Comment by InefficientRed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InefficientRed | Hacker News Reader

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> Well past time to go to the city inspector.

"Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously, and in any case our city was very landlord-friendly/human-hostile. In most cities waiting for the leas to be up and then moving out is always easier...

We resolved this by threatening the neighbor to go to the office that permitted his food truck.

If food truck regulations didn't exist, we would have been SOL until the lease was up.

> Or refuse to haul the trash entirely.

This was an impractical option.

On an 85 degree day, our apartment would stay below 75 (and below 70 until late afternoon close to the end of the workday) if we kept the large front windows open, the kitchen door open, and some well-placed fans. It would heat up to 85 very quickly if you closed off the airflow. Working in 85 degree heat is highly unpleasant.

To say nothing of the rats and fruit flies/ants, which were impossible to keep out of the apartment even when we kept the doors and windows closed.

That's a failure of code enforcement. I could have our local code guy on site in under 24 hours with complaints like yours. And if I could get lucky enough to actually snag a picture of a rodent, good god, all hell would break loose. Lots of things are just a ticket, but once their are rats, the real enforcement comes into play. That's what it took to get rid of a nuisance property down the street from us. They wouldn't do too much until we showed them a picture of a rat. In a matter of months they condemned the property and took it by force (the owner could not or would not fix the problem himself). Bulldozed it, sold the property to a new owner, and ta-da! It's now a nice, clean little house.

It's good to hear that your jurisdiction takes rodents seriously!

If a picture of a rat could get a building condemned in all jurisdictions, NYC would be leveled by the end of the week ;-)

Sure, there definitely has to be some context there. Where I live we don't have subways :). Smallish city, rats are rare, especially in the residential neighborhoods.

> Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously

Well, that's the root of the issue.

Sure, but in our case, it was helpful to be able to appeal to (apparently now controversial?) food truck regulations rather than reform a bureaucracy that the entire rich & connected rentier class would likely fight tooth and nail to keep unreformed.

There should be a mechanism to effectively resolve this type of conflicts. Regulations are usually too heavy handed or toothless.

There is a way to resolve things without the heavy hand of law enforcement/courts/the state, but it requires those options as a backdrop:

1. You have a conversation and politely ask as a neighbor. Maybe mention it a couple times to make sure the point gets across.

2. If that doesn't work, you research the regulation and have a second conversation explaining the issue in legal terms instead of neighborly terms.

3. If that doesn't work, you have a conversation and leave a note explaining that you don't want to cause trouble but that you will report to the city.

4. If that doesn't work, you -- at last -- get the city involved.

Without regulation, step 3 has no teeth. And you only get to step 3 if steps 1-2 fail, so the premise here is that simply asking isn't going to help anyways.

Most legal disputes can be handled amicably without getting the state or courts involved when it's clear who is in the right. But the law has to exist first, or else the abusive/negligent party will just continue to ignore the situation.

Exactly. City DGAF when some rando being sloppy with his trash. But when it's a business they're happy to enforce because enforcement leads to fines.

> "Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously, and in any case our city was very landlord-friendly/human-hostile.

Unfortunately if this is the case, I imagine it would still be the case even if food truck vendors were forced to submit a form testifying they had proper disposal arranged. As a thought-experiment, I imagine if this food truck was dumping his garbage in the mayor's garbage-bins, that they would find a way to make him stop with existing laws on the books.

There are usually laws on the books that could be used that simply are not enforced. Many jurisdictions have (by)laws about citizens being allowed the "private enjoyment" of their property, and you could easily claim that's infringed on here for the reasons you laid out. Public nuisance laws are also, by design, incredibly broad.

My point is that I believe it's a problem of enforcement and political will; not of letter of the law.

Where I am from (Canada), the correct remediation would be to take your landlord to the tenancy courts where you could represent yourself (i.e. not need a lawyer), but that's still undeniably a huge pain for a rough situation. I'm glad you're in a better spot now.

Yeah, it's a matter of power dynamics and enforcement rather than the letter of the law.

Renters are low class and have very little political power.

Fortunately for us, food truck operators in that city are also low class and also have very little political power.

Asserting our rights against a neighbor or landlord as renters was difficult. But asserting our rights as a residential citizen against a food truck operator was much easier (or, at least, the neighbor perceived that this would be the case and acquiesced).

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