Parking in front of peoples’ houses is one thing, but I thought there was a law about blocking mailboxes?
Other than that, have you tried the good old parking chair?
Second the idea of looking into rules governing garage conversions. Enough people to have six cars in the household seems a little excessive (barring the possibility that they’re all in one family, of course).
You mentioned having consulted with the property owner. Is the owner one of the occupants or an absentee landlord? And is this property within city limits, or is it unincorporated (who has jurisdiction)?
Do you have a HOA? Ours would look quite askance at a driveway being used the way this putz’s driveway is. Sometimes they can be good for something.
I found a reddit thread on this. Some towns have laws against blocking mailboxes. You can check if yours does. If not you can park in front of his mailbox.
Doesn’t sound like much you can do. My sister has a similar situation: a neighbor has three grown kids living at home, two of them with kids of their own, and one of the grandkids is a teen that is apparently a low-level drug dealer. They have six cars as well, and had seven. The seventh was non-running for over a year and finally a neighbor called it in as abandoned (parked more than 3 days in the same spot), so they finally got rid of that one (or it was impounded). Basically the homeowner has given up - trying to get the kids to move out, trying to get them to park courteously, and listening to complaints from neighbors. One neighbor parks his truck in front of his house, saving his driveway for his wife and guests. Most everyone else has just one vehicle and the kids parking in front of their house is a mild annoyance.
The only people actively bothered are in my sister’s house. They have three cars and room for each, but the gripe is they don’t like using both spots in front of her house; they want to park in front of someone else’s house too and the other family takes all those spots. :rolleyes:
Nice – you gave him a free car wash. Did he thank you?
No, there isn’t. At least not around here. I live in a triple decker, not enough room in front of any house to contain all the cars that might live there. You park where you need to park, everyone else does the same.
A sprinkler isn’t a car wash. Someone who cares about the cleanliness and appearance of the exterior of their vehicle will want to avoid sprinklers. They leave unsightly spots all over the car. If the person doesn’t care… then they’re not going to care. Unless, of course, if they happened to leave a window slightly open.
I recently had my first parking space issue with my neighbor. I’ve read about these kinds of problems before, where people shovel the snow and claim their “spot”, but I never lived in a place where it applied to me. Until now. The frontage space on the street in front of my house can accommodate about four vehicles comfortably. My neighbor across the street has no frontage. Her fence goes right up to the road, and that’s the lane that gets plowed. The other lane (on my side) stays full of snow. She doesn’t park any vehicles on the street, but when people visit her, they park on the street. I think her children and nurse come by often during the day to visit.
We experience quite a bit of snowfall recently, so I had a nice spot all dug out for my car. It’s obvious to everyone that this spot in front of my house is “mine” for my car. One day, I came home, and there was another car parked there. Someone who was visiting my neighbor. I was pissed. After a few minutes of complaining internally, I grabbed my snow shovel and dug out another spot for my neighbor’s visitors. It was a big pain in the ass, since it had a few feet of snow piled up on the road there. I just focused my anger and frustration on the snow, and once it was all finished, I was over it and not pissed off anymore. Now my neighbor has a nice shoveled spot in front of her house for her guests to park.
Though, if I come home and both these spots are taken, I might just lose my shit.
No, not a good move ever. It CAN be towed, however. They CANNOT block a driveway.
Agreed: don’t touch the car, but if it keeps you from getting in or out of your driveway, call the police. In my town, I’m pretty sure the police will tow a car that’s blocking your driveway. (They might be nice, and try to get in touch with the owner and give them a couple minutes to move it. Or not).
General rule round here (not accepted by everyone) is that you have 48 hours of exclusive use to a shoveled out spot. After that it’s fair game for everyone. But around here all spots will get shoveled out of necessity. That might not be the case around you.
Would you believe there are different conventions in different types of neighborhoods?
