Crazy Neighbor Strut
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
So...My wife and I have been thinking of finally taking the plunge on a house and there's been one property in particular that we've focused on - good neighborhood, good schools, and the property itself is in solid condition. Best of all, we can get it somewhere around 30% below market. The problem is...the next door neighbor is apparently bat shit crazy. We got the skinny from the folks who live around there. How crazy?He poisons neighborhood dogs. (Though no one's been able to definitively prove this). He calls cops on his neighbors 1-2/week, for things like...playing basketball in the day time in your backyard. If you're having a party, he'll come out and start photographing and videotaping people. He'll videotape your children if they're out playing by themselves. Two questions:1) This screams "deal breaker," right? 2) If it doesn't, how the fusk would you deal with someone like this? Live and let live? Mask and gloves?I've been very lucky - I've never had problems with a neighbor anywhere I've lived so a potentially confrontational situation is new to me.
Comments
T
Middle-aged. Has a live-in girlfriend. No kids. He's some white collar worker.
You want to feel relaxed in your home, not have that feeling of minor irritation or paranoia (but justified) that some creep is keeping check on what you're doing.
There's plenty of deals elsewhere w/ less drama.
Also can you imagine the point where you might need to sell your home if things get rough, it might be difficult to shift. Also let's not forget it 30% less for a reason, that's a pretty big knock off the price.
There's no point buying into something which could lead you to a loss in the future. It's best to move on to somewhere else, god know what you could do to piss the person off, playing music too loud??
You don't want to be saying ' hindsites 20/20 ' down the rode.
I've seen the crazy neighbor thing go down many different ways with many different friends and it ends up being a huge regret.
Oliver, we're starting to look too, but there is a huge lack of inventory right now. Our agent has told us that in the next month you will see a huge influx of homes hitting the market. Shit just keeps dropping like crazy. Every home we've looked at has been going down in price week by week. We looked at this house in Rockridge that has dropped 30K in the last week with no offers.
It's a buyers market for sure right now, no need to rush into something, especially if you've got an issue like this. You may say to yourself you'll ignore him, but in the end it will end up being more than you want to deal with.
You don't want your child anywhere near this creep.
You never know what your neighbor situation will be like a week, month, year, 5 years down the road. You can find a decent place with great neighbors and they all move out within a year and a bunch of jackasses worse than this guy take their place.
b/w
Nice set on Wednesday.
I also hear what Rick is saying too (and thanks for the props on the set). I might do a little more footwork just to confirm the stories (this reflects how badly we'd like to get this post; it's literally about 100 yards from a very good elementary school plus a quarter mile from one of the best Chinese restaurants in San Gabriel.
But yeah, we're not desperate to move either (much as I find parts of the Westside oppressively homogenous).
(?) Overall housing inventory is still extremely high. I think nationally its still running at a 10 month supply (should be 6).
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/01/13/nationwide-housing-supply-still-outpacing-demand/
He's talking about Rockridge, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the East Bay, also where I live. In my zip the average house sells for $850,000 and prices have steadily been increasing[/b] despite the recession so far. It has largely been insulated from the bad times until like last month. Moving forward, shit is about to get real for many of them rich folk. I rent, thanks u very much.
Interesting. Seems like that would only benefit the people who already owned property in the neighborhood. Better to buy in a place when values have gotten shit on but will likely rebound (no Detroit).
He's got a point. We have a crazy neighbor, overgrown yard, constantly barking dog, abandoned cars
parked in front of our house for months at a time and so on.
We've had plenty of words over the years but we basically ignore one another now.
When the weather gets nice I'll have to start dealing again as she's promised to fix her failing fence for
the last 2 years.
But all that said she's never called the cops on us or filmed us, that is some next level stuff.
Good luck on your house hunt O!
Prices will be coming down, it's already started happening. I'm happy renting now, but I'm ready to pounce if the right house in the right neighborhood for the right price (not the price you mention above) comes on the market.
"YOUR BOOGALOO IS TOO LOUD!!! I"M CALLING THE COPS!"
Trust me, if you are able to find out about somebody BEFORE moving in, it's a million times worse for the people who live there.
At my last address I had a group of hillbillies living across the street who will NEVER leave that house. NEVER. Considering what you just described, they weren't even that bad, but you couldn't tell me that at the time.
The best you can hope for are neutral neighbors, nice folks who mind their own goddam business except to keep an eye out for trouble and suspicious shit.
Holy shit... someone would poison one of my dogs, I'd shamlesly exploit my immunity and kill his ass dead without such thing as a second thought.
He'd only talk to us when he was smashed drunk, and then talk about how he doesn't mind paying for the kid he had with his wife, but not her two kids from a previous marriage. Classy. We got into arguments about stupid things, like garbage and how he always felt entitled to the "better" parking space. They had really bad domestic disputes regularly. Finally the cops were called, not by us, actually, but I was about to a few times.
People across the way must be completely deaf and have their television on 120 decibels about 18 hours a day. Better than the previous neighbors...
In that building, one night a girlfriend came out, grabbed a stone from the garden (such as it is), and smashed out every one of the windows in their car. I did call the cops that time.
Why you assuming he's White?
(No, seriously, he's Indonesian actually).
For real. I'm surprised there hasn't been some harsher repercussions regarding this but from my sense of the neighborhood, there's not a lot of "real world moves" going on there. This d-bag tends to use the local police dept to "investigate" (read: waste their time) noise complaints while the neighbors are readying some kind of legal complaint against him.
It's just hard to know to what extent people will take shit. This guy sounds like a class A asshole but he's never had a violent, direct confrontation with any human but who knows his capacity to escalate shit? It's like I>Lakeview Terrace[/i] except where Sam Jackson's Black cop is replaced by an Indonesian chemical engineer.
I guess he's just crazy enough to have people scared. Probably for a reason. I mean it doesn't sound like a good idea to test someone if he's crazy with the capacity of taking it to a violent level or crazy but easily scared and will back down if met with violence or a real threat thereof...
I'd definitely stay away. There is already enough risk of having to deal with assholes in day to day life, no need to move next door to a sociopath.
Chances are, he'll get his one day. Hopefully before he advances from poisoning dogs to the next logical step.
we just moved because our neigbour was crazy. We discovered that being comfortable in your own home and being able to truly relax and "do your thing" is worth it's weight in gold - i'd rather have a crappy house w/ a leaking roof than go back to a "crazy neighbour" situation.
Emotional well-being > a financial deal. Don't do it.
She used to throw rocks over the fence and at our basement neighbor's car sometimes (he didn't get a garage spot). But we coexisted with her pretty peacefully despite the insanity. I hear that our other neighbor is friends with her now (not the one she tried to poison to death - that neighbor moved away).
We didn't know that she was batty before we bought -- if we had known, we probably still would have bought. Her problems don't seem to get to the level of this creep, though. She never called the cops on anyone (suspected drug activity in her house-related). And she never poisoned anyone's dog.