Funny you should mention that. They have a stack of crap in their back yard that appears to my uneducated eye to be bee apparatus. I don’t believe it to be currently inhabited however.
We live next to a house with chooks in the backyard - they aren’t noisy (we only hear them once in a blue moon) but the smell of the manure is revolting. The neighbour used to pile it up next to our joint fence (and about 3 feet from our pool) and the stench was eye-watering in the summer. We asked them to move it and we haven’t had a problem since.
One chook did jump over our fence once - I saw it wandering around the pool when I go up. It jumped my back fence when it saw me - I can only presume my neighbour eventually caught it…
My mother in law keeps chooks as well - their feed does attract rats and she has rat killer pellets spread around and a cat to keep them at bay. Mind you, her vegies are wonderful and the eggs are worth the hard work of keeping the chicken coop clean and the manure well composted.
I do think a rooster would be a deal breaker though.
Be certain your neighbors don’t intend to have Guinea Hens; their cackle sounds like a handful of rocks flung against hanging sheet metal.
We had 20-30 chickens year round when I was a kid and so did most of our neighbors. I don’t remember the smell as being too bad except when the hen house was cleaned and then it was horrible. But the hen house was at least twenty yards from our house; had it been closer, the smell would have been terrible.
I would probably vote against having chickens in an urban setting.
My parents have about a dozen chickens, and I don’t believe I’ve smelled them even once, even in the coop. The roosters can be pretty obnoxious, but the hens don’t make much noise or cause trouble.
I live downtown in a very heavily populated area, and my neighbor across the street keeps chickens and a rooster (not sure about how many). I didn’t notice until one day I sat up talking with a friend on my front porch, and around 5 AM heard the muffled sounds of a rooster crowing. Still wasn’t sure who had the rooster until I saw the neighbor outside, letting the chickens run around the yard for exercise or something.
So, I don’t have any complaints, I find it rather amusing. But, I live across the street and my building sits far back on the lot, so there’s about 100 feet between me and wherever he keeps these chickens (I assume he has some sort of coup in the backyard).
YMMV, obviously, depending on the number of birds and how close you are to this neighbor.
There are chickens all over my neighborhood, including roosters. Some are kept in coops, some wander at will. I don’t even hear them any more, unless a rooster sneaks up under my window. And with my dogs, they don’t do that often.
Chickens don’t bother me at all.
When I lived in NYC’s East Village, someone in the neighborhood had a rooster. I didn’t live close enough to know what else they had, or to even smell anything; but every morning the entire neighborhood was awakened way before dawn, sometimes as early as 4 am.
Trust me: 100 feet is not nearly far enough if your neighbor’s chickens decide to stage a coup in his back yard.
It’s usually a left-wing operation, instigated by some New Hampshire or Rhode Island Reds, sowing dissatisfaction, getting the regular breeds all chook up and brooding. They’ll keep pecking away until the others get sick of arguing and, with a cold in their beaks, ask “Wyandotte? Why can’t we pullet off?” Since the end of the cold war, Russian munitions can be had on the black market for poultry sums: and it’s all over when revolutionized chickens have them in their clutches. And then you’re flocked. Outwitted and outgunned by a bunch of chickens – a prospect which should gallus.
I don’t have much to say exact that it’s amazing how wide-ranging the opinions on whether an approximate(d) number of chicken are very noisy or very smelly. You’d think it would be easier to come near consensus on something like this, but that’s the Dope for you.
We raised chickens when we were growing up, but it was on a family farm out in the country, with the henhouse about 100 yards from our backdoor. I don’t remember us having roosters, though aunt down the road had one the crowed pretty near all times of day.
Never had a problem with chickens, not the fresh eggs and not even when my mom would wring a hen’s neck and fry it up fresh for dinner. Almost everyone here seems to agree about roosters though.
King of (Chicken Noodle) Soup: once again, you leave me cackling with delight.
