All is not blissful coexistence along the tree-lined lanes of cities and suburbs today.
Somewhere between the images of cups of sugar loaned over the fence and annual Fourth of July block party barbecues, malice has moved in and made itself right at home. On otherwise quiet residential blocks, property lines have become battle lines and mild-mannered homeowners have morphed into backyard warriors.
Love thy neighbor as thyself?
Maybe, but does that mean you have to love his dog? Or his choice of paint color, his hobby of restoring old junkers in his “natural yard” . . . or his obnoxious kids?
When it comes to getting along with the neighbors, turning the other cheek often gets pushed aside in favor of a new strain of knock-down neighborly relations.
Judge Arthur Fine, a Denver County Court judge, says he’s seen thousands of cases where neighbors feud like the Hatfields and McCoys.
“It’s more important than Bosnia to most people,” Fine said. “Every one of these little situations is really a hot problem for the people involved.”
That’s what happened with “Chris,” an easy-going guy who thought he’d found his suburban Eden when he moved into a “nice, comfortable” north metro Denver neighborhood seven years ago.
He adopted a stray dog and all was idyllic until two years later, when he came home to find a “barking dog” notice from the city’s animal control department tucked into his front door frame.
One notice led to another and another, culminating with a ticket and court summons for letting his dog run at large.
Chris began mediation with the neighbor who filed the complaints, but the compromise didn’t last long. In the months to come, they exchanged fighting words, bloody punches, lawsuits and finally, permanent restraining orders.
Looking back, Chris says it’s hard to believe it really happened.
“This was never anything I conceived could or would happen. This has made living in my neighborhood a lot less pleasant,” said Chris, who told his story only with the assurance that neither his name nor his neighborhood would be reported for fear of inciting further problems.
“Worst of all, I really feared for my personal safety for a month or two,” Chris said. “It passes with time as nothing else happens, but immediately after the last altercation, I didn’t know what this guy was capable of. These days you don’t really know where someone’s limits are.”
Bill Adler, author of “Outwitting the Neighbors,” writes that neighbor problems are part of the price we pay for living in close proximity to one another. But that doesn’t make some strange behavior any easier to swallow.
“How bad can it get? Is there a hell, and if so, are there some neighbors who have just stopped by your neighborhood on their way there?” Adler writes.
Neighbor disputes typically erupt at greater frequency in the summertime, when dogs and cats spend more time outdoors, along with their owners.
“You can see a potential escalation of conflicts when people see more of each other and are spending more time out of doors,” said Deborah Solove, mediator and senior partner with Professional Mediation Alternative Inc., a Denver dispute resolution firm.
“But unfortunately a lot of these are not seasonal issues-they happen year-round.”
Noise and animal complaints are the most likely to bring neighbors to loggerheads. Barking dogs, dogs and cats running at large, even biting pets top the creature culprit list.
Complaints about loud stereos, wheezing car engines being “warmed up” outside and even hot tubs fired up at odd hours have sent sparks flying between otherwise tolerant neighbors.
The rest of the list runs from the mundane to the bizarre: cars and where we park them, pets and how we contain them, kids and how we control (or don’t control) them. The weird ones defy description and neighbors’ patience. After all, one man’s pile of horse manure fertilizer is another man’s stinky nuisance.
Judge Fine recalled several cases where people were brought into court for being pathological collectors.
“There have been people who have stacks of newspapers 12 feet deep on their property,” Fine said. “Drastic collectors literally can pollute an entire neighborhood.”
The oddity of the complaints is equaled only by the ways neighbors find to “correct” them.
A condominium owner was so enraged by a downstairs neighbor’s habit of practicing his opera singing at midnight that she took a rotting cantaloupe and dropped it from her second-floor balcony-a la David Letterman dropping things off a 10-story tower-to explode into a smelly, gooey mess on the neighbor’s welcome mat.
Newspapers in near-treeless Highlands Ranch frequently tell the tales of neighbors who sue each other over landscaping that blocks coveted mountain views.
Then there was the man who posted a sign in his front yard to draw attention to his neighbor’s habit of collecting rusty pieces of “Americana” throughout his yard.
To an outsider these squabbles may sound funny, but when you’re in them, it’s not a laughing matter. In fact, some of the stories are downright scary.
Last year, a well-publicized war between Evergreen neighbors-the Quigleys and the Aronsons-escalated from bickering to charges of ethnic intimidation, eavesdropping on cordless phone conversations and even alleged threats of burning down a house.
Books have been filled with believe-it-or-not stories of neighborhood vendettas and childish acts committed in the name of peace and quiet. So much for the saccharine promises of the “Mr. Rogers’ ” theme song: “I’ve always wanted to have a neighbor just like you. I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you . . . .”
“There’s a high degree of personal investment,” Solove said. “It’s not something you can leave at 5 p.m., it’s where you live and it’s a major investment that you intend to keep for a long time. So the interests that come out are more highly personalized and potentially more emotional.”
Most neighbor disputes stem from violations of city ordinances and neighborhood covenants, rather than state or federal laws. That’s why many people, inappropriately, head straight to law enforcement or to animal control to solve a problem.
Those on both sides of the legal process agree that you can often get a more satisfactory solution if you start by talking directly to your neighbor. Politely, if you can. If that doesn’t work, try mediation before you rush to court.
“Mediation makes a whole lot more sense than going to court where all you do is make someone more angry than they were when they started,” Judge Fine said. “There’s every reason in the world to mediate and almost no reason not to.”
Jefferson, Boulder and Arapaho counties all have mediation services available to residents-often free of charge-and private mediation services abound to help combatants reach compromise.
“Maybe your solution will be as easy as getting a dog-bark collar for the neighbor’s dog, or even getting the dog de-barked,” said Mark Loye, administrator of the Jefferson County Mediation Services Program. “The strength of talking through it together is that people who own the solution will help enforce the solution. Nobody likes it if a judge imposes a solution on them.”
At a cost of $100 to $150 per hour for a private mediator or free for county-sponsored services, mediation can be significantly less expensive than hiring an attorney and going to court.
For other mediation help, seek out your local property association or even your local bar association. The American Bar Association has a dispute resolution board in nearly every major city, handling about 1.5 million problems annually, according to Larry Ray, director of the ABA’s section of dispute resolutions.
“In mediation, what you’re really looking for is a way to try to solve the problem rather than declare a winner,” Judge Fine said. “It’s really satisfying to come up with a solution that’s maybe not a win/win but a sorta win/sorta win.”
If all else fails, taking your neighbor to court may be the last resort. Court dockets in civil court-especially small claims court-are full of neighborhood spats. Some, like Chris’ case, even seep into criminal court.
“That’s the last thing you’d ever want to do is get into the legal system,” Chris said. “For me, it cost me time, money and a lot of stress. It’s not worth it.”
Even if you do go to court, it’s never too late to switch gears and head back into mediation. Judge Fine cited a case involving several tenants who shared a rehabbed Capitol Hill mansion, peacefully for a time. But when the downstairs tenants had one too many late-night parties, the woman upstairs retaliated.
“She threw her bicycle at them right down the stairs,” Judge Fine said. “The more I listened to them fighting it out in court, the more I realized that this was a case that could be resolved in mediation. So I stopped the trial right then, sent them off to mediation and it got solved.”
Of course, you can always try to ignore the problem, following the belief that problems eventually go away: teenagers grow up, old junker cars and yappy dogs eventually die. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be.
For Chris, his tolerance has run out at the property line. He recently moved to a new home, although he intends to rent his former home-along with a warning-to new tenants soon.
