Hi all,
About 4-5 years ago our next door neighbor renovated their home to be a party house and turned it into an airbnb. Since then, there have been weekly house parties which are generally loud, disruptive, and leave behind quite a mess.
Some examples of what we deal with:
1) Our neighborhood is strictly limited to one dumpster per three houses, and will not provide more dumpsters. Generally, the airbnb house parties will fill up at least one entire dumpster with party waste - often times they fill two or more dumpsters. This is a big problem because it leaves no room for the actual residents of the neighborhood to throw away trash - many of us have had to make trips to the dump just to throw things away over the past 4 years.
2) They're generally loud and drunk, playing music until well past 2AM - lots of them like to antagonize our dog or the other neighbor's dogs when they're outside which leads to lots of barking. The way our city's noise ordinance laws work, there is no pentalty for this _unless_ the same people at the same residence receive another citation within 30 days - since this is all short-term house-party rentals this means that local law enforcement will not take any action against the owner or the tenants - the most they would do is come by and ask them to be quiet. To be clear, there's at least one party each week, sometimes 2 or 3, expecting the neighborhood to call in noise ordinance complaints that can't be enforced or fined 1-3 times per week is not a good answer.
3) It's not at all uncommon for partiers to knock on our front door and ask for things. We've had 8PM knocks asking to borrow a lighter, 2AM knocks asking to borrow a hand mixer (by a bachelorette party), and everything in between - asking for beer, cigarettes, etc. or asking if we've seen [whoever]. This happens probably once every other month.
4) Our front yard gets absolutely littered with trash every time - we complained to airbnb about this multiple times before the owner's brother finally started cleaning our yard up after each party. Over four years, the neighbors on the street have submitted a collected 30+ complaints to airbnb and this is the only action that ever came of it.
We [several of the neighbors] have tried talking to the owner about it - once we all started expressing our displeasure with his property he stopped showing up in the neighborhood himself and now sends his friends and relatives to do any work around the house. The law has their hands tied by a technicality here. I'm at wit's end and don't know what I can do about this - does anyone have any ideas?
The only thing I can think of is making the stay as obnoxious as possible for the tenants - pointing floodlights directly in their windows, laying on an air horn whenever they're in the back yard, playing a looped recorded message in our back yard about how displeased the entire neighborhood is, etc - which should lead to lots of bad ratings for the host who would then hopefully stop getting tenants. But at the end of the day it's not the tenants I'm upset with, it's the owner, so going after the tenants seems rude.
Is there anything we can do here to get this obnoxious party house shut down?
