Affordable Housing Institute : US

Buried in the typical apartment lease is the resident’s right to ‘quiet enjoyment’ of the premises.  While it doesn’t specifically mean noise (rather, it refers to undisturbed occupancy), as anyone who’s lived in an apartment complex knows, ‘quiet’ is often a precondition to ‘enjoyment.’ 

 

I’m not enjoying your taste in music

 

Noise travels, and it cannot be shut out (nor can odor), so when your neighbors are noisy, it certainly disrupts your enjoyment, but what are you to do about it, particularly when the noisemakers are … children? 

 

How we grew America: immigrant children at Ellis Island

 

That’s dicey, as reported in The New York Times:

 

APARTMENT dwellers in New York City have long endured the trauma of jackhammers, Manolo Blahniks, recycling trucks, sirens, canines and air-conditioning systems.

 

Only the colors are loud, daring

 

But, perhaps because the population of children in the city is increasing, the sound of little feet is a complaint being voiced with increasing frequency.  And, for reasons ranging from a sense of entitlement to the impossibility of teaching a 3-year-old to glide to the potty like a supermodel, the parents of those little feet are not happy to hear that their children are driving you crazy.

 

Many, in fact, have heard just about enough of it. They complain that they are being forced to choose between being good neighbors and good parents.

 

As I’ve posted many times, New York is unique in American cities, not least because it always has a shortage of rental and affordable housing.  With increasing density comes verticality, and with verticality comes multiple dimensions of contact surface, multiple ways our neighbors can intrude upon us, and we on them.

 

“It’s nerve-racking to be constantly shushing my kids and not letting them be normal kids in the morning,” said Janeen Thompson, who lives in a postwar rental building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her two young sons — ages 5 and 2½ — have elicited multiple noise complaints from their downstairs neighbor, a 25-year-old woman with no children.

 

From the New York Times: SLEEP SCHEDULES Greg and Janeen Thompson, with their two sons, got complaints from their downstairs neighbor, who doesn’t have children. Both sides say they have tried to be sympathetic to the other’s plight.

 

We all know that having children is a life-changing and irreversible step that often triggers a move to the suburbs, and that children are a mind-altering drug, because with sleep deprivation comes an unconditional love so powerful it transcends all others.  Yet the parents try to accommodate the neighbors whom they used to resemble:

 

In the morning when the boys are getting ready for the day, Ms. Thompson said, she insists they not roll their little cars down the hallway, or run before 8 a.m. “I tell them the neighbor is still sleeping, and they just look at me — ‘Why is she sleeping?’ ”

 

I’m not!

 

Ms. Thompson said she can’t even let her children cry when they need to. “For six months straight, my younger son woke up at 2 a.m. — we kept him quiet for two hours every night so the neighbor wouldn’t hear him,” she said. “Finally, we had to post signs in the building saying we were going to let him cry it out for a weekend, so our neighbor wouldn’t get mad at us.”

 

Children shouldn’t live in high-rises.  They need lots of space to run around, get dirty, and be loud. 

 

Boys in Mumbai: even if you live in a high-rise and the wicket is cement, you need to play cricket!

 

The downstairs neighbor, who agreed to give her first name, Jennifer, but not her last, out of fear of being branded anti-child –

 

Nancy and I chose not to have kids.  We got our fair share of looks.

 

– said the children were waking up every single night in the middle of the week, which prompted her to pound on the ceiling after midnight, triggering an even noisier altercation with the children’s father.  

 

Pounding the ceiling is seldom the right strategy.  If you haven’t got their phone number, you drag on the bathrobe and sleepily take the elevator up a floor, to ring the doorbell.

 

And be polite

 

“The bedrooms of the parents and children are really far apart, so I don’t know if they can hear the children,” she said.

 

With urbanization, sound intrusion becomes more common. 

 

According to the professionals drawn into disputes about child noise — managing agents, lawyers, mediators and acoustical engineers — square-offs like these are increasingly common.

 

From the New York Times: Alan Fierstein, a Manhattan acoustic consultant, says his business is booming

 

What are the solutions?

 

1.  Learn to live with it.  Some people just suck it up and gradually inure themselves to the children’s presence.  Unfortunately for them, children have ear-piercing screams and cries – evolution’s way of making sure their parents can find them – and they’re not shy about deploying those little screechy lungs. 

 

I can’t do much but boy can I make noise!

 

2.  Behavior modification.  I admire the parents who try to teach their kids to behave like adults.  As a former child myself, I think they’re doomed to failure.  Children have to be kids, and they have to be hyperactive.

 

Even in a monsoon, we have fun!

