complained to them and it didn’t do any good. I might add, they built their plant after I and my wife bought our home. Before I contacted the bylaw people, I went around the neighbourhood and collected over a hundred signatures from my neighbours. It was then that I complained to the bylaw officer for our area. He arranged for a meeting between me and the owners of the plant. The owners said that I wouldn’t have to complain about the noise anymore if they put central air conditioning in my home at their expense so that my windows could be closed permanently. I didn’t accept their offer so the owners of the plant were informed by the city that as of two weeks from the date of the meeting, there were to be no more deliveries or shipments to or from that plant after nine at night and none before seven in the morning. I and all my neighbours after that were able to sleep again.

I had a neighbour whose yappy dog was next to my apartment window every morning when he would let his dog out at five. I complained but it didn’t do any good. After I moved out, I got the phone number of the owner of the dog and every once in a while when I got up in the morning at four to pee, I would phone him and when he answered the phone, I would yell, “BARK BARK BARK” and then hang up before he could put a tracer on it. He certainly didn't cooperate when I was being bugged by his yappy dog but calling him at four in the morning after I moved out sure gave me satisfaction to the point that I felt all warm and fuzzy when I heard him screaming in his mouthpiece, “I will get you, you bastard!” He had to have known it was me but Toronto is a very large city and since my phone number was unlisted, there was no way he could do anything about it but suffer as I did.

A friend of mine who is a retired cop told me about a young eighteen-year-old neighbour that lived at the end of his street. Every morning at six-thirty, the young punk would drive his car down the street with the tires squealing and making a terrible racket. Some people spoke to him about the noise but the punk just laughed in their faces.

My friend found a novel way to stop this punk right in his tracks. He investigated and learned that the punk had no property damage insurance on the vehicle so my friend bought an old wreck for next to nothing and filled it full of bricks. Then he placed it at the top of his driveway and when he saw the punk’s car heading down the street, he released the brake and the car rolled down his driveway and right into the path of the punk’s oncoming car. The punk’s car was a total right-off.

You go to a lot of trouble to find a home that suits you. Surely you are entitled to live in it in peace? Yet the most beautiful community in the country can be rendered a veritable hell hole to you by the monsters living next door to you or even down the street from you. The stress and anguish caused by problem neighbors can thoroughly wreck your peace of mind; not to mention your health.

Check before you purchase a home to get a heads-up on the potentially noisy or abusive folks next door or who are close by your potential home. The last thing you want to discover after you have bought the property and moved in is that your next door neighbour is single and has parties every night up until one in the morning, or that his five dogs bark all night or he has just been released a month ago after serving fifteen years in prison for molesting small children.

The trouble facing most home owners who have just bought their homes are not likely to think ahead about what their neighbours will be like until after the problems have actually started. Unfortunately, bad neighbors can become a feature of your life at any time, in any area. For example; a week after you have moved in, a neighbour from Hell can move in right next door to you.

Problems with bad neighbors can escalate very quickly. For some people, this can become almost like a game of one-upmanship, which is ultimately a power struggle. Issues with neighbors often have to do with issues of control and power, with one seeking to dominate others. These kinds of people were bullies in school, they are bullies at work and they are also bullies in your neighbourhood. They behave and react badly, sometimes with little or no provocation. They are selfish and self-centered, wanting everything their own way and seeing things only from their own perspective.

Conflicts are all about power. Whenever you react or respond to someone's provocation, you give them some of your power. The more they get a rise out of you, the more power you give them, which only encourages them to continue provoking your reactions and thereby stealing power from you. This will increase their sense of power, dominance and victory, while diminishing your power and making you feel powerless.

There are other options, including some little-known ones. Often when people are at wit's end, they call police or a city bylaw officer. But such cases can be hard to prove. People often turn to the courts to sue a neighbour. But this can be time-consuming and costly if you go to the higher courts but in Ontario, as of April of 2009, people can sue in the small claims court for as much as $25,000. If a complainant can establish that over a long period of time, he or she has suffered from the conduct of a neighbour, going the small claims route in Canada is a viable option.

As an alternative to the police, lawyers or courts, mediation has a completely different take on neighbour conflict. Rather than assign blame or render judgment, it brings the two sides into direct contact and opens communication between them.

Often neighbours are referred to mediation by the police, city authorities or even city councilors. The process uses volunteers from the community trained in mediation. Mediation is useful, proponents say, because more often than not, the issues are not black and white; rarely is one person perfectly right or perfectly wrong.

When there's ill will, people antagonize each other. In one case, a neighbour involved in a property line dispute place his barbecue on the line so that the smoke would drift onto his neighbour's patio.

Sometimes it gets worse. There's a potential for real violence. Cultural and racial differences also come into play. Two neighbours at a housing co-op began fighting over how one woman treated the other's disabled child. One woman was black, the other was white. It descended into racial comments. They're decided to have the matter mediated. But people can be stubborn. More than half the time, one party refuses to go through mediation. They insist on a more confrontational approach, proving once again that neighbour disputes can be some of the nastiest of all.

There are legal ways to deal with terrible neighbours however, avoid any real confrontation. It will make matters worse. Most important, keep a record of the times and days that the neighbour acts in a manner that you consider is abusive. This is most important if you are filing a police or by-law complaint and especially important if you are taking the monster from Hell to court.