The floor of good neighborliness
What a pile of excessive Halloween decorations can teach us about being a good neighbor
This is the deep end, and it's the one day of my newsletter regimen that is purely philosophical and not design related. Enjoy!
The first year we lived in our house was the same year my daughter was born. Around the end of September, the neighbor across the street put up her Halloween decorations.
I’ll say it again, because it matters: the end of September.
In total, it's somewhere around fifty pieces, and, of those fifty, about twenty of them made noise. A giant werewolf that howls. A headless horseman that rattles off some gibberish about dragging you down to hell, right next to a hunchback sewer rat bound in chains that hisses and squeaks. The demon raccoon that pops out of a trash can when strolling walkers go by.
A Chucky doll being... Chucky. A screaming banshee dressed in red. A talking tree. And finally, last but pretty close to my least favorite, baby dolls dressed as zombies, crawling out of the lawn.
It's a vomitus pile of haphazard, uncoordinated annoyance confined to 150 square feet of front lawn that is visible from my kitchen and greets me every time I walk out my garage.
Who doesn't love the opportunity to explain to their toddler why dead babies are crawling out of the ground, am I right?
Kidding... (I don't have a good explanation for why that's even a thing)
The night it came through the front door
I can handle the ugly visual (even if it means the market value of our houses drops during the month of Oct 😂). What I can't handle is ugly that incessantly makes noise from 5pm to 10pm.
One night my wife and I were trying to watch TV, and we could hear the whole ensemble of whatever-the-opposite-of-harmony-is through our closed front door. The werewolf, the chains, that freaking doll with a kitchen knife in his hand, all of it, made its way into the one room of the house where you’re supposed to be sheltered from the outside.
Once it crossed the threshold into my house, it stopped being a matter of taste and became an issue of encroachment.
So I walked across the street and made what I perceive to be a small ask:
"Can the sound go off by 8 PM, when everyone’s inside anyway? And on Halloween night itself, run it till sunrise. One night is no big deal at all. It would be great to not hear this while we're in our living room for 30+ days."
Call me crazy, it didn't seem unreasonable
And yet, nothing changed. If anything, it got louder.
For the record, she’s a pleasant person. She waves and she brought us cookies over the holidays once. I don’t have any ill will toward her... but it’s hard to enjoy cookies from someone whose annoying decorations uninvitedly slither into my eardrums when I'm trying to watch Frasier for the 2nd time.
Neighborliness has a floor and a ceiling
The ceiling is what everybody talks about: the casserole brought over when you moved in, the borrowed lawnmower, or the package you returned after it was mistakenly dropped off at your house. That stuff is wonderful, and it makes for good stories.
The floor is the part we skip and here it is in once sentence:
Don’t force your house onto mine.
Your life is yours right up to the property line, and then mine starts. You don’t have to like me, you don’t have to know my name, you just have to leave my house alone.
Nobody notices the floor when it holds. Nobody thanks the neighbor whose music stopped at 10 or whose fence stayed exactly where it belongs.
But the higher levels of neighborliness fall when the floor isn't held up.
Generosity from someone who ignores your boundaries doesn’t feel like generosity. It feels like another unnecessary insertion of you into my day.
Same violation, different clothes
Once you start looking, it’s everywhere and it attacks all the senses.
Sound. The Halloween yard or constant, loud music. Sound doesn’t care about property lines, and you can’t close your ears the way you close a blind.
Presence. The pit bull down the street that keeps getting out. It’s been in my driveway a couple of times, and a week ago it was loose again while I was out walking with my two-year-old. This isn’t about the breed, it’s about responsibility. I don’t want to corral your dog on my evening walk. The first escape is an accident, the fifth is a neglectful decision not to fix it, and the tenth is proof that you really don't give a damn.
Smell. The neighbor who smokes weed in the backyard, flagrantly, letting everyone within a 30 yard radius know.
Space. When I was a freshly driver licensed teenager, the roommates in the rental across the street kept parking in front of our house (my spot), even with plenty of room around the corner. The curb in front of your house isn’t legally yours, but everybody knows whose it feels like.
Sight. The guy across the street who sunbathed in his front yard at my parents' house in Clairemont. You have a backyard, please wear your speedo there.
Every one of them treated themselves as worthy of intrusive overflow, and left the neighbors to absorb it.
Why I care more now
As a kid I lived in a house, but I wasn’t responsible for it and didn't have the awareness to consider social expectations between neighbors (late bloomer).
Owning a home changed that. Now I’m the guardian of a small piece of ground, and when something comes over the line it isn’t just annoying, it’s a failure to respect something I’m responsible for.
There’s a bigger reason too. Most of us barely know our neighbors anymore. We’re busy, we move around, we’re not tied to a street the way people used to be, and I get it. But it means there’s little relationship to absorb friction. It's almost like every violation lands on a stranger to the same effect as road rage, I don't know you and, as a result, my sympathy is limited.
People assume the fix for a disconnected street is more connection: more block parties, more potlucks. All good things, but I think that’s backwards. When you barely know each other, the floor is the one thing you can still do as an unspoken social contract. It takes no friendship, no cookies, it doesn't even really even require more time, it only requires the respect of restraint. And without it, deeper connection is likely never to happen anyway because you turn your neighbor into someone who doesn't want to deal with you at all.
What I’d ask of any neighbor (including me)
- Assume your life travels farther than you think. You can’t hear your own noise or smell your own smoke the way the house next door does.
- If it has to cross the line, make it something people can ignore. You can look away from an ugly yard. You can’t turn your ears off when the Headless Horseman statue preaches.
- Contain what’s yours. Your dog, your noise, your cars, your overflow.
- Respect the line as your neighbor feels it, not just as the law draws it. The curb belongs to the city. The courtesy belongs to you.
- When a neighbor asks, listen. By the time someone walks across the street to say something, it’s been building for a while.
- Time-box the big stuff. Go loud on the one night that matters, and quiet the other thirty.
Floor first
I don’t think the woman across the street is a bad person. I think she believes she’s giving the street a gift, and in her head she’s living on the ceiling.
But a gift that comes through my front door while I’m trying to watch TV with my wife isn’t a gift. It’s an ugly imposition that sounds as bad as it looks.
Be generous if you can. Bring the cookies. Grab the packages. But don't expect there to be any further relationship if you can't even respect the floor of good neighborliness.
You don’t have to love your neighbors to be a good one. Just keep your house in your house.
Yours, Zach "I'm too young to be writing about this shit" Stevens
