rock and roll all night
The ongoing saga with the resident who lives above Lief and has been…. exhausting.
Here are the Coles Notes of the situation, for those of you playing along at home:
- When we moved in, we assumed people were doing night time renovations in the suite above us. The sounds were bizarre. Are they having roller-chair races across the apartment? Are they laying new floor? Do they have multiple pets?
- We waited it out for a while, feeling that because our neighbors had afforded us the time and leniency to carry through with 6 weeks of our own renovations, that we ought to cut them some slack.
- When the noise became unbearable and had gone on for far too long, Lief was the first to act… going upstairs to request that they hold off on the renovations between midnight and eight in the morning, only to realize that there weren’t ‘people’ up there, but rather, one lonely old drunk man. He is the only ‘resident’ of the suite. Anyone else we heard stomping around at 3am was merely his guests.
- As time went on, we came to find out that our single upstairs neighbor was a long time alcoholic who, in the last year, had met a woman who is a drug user and she and her friends had been causing a great deal of disturbance in our building, including, but not limited to: breaking the front door/ buzzer system in order to ‘fix’ it so that they could get into the building without being buzzed in, sorting through people’s recycling in order to gleam personal/ financial information, bringing in johns and prostituting in the hallway, putting out cigarettes and joints on the walls and carpet, and making outrageous levels of noise all night (we are talking from midnight until 8am with breaks no longer than 5 minutes) several nights a week.
- You would think that there would have been multiple complaints to our Strata and to our business manager. At least, that’s what I had figured. When I lodged my first complaint last month, I was quickly contacted by the President of our Strata, thanking me for being willing to stand up on this issue.
- What?
- Turns out that people in the building have been scared of the repercussions of making complaints against the resident of our upstairs neighbor.
- Once the complaint had been filed and the owner had been fined for his tenant’s (our neighbor) breech of the Strata Bylaws, the owner served the tenant with an eviction notice.
- As of July 30th, our upstairs neighbor will have moved out.
- In the meantime, the noise level has increased and become much more intolerable. The last thing we heard was that the police had been at our building to remove friends of the tenant who were sleeping in the garbage room (and any other room they could jimmy into downstairs) and there are about 10 people sleeping on his floor on any given night.
The *obvious* exhaustion that I am feeling is caused by the noises emitted all night from the suite above us. I will quote myself from one of the letters of complaint I have submitted:
There has been loud noise emitted from suite 303 between the hours of 10:30pm and 7:00am - including, but not limited to, stomping, crashing, yelling, screaming, tapping, banging, slamming, music and TV played at high volumes, repetitive opening and closing of sliding doors, windows and cupboards, etc.
*Equally* exhausting has been trying to figure out how to deal with the situation. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was being prejudiced against people living with addictions – feeling like a hypocrite for my not-in-my-backyard attitude. Because, the truth is, I have wanted the tenant’s guests to be thrown out of our building for 6 months now.
I feel fucking terrible for the guy who is actually renting. It is clear that he is old, sad and lonely. Over a decade’s worth of going to the Legion has resulted in what seem to be major health concerns. He has very low mobility, strength and endurance.
However, he has chosen to create an unsafe, upsetting, unhealthy living situation for the other 60 or more residents of our building. The people that he is allowing into the building are not assisting him financially or emotionally - - and I don’t think that they are even keeping him from feeling so lonely. When there are parties upstairs (6 nights out of 7) we *never* hear him. He is passed out in his room… just like he would have been before he allowed people into our building.
And while I wish that things were different and that the resident could stay in his apartment, he has been served his eviction notice and will be leaving in a number of weeks.
I didn’t want him to be evicted, but because he was entirely unwilling to even acknowledge that he has ever had anyone stay in his apartment with him – he was evicted on the basis of the disturbances that his guests have caused.
It all still leaves me feeling uneasy.