 

3.  Soundproofing.  What technology taketh away – space – technology can giveth back – sound dampening.

 

“Fifteen years ago or so, it used to be that the noise complaints were all about loud stereo and TV equipment,” said Stuart M. Saft, a real estate lawyer at Dewey & LeBoeuf in Manhattan, which represents about 100 full-service co-op and condominium buildings in Manhattan. “Now it’s kid noise more than anything else, and I think it demonstrates the changing demographic of the city. You have more kids living in the apartment buildings, and parents who feel their children have the right to be children.”

 

‘Rights’ are tricky things; As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes memorably put it, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, and your children’s right to be loud may end at my eardrums – or, even better, at the walls of your apartment.

 

I have a right to be heard!

 

At the same time, even as New York City has become a magnet for young families, the escalating price of real estate has contributed to the feeling that people ought to get what they want and expect for their money.

 

“People’s expectations of quiet for their very expensive apartments have risen, so something that might not have bothered somebody 20 years ago because real estate was so inexpensive then does become an issue now,” said John Hauenstein, the president of JRH Acoustical Consulting Inc., which assesses and mitigates child noise issues.

 

I find it so cute that Mr. Hauenstein thinks New York apartments were cheap twenty years ago.

 

4.  The simplest solution.  What about the simplest solution? 

 

That’s a bit much

 

No children allowed?

 

Gee, Saturn, that’s illegal too

 

Sorry, it’s illegal to exclude children.  As a good Fair Housing site puts it:

 

Under fair housing laws, rentals must generally be available for rental to families with children and pregnant women. Families with children must be treated the same in advertising, during the application and selection process, and during their tenancy.

 

“Adults only” communities are generally not allowed, except in housing which qualifies as Housing for Older Persons.  

 

The law in its majesty makes it illegal not only to exclude children explicitly, but also implicitly:

 

How dare you try to discriminate against me!!!

 

Housing providers cannot establish strict occupancy limits that have the effect of discriminating against families with children.

 

And indirectly:

 

Housing providers may not restrict families to certain buildings or to first floor units.

We are thus forced to live together.  This is stressful:

 

Parents, meanwhile, feel persecuted.

 

From the New York Times: ON EGGSHELLS Margaret Hundley Parker and her husband don’t let their daughter play with loud toys in their bedroom, because it is right above their neighbor’s bedroom.

 

The problems of an Upper West Side mother who did not want her name used, out of fear of reigniting old tensions, began four years ago. Two days after she and her family moved into their $1.8 million prewar unit, they received a hostile missive from the 30-something married couple living below.

 

“It was a typewritten note in a typewritten envelope with a formal return address. It said something like, ‘We never heard a sound from the older couple who lived in your apartment, and now that you moved in, our peace is being disrupted and we don’t appreciate it.’ It set such the wrong tone, almost like a lawyer had sent it, and we had been in the building less than a week.

 

Probably a lawyer-husband-tenant did send it.  Not neighborly though.

 

No lawyers here

 

It would have been better even if it had just been handwritten instead of typed. It was like the punishment didn’t fit the crime.”

 

Had I been advising the downstairs apartment, I would have counseled them, Just because you are infuriated does not mean I intended to infuriate you.  A gentler tone is always wiser.

 

Still, she said: “I wanted to take the high road. They left their phone number so I called and introduced myself and left ours.” It was a decision she quickly came to regret.

 

Despite the wall-to-wall carpeting in her children’s bedrooms and a firm policy against bouncing balls indoors and leaping off beds, she fielded a series of “incredibly nasty” telephone calls that “were confrontational, upset and accusatory, not like, ‘Hey, do you mind — it’s getting a little noisy.’ ”

 

“Over the course of the next year, we felt we were living on eggshells,” she said. “It became almost a mantra, saying to the kids, ‘The neighbors, the neighbors.’ ”

 

A frosty detente set in when the couple downstairs had their first child two years ago.

 

That’ll do it!

 

“By now, I kind of know that our bedroom is over their bedroom and if we drop stuff on the floor it’s really loud for them, so if the baby has a loud toy I just shut the door so she doesn’t come in,” said Margaret Hundley Parker, a 39-year-old freelance writer who rents a postwar apartment on Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn.

 

“We do indeed walk on eggshells, and I find myself on tiptoes if I have high heels on, even when I’m not home,” wrote Ms. Parker in an earlier e-mail message. “I’m a trained monkey. But my 19-month-old is not.”

 

“We’d love to move,” she continued, “but did I mention the rent-stabilized apartment?”

 

You didn’t have to.

 

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