Signs a Recession is Coming: Calling Out Noisy Neighbors

I didn’t want to call my neighbor’s parole officer, but I saw it as my last chance at peace. Not peace between the parolee and myself, but peace and quiet from my noisy neighbors.

The ex-convict was living in a rented house next to ours with a woman he knew, her kids, and a lot of visitors at all hours of the day and night for short visits, if you know what I mean. In other words, drug deals from noisy neighbors that the police decided weren’t big enough to warrant their attention.

But that wasn’t the main reason I spent months complaining to police before I eventually figured out that the man’s parole officer was the best person to help me solve the many problems he created among the noisy neighbors he lived with. I’ll get around to those problems later, which I should have seen as a tipoff of the recession that was to come.

Noisy Neighbors Just the Beginning

In a roundabout way, my call to the parole officer was not only an example of how to deal with a bad neighbor, but of how the rising housing market and low home rental rates quickly led to the housing market crash, and thus the recession, of 2008. My call to a parole agent, I see now, should have alarmed me to the housing crash that was coming. Hindsight is 20/20, I know, but seeing what was a great neighborhood become a spot where drug dealers could come and go is something you can’t miss.

Just as police use the “broken windows” method of crime fighting to prevent major felonies from happening by taking care of broken windows and other signs of small crimes quickly, having an ex-con as a neighbor who created problems on my normally quiet street should have been an omen.

I live in a middle-income neighborhood of Cape Cod-style homes in Northern California, in a house that my wife and I bought for its charm and uniqueness. It was a safe neighborhood when we bought the house, and it continues to be.

Around 2006, things slowly changed in the area. As banks offered home loans to anyone with a pulse, more investors started buying homes in my neighborhood. Homes were selling fast at prices more than triple what we bought for only a few years earlier.

Home Investors Everywhere

A real estate agent bought a house next to ours. It was one of about six that she owned that were spread out in a few cities, she told me one afternoon as she happily handed me her business card and recommended that I, too, could become a real estate investor like her with almost no money down. She offered to introduce me to her loan officer. I declined, but kept her business card.

She rented the house to a series of tenants. None stayed more than six months or so. One tenant was a woman with a few kids. That would be great, I thought, since our daughter was only 2 years old and we’d like to have a babysitter once in awhile.

This family wasn’t baby sitter material. They turned out to be the noisy neighbors from hell. Cars would slowly drive by late at night, stopping for a few minutes as people went from the car to the house and back, and then the car would leave. One guy walked over on weekends to visit them, and he mistakenly walked into our house before I quickly awoke from a nap and confronted him about his error. He knocked on our door a few weeks later, again unsure which house his friends lived in.

The noisy neighbors had parties we could hear at night as my daughter tried to sleep. The police would come and quiet them down, only to have it start up again later.

But what really annoyed me was when the ex-con boyfriend would get into his truck, which didn’t have a muffler, and rev it up the hill past our house and waking my daughter from her nap. I asked him to please either get a muffler or coast downhill, but he told me to get lost.

I called police to see if they could ticket him for driving without a muffler, but they said they had to catch him in the act.

Let Parole Officer Deal With Noisy Neighbors

After a few months of constantly complaining to police about the noisy neighbors and drug deals, the problems continued and I didn’t see an end coming. The best answer the police gave me was that they’d have to work undercover to catch the drug dealers, and that there wasn’t enough evidence for them to get a warrant to enter the house.

That’s when I learned that a parole officer doesn’t need a warrant, and can take care of such problems easily by sending their parolee back to prison for the smallest violation.

I went to the nearby police substation, gave them the license plate of the truck without the muffler, and was told by a kind officer all of the driver’s criminal offenses, along with his date of birth. Home robbery was the biggest one, and it turned out he was on parole. The officer gave me the parole agent’s telephone number.

The parole agent, it turned out, was happy to talk and learn that his man was hanging out with drug dealers, and possibly dealing drugs himself, using my noisy neighbors as a front.

He told me he’d call the guy and remind him of the last time he arrested him for a parole violation, resulting in a “boot on the head” as he was forced to the ground and a return to San Quentin State Prison.

I don’t remember how it went after that with the noisy neighbors, but the truck driver was soon sent back to San Quentin for parole violations, the parole agent told me, and he wouldn’t be on the street for years. The family moved out of the house, possibly because of a lack of income from the breadwinner’s drug deals.

The noisy neighbors were gone, and the real estate agent who owned it eventually couldn’t afford the mortgage anymore and the house was foreclosed on. What a shame.

Finding a parole agent, I discovered about a year before the 2008 recession but didn’t realize until later, was a sure sign that a financial storm is coming.