[groan] 
We lived next to chickens in suburbia. Without the rooster I don’t think I would have even known.
In your case I think I’d be OK with it if 1) no rooster 2) any chicken apparatus not adjacent to my property and 3) all feed secured from rodents and 4) they start out with a minimum number for now and can’t expand without getting permission again. Like, start with one chicken. If there is no smell, no escapes, no lurking predators, and no rats, then get a second chicken. Maybe chickens are like cats, where you’re usually better off with two, in which case start with two.
Oh, and of course 5) the occasional gift of fresh eggs.
These particular neighbors of ours also kept ducks, which would come into our yard all the time, and at least one pig, which was somewhat noisy and resulted in a gift of some interesting-tasting ham.
I’m surprised no one has yet mentioned zoning. Raising chickens in a non-agricultural area is probably illegal unless you don’t have any zoning.
I think this covers it.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned fleas. The family living behind my sister raised chickens and the fleas were Sis’ only complaint.
It’s strange. My sister lives in an area with a lot of egg laying operations, and even the dry houses smell bad when you drive by on a road several hundreds of yards away. On the other hand, none of the backyard houses I have been near smell. I assume that this is because the backyards have yards for the chicken and the waste doesn’t build up.
Messy, smelly, noisy, draws pests, and a significant chance he really wants to raise roosters for fighting.
Say NO!
My assumption would be that the permit will not bar roosters and that any limit on numbers will be some (high) maximum figure that’s already in the regulation. I’d sure find out if that’s the case before signing off on it. If I’m right, then any assurances of “hens only” or “no more than [insert low number] birds” will be strictly the neighbor’s word, with no legal recourse if he changes his mind.
Our neighbors next door here (residential neighborhood) have chickens… no real smell, but the call to prayer wakes them up and they don’t calm down til the sun rises 1.5 hrs later. I am guessing there is no call to prayer in your neck of the woods but the noise would cause me to vote NO instantly.
I don’t understand how these answers can all be true. My own experience is that I have discovered that several of my neighbors keep chickens and I never knew they did. I live in the center of a smallish city – about 50K people – in the Netherlands where the houses are built in rows, right up on one another. So it isn’t as though they were far away.
I have heard roosters now and again but never pinpointed which yard they were in, as it didn’t happen often enough to make a difference.
Can it be the number of chickens? Is there some secret Dutch way of ensuring prosocial behavior of chickens? Maybe they extend the local near-obsessive insistence on regular meal times and naptimes for children to chickens? Do they put them all in circle time as young chickens and have them sing little songs? Or maybe they eat all the ones that make a racket?
I’ll have to ask the chicken-keeping neighbors. Will report back.
My family had chickens on our suburban property from the early 1960s until around 1970. Only reason they disappeared, from what I can recall, is because of the demolition of the old house and building of a new one on the property. We didn’t have any problems with the chooks, apart from one rogue rooster who was dispatched fairly early in the piece and ended up as a good meal. There was the tale of a turkey my mum told me about, but – you aren’t asking about turkeys. 
Depends on how dense the neighbourhood is developed, really. The suburb where I live was predominantly half-acre and quarter-acre properties as I grew up. Now, they’re almost all pocket-handkerchief-sized properties. Folks living cheek by jowl, as it were. Mine’s probably just about the last of the old acreages left on the block. In an urban environment, with lots of nuisances which can start neighbourhood wars – I wouldn’t recommend either cooped or free-range chooks. Even though I did have fun collecting the eggs, and roast chook straight from the back of the property tasted good.
You live in a city and worry about someone having chickens? Worry if they have a bagpipe tuning store beside you.
Shit.
Depends on how many chickens. We recently had 2 chickens. Until one of the neighbors narked us out to the Shanghai city health department, and we ate them. The bambina’s liked seeing the chickens and the eggs. We had the chickens inside at night and wouldn’t let them out until 800 am. They can be a little loud if allowed out in the morning themselves.