I’m considering buying a house on a dead-end in what seems to be a nice neighborhood, that is priced 25-30% below nearby comparables. Some of the price difference is probably due to its lack of ‘upgrades’ (which is good as far as I’m concerned), but I’m worried that the proximity to the field will be a big stumbling block when I’m looking to sell in 5-10 years.
There is ~20’ between the back of the house and the rear fence, then an alley, a line of ~15’ tall trees, a concrete drainage canal, a ~20’ strip of grass, then the back corner of the bleachers. All told, approximately 120’ from house to seats.
The field appears to be used for both football and track and is on the property of an apparently fairly expensive private religious high school. I have no idea if any of that has an effect on noise levels.
So, if you were in the market for a not terribly expensive, but not cheap, house a few years from now, what would you think about the nearby athletic areas? Would it be a deal-breaker, would you discount by a certain amount, or would you not care at all? Thanks.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t even considered the band. I like Louie Louie as much as the next guy, but that could get old really quick. Time to do some more research.
I own a house next to a high school football field.
Well, actually across the street. The school butts up to my across-the-street neighbors’ houses. I don’t know why but not all of those people have fenced-in yards. One guy has a huge 8’ solid wood fence. The other few that have fences just have chain link.
I went to said high school and I was in the band. I work from home. The band doesn’t always practice outdoors during the day. They do practice every Thursday night from 6-9 outside. There is one band show at the school every October (which I attend).
I never ever ever get sick of the band.
There are only 6 or 7 home football games per year. Right now there is a soccer game going on. There are also baseball fields but they are too far away for me to hear.
I’ve never been bothered by the noise up there. This year they actually built a new complex and it’s about 300 yards closer to my house.
The only thing that SORT of sucks is that on football nights people park in our neighborhood (they are too good for the parking lots I guess?) Last night, they parked on BOTH sides of the street. I’ve never seen that happen. I called the cops.
Houses in our neighborhood were all built in the late 60s and are mostly ranches. They’re about $130k-180k. There doesn’t seem to be any difference in price for the houses against the athletic fields vs. the ones further away. The prices are more based on size and features.
FWIW I grew up in this neighborhood, in a different house farther away from the fields. You could still hear everything, tho. So that left me with no qualms about buying a house here. I actually could have bought one of the houses directly against the school but I chose not to. Not because of the school but because this house had a basement.
I spent a lot of time at track meets at a a big high school football field. During the day, the school played a tape of distressed seagulls, all day long, to keep the birds off the bleachers. I imagine if you lived nearby you would either get used to the squawking or it would drive you nuts.
There is a high school near our house. The noise bothered me a lot until I lived here a few years and got used to it. The field is used for junior high as well as high school games and practices, so there is quite a bit of racket going on over there during the season. It used to just be the band, the crowd, and the occasional air horn. Now the crowd has discovered vuvuzelas.
One thing I might suggest is that you drive over there during a night game. Sometimes the lights can be a much worse problem than the noise. The football field lights near us shine right in my mother-in-law’s windows.
I also own a house across from the street from our HS football field. Our yard is railed from the street and the field is sunken so we can watch the games from our front yard.
There are only a few games a year (one last night), the lights light up our yard pretty good. It is loud but again it’s rare. Our street gets a lot of cars parked on it during games but that’s not a big deal. Some saturdays there are 4 peewee games back-to-back (like today) but that barely warrants a notice. Practices are there but aren’t bothersome.
I do, however, have an uncle who loves the sounds of kids playing, grown up backyard parties and so forth. He says he loves to sit on his deck and hear “the sounds of people really living and having fun”. I bet he would be fine buying a house near a football field and I’m sure there must be others like him.
I’m not trying to bust on you here, because that would annoy me too, but aren’t most residential streets open to public parking? Could/did the cops do anything?
Some residential areas forbid parking on both sides of the street due to narrow streets. Parking on both sides might squeeze the street down to one lane. Other areas require resident parking permits - sometimes during certain hours only, sometimes at all hours.
I used to live across the street from a large college football stadium. Only the lights at night, the occasional cannon, and the huge pedestrian crowds bothered me. But the lights didn’t shine directly in my window. I was just more offended that it was like high noon at 8pm.
It might well be quieter to live next to even a grassy field than a number of neighbors if they’re like some of my neighbors. They use commercial lawn services that have guys using leaf blowers, and two neighbors seem to take a perverse pleasure in firing their own leaf blowers up for hours at a time. The noise and air pollution drive me nuts.
A field will at least get mowed – relatively quickly and efficiently, considering its size – and leaf blower use on the larger facility grounds will hopefully be minimal.
FWIW, I was in a top-ranked marching band in high school and we had a summer-vacation band camp every August. Monday-Friday, 8:00 or 8:15 in the morning, we’d be out there practicing, then retreat to the bandroom for indoor music practices later in the morning in time for the football team to take over (this was Miami, so it was damn hot and humid even at 9:00 in the morning). The outdoor practices were marching-only at first (but not silent; we had a PA system playing the music), but later in the month we’d be combining our marching with our playing. Throughout the month, there was heavy megaphone and whistle use, with lots of shouted instructions and the like, from the band director, the drum major, and the drum major’s assistants (but at least the latter didn’t have megaphones of their own).
You might want to inquire at the school if they have a band and what their practice schedule is like.
I grew up with my backyard facing the high school. There was the football field, a street, a row of houses facing the school/field, then my house was on the other side of the block.
If you’re planning on staying in the house and/or having high school aged kids in the house, living with your back to the school is great. We could be in whatever extracurriculars we wanted and just walk that short distance home when we were done. No worrying about coordinating ride schedules or anything.
Also, the band (which I was in) practiced during the day, so if you work a regular work schedule, you won’t even hear the band, except during football games. And if the house is really that much of a steal, I’d deal with it for a couple months a year. Shoot, half the time the games won’t even be there; they’ll be on the road. In high school, we only played 5 home games a year; one of them didn’t have the band because it was usually the very first week of school. So, really, four bad nights a year? Not bad.
We lived across the creek from a city park for several years. It had two or three lighted baseball fields. The lights were a blessing in two ways: One, all the bugs were attracted to the lights and so were not in our back yard. Two, you could mow your grass at 10 pm when it was not 100 degrees out.