Urban Living is a Team Sport
It is a summer Sunday morning, shortly before 9:00 a.m. I am sitting out on my screened back porch, enjoying a cup of coffee, feeling the mild breeze through the trees and listening to my classical music, the gurgling of my tiny fountain and the chirping of the resident birds. My experience is truly remarkable, as I live in south Minneapolis. My house stands a little over 13 feet away from the homes of my neighbors to the north and south. But on this Sunday morning, as far as I can imagine, it is as quiet as if I were on my own 20 acres of land in the country.
My neighbor to the north spends her weekends out of town at her significant other’s place. My neighbors to the south rarely use their back yard, except to take their two Jack Russell terriers out. This morning’s airline flight patterns won’t pick up for another hour. There is a din from the highway, which is situated approximately a half mile away, but I have gotten used to it. The city bus will run by once an hour.
My neighborhood consists of mostly starter homes: two-bedroom bungalows, with some larger four-squares mixed in. I moved into my house twenty years ago this fall. Many of my neighbors down the block in each direction have lived here longer than I have. Over the years, a number of excellent restaurants and shops have moved in and established themselves. When I walk my dogs through my neighborhood, I take delight in the beautifully maintained front yards and gardens. I am less than a mile from one of the city’s most popular lakes, along with its attendant gardens. Urban living has worked out very well for me.
I am so much more cognizant of this fact as I encounter people who don’t have it nearly as perfect as I do. And they live in the very same city.
My new job has me filing nuisance property lawsuits on behalf of those people whose existence in their own homes is made miserable by the actions of one thoughtless neighbor. In my short time doing this assignment, one common characteristic of the thoughtless neighbor is revealed: chemical dependency. The troublesome homeowners have succumbed to the ravages of drug addiction and placed it as a priority in their lives above and beyond anything else. Interestingly, it is never a quiet addiction, or I would not be involved. People at the nuisance properties end up fighting with one another, most times out in the back yard. They light things on fire that give off a noxious odor. They engage in drug trafficking, which results in lots of strange vehicles coming and going from their houses at all hours of the day and night. Police raid these homes pursuant to a search warrant, sometimes on a high risk basis. It can be very ugly.
I recall the testimony of neighbors in my first trial, describing how in the summer they could not open their windows due to the noxious odors coming from the nuisance property on the block. The homeowner, an alcoholic, and his drug dealing friends would burn their plastic drug paraphernalia in the back yard so that law enforcement couldn’t identify the items in a garbage pull. Neighbors in another case described an auto repair operation, where the ear shattering repairs were being undertaken in the middle of the night, so as to avoid detection by City officials. Because, as it turns out, operating an auto repair shop out of your home is illegal in the City of Minneapolis.
About a month ago, in the process of preparing a case for trial, I met with neighbor witnesses and went to their block myself in order to be able to fully understand the conditions in which they were living. These neighbors were all hard working, friendly people, who just wanted to come home to a peaceful refuge. The prevailing theme for me after meeting with these neighbors was the pride they took in home ownership. I almost titled this post “Home is Where the Heart Is” because it rings true for me and for the majority of home owners everywhere. Home is a haven – it is where we take shelter, both from the elements, but also from the stresses of everyday life.
The woman who lived across the street from the nuisance property showed off her front yard garden and the tiny planter gardens she was working on. She spoke enthusiastically of how she would strategically watch for end of season sales on plants and scour thrift stores for garden artifacts. And then she told me about walking her dogs early in the morning and encountering one of the residents from the nuisance property yelling, screaming and stumbling around in his front yard, obviously inebriated.
The next door neighbor took me into his backyard – a beautiful sanctuary surrounded by a privacy fence. He explained that he built it the previous year when the activities of the nuisance property neighbors became unbearable and he began to fear for the safety of his young daughter. He even solicited one of the residents of the property to help and showed me how poorly, in his mind, that side of the fence turned out. He described the sounds of scrapping that he would hear late at night or very early in the morning, as well as the loud, obscenity-laden, drug-fueled domestic disputes between several of the residents.
On yet another case, I received a letter from an attorney representing another homeowner to whom our office had sent a “Notice of Nuisance” letter, stating that his client had no idea she had violated “community standards” much less that there were “community standards” in the first place. It turns out, as residents of Minneapolis, we are obliged to adhere, not only to the laws as they relate to criminal conduct, but also to a set of standards for being a good neighbor. While I may not have paid any attention to these ordinances in the past, I now have become intimately familiar with many of them, as they impact “livability.” When you are living less than fifteen feet from your next door neighbor, livability is crucial.
I also see, in many cases, varying degrees of tolerance. I know for me personally, the standard has become extremely high, based on living on a near perfect block in a wonderful, vibrant neighborhood where we all seem to share the same values. I now find myself often wondering what would happen if I were to get new and different neighbors who were simply home more and used their back yards to the fullest extent allowed by law. I have to expect that children will be loud, people will set off firecrackers now and again and dogs will bark. It is the price I pay for living in the city.
As neighbors, we all need to practice tolerance and civility. We don’t all possess the same set of life skills, but we ought to be able to coexist peacefully. I would not think it would be that difficult, but in my short time practicing this area of law, I have seen people on both sides of the equation struggle mightily to achieve that balance.
So as a practitioner of gratitude, I like to periodically take a moment to appreciate the little slice of paradise that I was fortunate enough to land in almost 20 years ago. And here's another thing: it bolsters my resolve to do my job to the best of my ability, so that others can enjoy that same peace of mind for which they have worked so hard.