Huh, that happened to my high school in Gainesville, FL in the early 80’s. It was ridiculous. This one old guy would come up and bitch and bitch about our band that had been practicing there for years. Geez, if you’re gonna buy a condo directly across the streest form a hich school, you’re gonna have to expect some noise.
The University that employs me deals with this all the time. It’s in a largely residential area, but it’s been here since 1891. I know for a fact that everyone who lives “next door” to campus has moved here since the University was built (I mean, most of the houses date only from the 1950s-1970s), but they still complain – loudly – about the noise the students make, the number of cars that drive and park on “their” streets, and all sorts of other things. Yet they love to use our facilities (the gym, the fields, etc) without paying for them. Drives me nuts.
Man, I had to check your location to make sure you weren’t working at my University! The school was built right in the middle of orange groves. No real town to speak of. Just the school, the train depot, and orange groves as far as the eye could see. Now 115 years later, everything has changed, and nobody seems to care that “we” were here first and “we’re” not interested in their bitching.
The Clark Rifle Club, near Vancouver, WA, built its firing range way the hell out in the woods where the shooting wouldn’t disturb or endanger anybody. In the late '70s (I think), yuppies started building houses in the woods. At the business end of the rifle range, right behind the target backstops! Mind you, this was in thick forest, and the houses were being built just far enough away from the range that they couldn’t be seen through the trees. Nobody told the rifle club what was going on. The first the club heard about it was when they got a cease and desist order, because the carpenters kept finding bullet holes in the houses. The club had to completely abandon their 300-yard range and build a new range pointing a completely different direction.
Now, up here in Wenatchee, WA, the “Apple Capitol of the World”, we’ve got people building houses next to orchards and then complaining about the chemical spraying.
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- Online, I mostly hear about this type of complaining concerning firearm ranges–but locally, there is a lady who bought a house in a luxury subdivision, surrounding a golf course.
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And yes–don’t you know it–
the first summer she was there, she started complaining about golf balls landing in her yard and hitting her house.
- Online, I mostly hear about this type of complaining concerning firearm ranges–but locally, there is a lady who bought a house in a luxury subdivision, surrounding a golf course.
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- Apparently the house is near the “end zone” of a long-shot type area, and people who slice put balls into her yard. She wanted to build a 20-foot-tall wooden fence at first, but the management said “no FUCKING way, lady” and in court (yes there was a civil suit) she claimed she did not know that the golf course was laid out that way but the judge told her to go stuff it sideways. So they let her put up poles, and string some netting aross them to block the errant shots.
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Jeez, is Washinton State the Shoting Range capitol of the world? My dad runs a range about five miles down the road from our house in the beautiful Skagit Valley, they have a skeet shoot the first Sunday of every month from April to November. (my formative years were spent as a trap boy in the cement box, loading the pigeon firing thingy.) They have been doing this for over thirty years, and every Sunday, someone in the community complains, and every week, my dad has to explain that they have been doing this for thirty years. Three decades. If you don’t like it, move. This in an area with more hunters than church goers.
At the Air Force Academy, there is a very high end housing development at the southern border of the base call Perregrin Heights, or something equally pretentious as that. Every Saturday during football season, some idiot complains about the flyover for home football games, and noon formations. About six years ago, the base commander put up a sign I have seen at just about every military base with a flightline. “Pardon our noise, it’s the sound of Freedom.” Cheesy and simplistic? Yes, but effective.
Couldn’t they just build a big wall of some sort behind the business end of the range?
All of the pistol and rifle ranges located on State Game lands just have 20-30’ earthen berms behind the target line to stop shots. If you’re firing over that berm, you shouldn’t have a firearm because you’re being a meathead.
For 50 years a pleasant elderly couple lived next door to our firehouse. Before the days of radios, Mrs. D answered the fire phone in her kitchen, wrote down the address on a tablet, mashed a big red button above the phone to blow the siren, and then waited in her housecoat and slippers for the first fireman to arrive so she could give them the address of incident. When she and her husband passed on, some yuppie couple bought the lovely old home and immediately began to bitch about the siren. According to them, the noise caused sleep interruption, loss of consortium, made the dog poop on the carpet, and armpit warts, among other maladies, and demanded that we turn it off. We told them to take a flying leap, but they appealed rulings for the company to county court, and even filed suit against the Chief, personally. Buttheads.
I’ve also heard of people causing much aggravation for Atco Dragway in New Jersey. Candy-asses and crybabies annoy me to no end.
Heh. I’m sorry, but the only thing I could think of when I read this was that movie Canadian Bacon.
Michigan: Our first line of defense against the Canadians!
Actually, it is worse than that. The students intending on being pilots fly, oddly enough. They also have to paraglide, glide, etc. Well, that Peregrin neighborhood had enough pull to get the congressman (Hefley) to change the AF Academy. The most critical newspaper guy soon left. Coincidence?
My grandfather had the same problem with his farm discussed above. The farm had been in the family since before the Revolutionary War, but the people who moved into the 1970’s trailer park complained incessantly.
Aaand I forgot to actually add the part that’s, y’know, on-topic.
My parent’s house (where I grew up) is nearly 100 years old. It’s next to a 4-lot property on the corner, which is a small 50+ year old factory. They make heavy machinery - molds for tools and whatnot. They occasionally make a lot of noise because, well, factory. Heavy machinery. A lot of the houses on the cross-street at that corner are new - sprung up in the town’s massive growth in the 70’s. To this day, there are people who sometimes call the cops and bitch that “The factory is making too much noise!” The factory that’s grandfathered out of all zoning regulations, since it’s been there for about a zillion years. :dubious:
So *that’s * where they went.
