Marie Everett recalls that it began at 5 a.m.
Every day.
“You didn’t need an alarm clock,” she says of the trucks that rumbled down the road behind her home in Petaluma, Calif. “We were six houses down from an intersection. As they would come barreling down the highway, they would start hitting their brakes at a point about even with our house,” which she estimates sat about 30 feet from the roadway. She said the noise continued unabated through most of every day.
Everett, a former Chicagoan, said that she “kind of got used to it,” but her husband never did. “It would always wake him up, and then he would wake me up complaining about it.”
The Everetts didn’t start out with this problem when they bought their single-family home in a fairly new subdivision in 1988. At the time, the thoroughfare behind their house was just another quiet country road, she recalls.
“But the area was growing, solid development,” she says, and simultaneously, “for whatever reason, the truckers discovered that this road was a shortcut from Petaluma over to Sonoma,” a distance of about 20 miles.
Noise-weary, they put the house on the market in 1995, and dutifully checked the appropriate boxes on the California sellers’ disclosure statement that the house had a “noise nuisance.”
And there the house sat, unsold, for almost two years. On New Year’s Eve, 1996, they got their first and only offer. They dickered over the terms a bit, and then took it.
If the world is divisible into two types of people–those who are willing to live on busy roads and those who aren’t–it’s safe to say that the Everetts, who now live on a hillside considerably removed from any street, have made their draw, once and forever.
But there are lots of people who say they don’t mind such locations at all, for reasons that vary from economic considerations to a yearning for a sense of excitement.
Traffic noise, apparently, is in the ear of the beholder. One person’s multi-lane sound machine can be another person’s dream address.
Take Lake Shore Drive, for instance: Each day, an average of 136,000 vehicles use the part of the roadway that runs between Belmont Avenue and Irving Park Road, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation. In addition, an average of 24,000 cars a day travel alongside it on the Inner Drive–all of them essentially in the front yard of Barbara Stein, who has lived for four years on the second floor of a prestigious co-op building.
“This is no noisier than where we lived before,” says Stein, adding that although her former residence, a townhouse in Hyde Park, was on a residential street, it had a lot of bus traffic.
“I didn’t really think (traffic noise) was a big issue when we moved here, although the part (of the unit that is nearest) the most traffic is where I usually have the windows closed in summer.
“I love it. I am an urban person,” she says. “It’s actually sort of fun to sit on my sun room (in the front of the apartment) and watch when it is snowing. I sit with a cup of tea and watch the traffic jams.”
Real estate agents point out that Lake Shore Drive is a different animal because it has a lower speed limit and it prohibits the truck traffic that, to put it kindly, enlivens other Chicago area roads and expressways.
What Lake Shore Drive has, of course, is access and that view, although in the case of Stein’s second-floor unit (“When there aren’t too many leaves on the trees, I can actually see the lake, sort of,” she says with a laugh), a convenient location and a private terrace in the back were the top draws.
Agents who have experience selling Gold Coast addresses also suggest that, depending on the acoustic effects of buildings that surround it, a given condo can seem noisier on a higher floor than a lower one.
Just ask Randi Jo Chester, who lived on the 11th floor of a Michigan Avenue high-rise for 18 years.
“It was a nightmare,” she said of her later years there. “You wouldn’t believe the car horns and the drunks in the alley behind my building.”
Chester’s solution was to move to a newly constructed townhouse on the Northwest Side, although its acoustic advantages might be puzzling to some: Her back door happens to be about 100 feet from the Kennedy Expressway.
Chester is happy to testify that all noise is relative, and that not all noises are alike.
“I don’t even hear (the Kennedy), to be honest,” she said several months after moving into the Terraces of Old Irving Park, a development near the intersection of Berteau and Kostner Avenues that is prominently visible from the expressway.
“It’s just like a touch of the suburbs dropped into the city. You have all of the benefits of the convenient location, but you’ve got peace and quiet, too.
“The only traffic I hear is in front of the house, occasionally, plus the construction that’s behind us, but that is going to be short-lived. I hear the Metra trains pass by, but I don’t mind it. It’s city living.”
Paul Bertsche, who was one of the developers of the project and who also lives in it, agrees that he is accustomed to the sound, for the same reasons as Chester:
“It’s not the same noise as being on a street where there is stop-and-go traffic and there are a lot of car alarms.”