My cousin lives in DC in a rowhouse, possibly similar to your situation, and yeah, street parking is street parking and there’s absolutely no guarantee you’ll get any specific “spot.” No courtesy is expected.
I live in a suburb and everyone parks in front of their own house. If I parked in front of a neighbor’s house I guarantee you it would raise eyebrows.
It may blow your mind to learn the existence of parking chairs.
I’ve lived in the burbs where everyone had driveways, and people still parked on the street when needed. They typically parked in front of their own houses when needed, but not always an no one seemed to care.
I know all about parking chairs. Around here garbage cans seem more common. I’m ok with them for 48 hours. After that I generally toss then in a snowbank, usually several houses away.
The trouble with these threads is everyone thinks what they have in their own neighborhood applies everywhere.
Here’s a typical So Cal street. Obviously no one has “their own” spot there. In fact, you’re lucky if you can find any spot.
Now hereis a random street in my neighborhood in Mesa, AZ. You park right in front of someone’s house in this neighborhood, and you’re either a jerk or an idiot. Because there’s no reason you can’t park in front of your own house. Even parking across the street but still in front of your house is rude.
Of course I shouldn’t have to say this, but this being the SD, visitors aren’t expected to follow this “code”. They can park wherever. But why wouldn’t a visitor park right in front of the house they are visiting? You wanna walk in AZ? What’s wrong with you?
There have been several previous threads on this exact topic. Don’t expect any better resolution this time around. Someone has already chimed in with the “it is not your spot, it is a public street” position. Expect other folk to question why you even care. Other folk will agree with the OP’s preference that folk park closest to their own property.
I tend towards the latter camp. As I understand it, this is not a situation such as shoveling out spaces in Chicago, or grabbing whatever spot is available on a crowded street.
Maybe the neighbor doesn’t realize they are doing something that annoys you. Maybe they don’t care. Or maybe they intentionally want you to look at their car rather than they. Whatever their motivation, there is little you can do beyond politely asking. Check applicable ordinances. If they are illegally parking overnight, or blocking mailboxes, you might want to keep on the police - or the post office - to enforce the laws. But don’t expect a spirited response.
This thread also touches on various other popular threads, such as parking over the sidewalk. People perceive parking very differently, and when you live in any city/suburban situation, you can run into someone whose views differ from yours. Good luck in figuring out how to deal with it.
I second this - if it comes to that. There’s a lot of illegal conversion going on and having lived in California, I know that cities will waste no time cracking down on it.
Even so, that doesn’t really solve the problem. There may be city ordinances about parking, but if not, there’s really not much he can do except have a friendly talk with the neighbor and see if he might be willing to come to an understanding. I would take this approach first, before going to the municipal code enforcement.
Yea, that’s part of the problem. There are no shoveled spots on this side of the road for at least a few hundred meters in either direction. I’m the only one parking permanently on the road. Any time there are other cars parked on the road in this area it’s visitors. My neighbors would rather just let their visitors take my spot rather than shovel out a space themselves. Instead of raising a fuss, I decided to just solve the problem by shoveling out a new exclusive spot for their visitors. My neighbors are pretty old, and it probably isn’t even reasonable to expect them to ask their visitors to shovel their own parking spot when mine is right there appearing to be open and available. I’m doing my best to accommodate them. These are the same neighbors who complained that my car is too loud and too pollutey (Charger Hellcat). They told me that it disturbs them from their sleep in the morning when I start it, and brought to my attention that it is illegal in Germany to let a car warm up before driving it. So… I now park my car on the far end of my property’s frontage, as far as possible from their window. And I no longer let my car idle for more than 30 seconds before driving off. This was a big change from Alaska, where remote start is commonplace.
Here’s an old thread on the same topic, which seems to have petered out because there was no real answer to the problem.
The problem with your suggestion is that if the OP “has a talk” with the guy and the guy says, “fuck off”, then the guy will know that the OP was the one who turned him in to code enforcement.