*eyes *Zebra ** suspiciously :dubious:
Cape Cod Mass. has experienced a huge amount of growth in the past 25 years. In particular there are many, many more year round residents there than there used to be.
It is however also still a massively popular tourist destination, mostly between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
I have witnessed with my own eyes people putting up signs and actually setting up lawn chairs to jeer at the tourists leaving Cape Cod after a long holiday weekend. These would have to be newer residents…the long time residents know the area’s economy is heavily dependent on tourist dollars.
“Well, sure. I knew I was buying a house in one of the biggest vacation destinations in the eastern US. But I didn’t think I’d have to deal with all these damn tourists!”
Another been there story from Washington state. I live right next door to Pacific Raceways in Kent. I have lived here for over 15 years and to me the sounds of the racetrack are just part of the scenery. Every 2 years or so someone moves into the neighborhood and starts complaining about the noise. I like to tell these yahoos to wait till they run jet powered dragsters and stuff falls off shelves. The only time it bothered me is when the NHRA came to town. To avoid paying to park, our neighborhood would become a parking lot. I even came home one day to find a couple of vehicles parked in my driveway. King County has restricted parking to locals the past few years and that has helped a bunch.
I’m just about to finish my first year of law school. The coolest thing I’ve learned so far is a bit of pseudo-Latin that comes up in relation to just such disputes, and particularly the principles that courts use in deciding whether a nuisance is unreasonable:
Le utility del chose excusera le noisomeness del stink.
All of this is well and good but the fact of the matter is that cities change and grow.
Yes sometimes something that has been there for 30 years needs to move to allow that new growth. There is a reason that airport was built 10 miles from town or the shooting range was built out there. That was the best place for them. Now most cities grow horizontally. Very few Americans want to live in huge apt buildings. They want single family homes with a yard and that takes room. The fact that the city grew is a good thing. You don’t want to live in a town where the population is constanly going down.
Striking the balance between growth and development and preserving what needs preserving is a two way street.
The new people aren’t always wrong.
In the case of a municipal airport, the complainers don’t care about its utility. They don’t bother to find out, or they willfully ignore, its utility. All they care about is the noise. They seem to feel that flying is a rich person’s sport. (Yes, it’s ecpensive – so much so that I am no longer current – but many, many people with limited budgets still scrape together enough to fly once in a while.) I don’t have the figures, but I read once that Santa Monica Airport contributes millions of dollars every year to the local economy. They don’t see that many businesses benefit from executives being able to fly into a municipal airport instead of a big Class B airport. They don’t care that municipal airports provide employment to their neighbours. I don’t want to get too pedantic, but the ripple effect can spread throughout the country. For example, if people don’t have a place to fly, then there will be less demand for aircraft, which may put people in Wichita, Kerrville or Moultrie out of work. And that’s just the ‘little airplanes’. Companies that use business aircraft (jets and and even pistons) lose flexibility. If these aircraft are made to use a Class B airport then it puts a burden on that airport, which would need to expand, and people will oppose that; not to mention the safety issue of mixing a large number of smaller aircraft with a large number of Boeings, and the safety issues involved.
Gun ranges? Not so important to the local economy as airports; but where will they go? If people want to close them down, are they willing to compensate the businesses for relocating and the accompanying loss of business? Probably not.
Smelly farms? Where will they go? I’d bet that most of the places in an area that are suitable for farming or ranching are already occupied. Sure, we have lots of land in the Mojave Desert; but is it a viable place to put a cattle ranch?
Factories? Again, who will pay for the move? The people complaining about the noise? With gasoline prices getting higher and higher faster and faster, who will pay the employees enough to make driving to the new, farther, location economically feasible? Again, higher wages will result in higher costs for the finished products, which means higher costs to the consumer. Of course, we can outsource to China or India where labour is less expensive; but what about the workers who lost their jobs?
The ‘two-way street’ seems to be the newcomers insisting that these places be closed and/or relocated at no cost to themselves, while the businesses (and homes, in the case of family farms) must fend for themselves. As I said in the OP, the shooting range should accommodate the newcomers by keeping projectiles from leaving the range. SMO requires pilots to ‘dogleg’ over the golf course so as not to fly over people’s homes. Many airports require that pilots reduce power on take-off (which introduces some risks/dangers).
I still say that people who move next to ‘nuisances’ – especially if they received the benefit of lower home prices – always have the option to move if it bothers them. Businesses often don’t have that option.
The Plateau Mont-Royal used to be a big hippie/bohemian neighbourhood, but then all the great old houses got bought by rich cool-chasers, especially around the carré Saint-Louis, which is, like, the biggest stoner hangout in town.
Anyway, by and by the people who moved in there started to complain because there were pot smokers there! Yes, pot is illegal (for now), but honestly, moving into the carré Saint-Louis and bitching about the potheads is like moving to the Sahara and complaining about all that nasty sand.
I’d call that pseudo-French, what with the articles and all. In pseudo-Latin, it would be
Utilitus quid chose excuserat noesomenessorum stenicho
Ah, but there is a big difference between this case and some of the others. Shooting ranges always have guns going boom. Airports always have airplanes flying into them. But it is entirely possible that someone has been living peacefully near a college for 40 year with no problem until now. College life and it’s impact on neghiborhoods has changed in the last 15-20 years.