He said his firm, C.A. Development, oriented the homes away from the expressway.
“We worked to make sure that there was adequate landscaping (behind them), and we worked on the designs of the houses so that the focus is frontward,” toward the other houses, Bertsche said..
Often, builders and developers of properties that are on high-traffic roads count on economic incentives to make the roadside properties more attractive.
Andy Kiener, director of sales and marketing for Realen Homes, explains that when a given subdivision sells its properties in phases, “you’ll phase a certain number that are interior, some that are on the perimeter, and some that might be on the road.
“You always have to acknowledge that, yes, there is a road. But what you can do is offer some price incentives (for the roadside properties). There are always buyers for whom price is the overriding issue.”
Bridget Hill, a real estate agent with Prudential Burnet Barrington, says she has cautioned clients that such discounts might disappoint them in the long term.
“People might think they’re getting a good buy when a home backs up to a highway, as opposed to what an appraiser might say later,” she says. In Hill’s experience, such appraisals may be as much as 10 percent lower than comparable properties farther into the same development.
Kiener responds that such differences would be proportional to the initial investment the buyer made, given that the property was discounted to begin with.
Marie Everett estimates that her house backing onto the noisy road in Petaluma, Calif., sold for about $12,000 less than comparable properties elsewhere in her subdivision that sold in the months before hers. She surmises that her house finally sold because it was the only one available at the time for her buyers, who had set their sights on her particular development.
Some might say that those buyers were viewing “location” in the greater scheme of things. For instance, Ferris Homes is marketing 14 sites for custom homes within the Stonegate development in Northbrook, where company president Andrew Ferris is counting on buyers who value having a Northbrook address, period, even one that is just off the Tri-State Tollway.
“The lack of new housing in Northbrook makes this an excellent site,” Ferris says of the custom homes his firm intends to build on lots that range from about one-quarter to about half an acre. Prices begin at $600,000 for house and lot. Since sales began last summer, there has been one sale, he says.
Ferris says that the overall Stonegate development will include much in the way of berms and landscaping to improve both the sound quality and the views.
In recent years, these have become common noise-reduction techniques among builders and developers, some of whom do it voluntarily to enhance sales, though sometimes such measures are mandated by local governments.
Technical studies have suggested that properly designed berms and so-called noise walls can reduce sounds by 15 to 20 decibels (abbreviated dB), which is a unit of sound measurement. Although there are many variables in measuring sound, a fair generalization might be that “normal, relaxed conversation” would measure 60 dB, highway traffic from about 50 feet away would be 70 dB and a vacuum cleaner would weigh in at 80 dB.
Because of the logarithmic nature of the measurement, an increase of 10 dB amounts to a doubling of loudness; conversely, when the distance is doubled from a point source, the sound level drops 6 dB, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA).
It has concluded that although noise can be reduced by buffers such as open space and by barriers such as walls or berms, landscaping falls into the “close, but no cigar” category.
“Shrubs and trees are worth little as tools for noise control,” the agency has stated. “Effective belts of trees must be at least 50 feet tall, must be in a continuous strip 75 to 100 feet deep, must have dense foliage down to the ground, and must be evergreen to provide protection year-round.”
(Or, as the Professional Builder trade journal put it more simply, “You might need a whole forest to make any impact.”)
The MPCA, which includes noise among the pollution conditions it studies, also holds that, despite various highway-dwellers’ testimonials, one can’t mentally “just block it out.”
“It is a common misconception that you can adjust to noise by ignoring it or getting used to it,” according to an agency report. “The ear never closes and is continually responding to sound, even during sleep.”
However, opinion is divided. A 1990 National Institutes of Health report concluded that there’s a “remarkably broad range of individual differences in sensitivity to any given noise exposure,” possibly physiological in nature.
Research may never be conclusive because no one has yet devised a Richter scale for “irritation.”
Debbie Cleven grew up in Skokie, in a house on Frontage Road that overlooks the Edens Expressway.
“Going there now to visit my dad, I don’t think I could live there again,” she says of the traffic noise. “I can’t stand it.”
Nonetheless, she thinks nothing of currently residing on a street called Tollview Terrace in far northwest suburban Gilberts, where she can stand in her living room and watch the traffic streaming along the Northwest Tollway. For her, “it’s just there,” she explains simply.
“I’m in a subdivision. I’m on cul-de-sac. For me, it’s very, very quiet.”
