Lifestyle Diversity
When there's a fair degree of consensus in a community toward noise - similar attitudes about what make up the ordinary sounds of life and what constitutes a nuisance - this generally becomes the "community standard" that influences local laws and their enforcement. A community vocal about its distaste for firecracker use, for instance, might see strict enforcement of substantial laws against it. However, when people with diverse lifestyles and disparate preferences occupy a community or a section within it, it becomes hard to ascertain community standards about noise, and this makes legislating and enforcing neighbor noise laws difficult.
Communities with a prevailing homogeneous population are able to set community standards that widely reflect the dominant culture. So, when it comes to noise, attitudes among most of the citizenry are apparent and have an impact. To make the point, here are two oversimplified but realistic scenarios:
- In a wealthy suburb, we often find police quickly shut down a noisy party on a secluded cul-de-sac because such disturbance isn't tolerated by those dominating the landscape. This is especially so if more than one call is made to complain, if the noise can be heard from a good distance, and the hour is late.
- Police won't aggressively enforce a citywide ordinance against noise, even when loud music is coming out of every other car and house, if that noise is an accepted local custom in a given area (an insular, ethnic community would be an example). That's because they usually aren't called with complaints. People with cultural and/or lifestyle similarities favoring musical variety of a particular nature dominate the small community within the larger urban society, so it becomes a social norm - a community standard. (I've spoken with members of such communities and many don't enjoy the noise one bit, but choose to tolerate it rather than complain.)
Lifestyle-diverse communities, meanwhile, pose a more complicated problem for legislators and enforcers of neighborly behavior, particularly when it comes to noise. Disparate "cultures" (as they pertain to noise preferences) collide, often with none emerging as dominant in number. Softly-played classical music lovers live beside blasting rap fans; some people wake up early and turn on the leaf-blower outside, others stay up late and have friends over until the wee hours. While everyone's interests might get consideration by authorities, none can get complete satisfaction. In such communities, what is considered too much noise is to a large degree in the ear of the beholder - tastes and preferences are individualized and resistant to standardization. In the following scenarios, who should receive the fairest consideration?
- There are two apartments in one building. On the top floor is a fashionable young couple who stay up late, have friends over, and walk in hard-heeled shoes over uncarpeted expanses of wooden floors. Downstairs is a quiet couple with a crying baby and a barking dog, all of whom get up early.
- A semi-retired man runs his consulting business out of his home, spending most of his day staring at a computer screen. A party wall away in a neighboring townhouse, a bunch of twenty-somethings signal they've waken after noontime by blasting their tunes, chuckling and shouting, and bouncing a ball against the party wall.
- A suburban renter living between two homeowners lives a quiet existence and enjoys music, which he plays only loud enough that he can hear it. Meanwhile, the kid of a neighboring owner is 14 and has a bass guitar and voice amplification system she cranks up in the side yard only loud enough that everyone can hear it. On the other side, unending hammering and power sawing can be heard during an extraordinarily long deck-building project that fills dinner hours and sunny weekend afternoons.
Most people will favor those with whom they most identify. If you have a 14-year-old who wants to be in the music business, the last thing you'd suggest is that people like yourself be given yet another thing to worry about. If you have a dog, you know how hard it can be to keep him from barking. If you work at home, you need quiet time during daylight hours. If you're a yuppie, you have a unique appreciation for bare wood floors that lack carpeting. Yet, retirees, children, teens, dogs and hipsters all live among each other in a diverse community, even in cases where it's made up of one dominant race or other culture.
The name of the game in a setting with people living disparately is forced compromise, rather than forced assimilation. This tends to favor a noisy neighbor because issues are too complex for easy solutions and across-the-board benefits, so the quality-of-life for some citizens - usually the good-neighbor-underclass - gets sacrificed pending workable, politically expedient answers that will never come.
Lifestyle diversity in a community presents a great social challenge. A peace-seeking majority may well exist in a given area, but many within it avoid the deep conflict promised by confronting the situation. They keep their personal standards off police and legislative radar by keeping their own noise levels - that is, the voicing of their objections to neighbor noise and similar nuisances - silent. The consequence is the continued spread of nuisance noise from neighbors and other sources. By not addressing, reporting or complaining about it, the numbers of complaints are left thinner; this facilitates neighbor noise's entrée to becoming a community standard in localized areas, accepted by area police and other authorities as the norm. More complaints to police by more people would notify them of a wider dissatisfaction with neighbor noise, and cops and legislators would likely respond positively with better laws and stricter enforcement.
Eventually.
