Coming Home To Bad Neighbours

I have lived in the Downtown South neighbourhood of Vancouver for going on fifteen years, in the same subsidized apartment.  It has its ups and downs, but being a particularly bad area of town, the downs outnumber the ups.  Despite recent efforts of gentrification there remains a persistent local street drug trade and street homelessness.  There is also a concentration of social housing and this includes the so-called hard to house.  I live next door to a building occupied by the hard to house.  I have been back from my month in Costa Rica for but three days and already I'm being serenaded by the blasting stereo bass of one of the tenants in the building next door.  To cope, I am wearing earplugs and I have turned the radio up.

This often feels like an ethical dilemma.  Like other progressive folk, I want the best for vulnerable and marginalised people.   I myself have been there, having been both very poor and homeless, and naturally I have empathy.  I also have to put up with neighbours who don`t have a clue how to coexist with others.  Their experience on the street, their issues of addictions and of mental illness, the possibility that they are afflicted with other issues, be they fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or brain injuries or the Asperger-autism spectrum can really compromise their ability to coexist with others.  Many are traumatized and not completely able to comprehend that others inhabit the universe with them.

They do not make good neighbours, but if they do not live in the community they will never integrate and will never really recover.  There has to be patience and tolerance.  I understand nimbyism.  Sometimes the fears are well grounded though usually they stem from irrational fear and prejudice.  No one wants their right to quiet and tranquility violated, especially on a chronic basis.  By the same token, the poverty and visible brokenness of members of our street populations make many of them easy targets for some of the worst human instincts.  Think of the wounded chicken being attacked and pecked to death by the flock.

It might also help to keep in perspective that some of the worst violators of neighbourhood peace and quiet are proper and upright burghers themselves, and even more, their teenage and twenty-something progeny, including poorly socialized young males who really should never have left their parents' basement.

With the increase of higher density we are going to be increasingly living cheek by jowl with one another.  There is going to be noise.  This might be a good time to open a discussion about severely limiting the volume capacity of stereos and radios and making mandatory as a right to tenancy that offending tenants must trade in their ghetto blasters for earphones.  No matter where they might happen to inhabit the social hierarchy.