It’s tough trying to deal with neighbors. While living in an urban area, you meet all kinds of people with different personalities. Some are social and easy to get along with. Others have bad tempers and love to argue. Then there are the neighbors who like to stay out of sight and keep to themselves.

Your responsibility is to find out which type they are in order to avoid conflicts before they get started. If a disagreement does brew, you need to have the communication skills to get it resolved as quickly as possible to prevent things from escalating any further.

Deal with Neighbors by Not Having a Street War

In the past, we’ve witnessed a scene straight out of the television show Neighborhood Wars. One neighbor said something with the other responding with greater force. Words turned into property destruction, which then evolved into an all-out street battle with both participants bringing an army of friends and family to see who would win the battle. Arrests were made, individuals were hospitalized, and everyone had to eventually move in order to avoid future conflicts. It was a street war that no one won.

Let New Neighbors get Settled First

At the moment, we have no neighbors feuding in the neighborhood, and whenever someone new moves onto the street, we all give the new occupants time to get settled in before we try to introduce ourselves and get to know them better.

Initially, I’ll just say a quick hello when I see new neighbors move onto the street. How they respond tells me if they are friendly, hostile, or just want to be left alone. Those who smile and start a pleasant conversation are the ones who we will over time establish a productive relationship with.

Neighbors who give a grumpy response or none at all, we avoid. There is no pushing the issue of talking or getting to know them beyond that first impression. If they gradually come around and want to talk, then we will respond with the same. We realize that sometimes people get stressed over moving to a new house, or just going through some bad times and not in a good mood.

Deal with Neighbors by Being Good Neighbors

During the winter months we will help each other shovel. Papers blow onto our lawn or the garbage can gets pushed over by the wind, we will pick it up. We even give each other rides to the store like in the past while vehicles are getting maintenance. In order to deal with neighbors, we believe we must first be good neighbors ourselves.

We never play loud music or talk loudly outside our neighbors’ windows. During the summer months, we don’t mow the lawn early in the morning. This also means no cookouts in the backyard with friends and family over, yelling and making a ton of noise way into the morning hours.

Everything is kept quiet and peaceful so that those who want to sleep or need to work aren’t disturbed. In the winter months we don’t throw snow up against our neighbors’ houses, and if the snow gets deep, we will shovel their steps once in a while so the mailman can safely deliver mail.

Solving Conflicts in a Civilized Manner

Whenever an issue does arise, we will politely and calmly ask them to not do something such as dump snow on our property or ride over our lawn. Since we put the rocks on the edges of the lawn, we haven’t needed to address this issue, further keeping peace. Keeping noise from becoming an issue, we have installed high stockade fences, and other barriers.

This way if they do play loud music in their cars or apartments, we still don’t hear it at night. A chain-link fence keeps neighbors’ dogs out of our yard, eliminating dog poop and attacking our stray cat sanctuary. Another tactic to deal with neighbors is to prevent them from hitting your house if their driveways are close to your property, just like in most cities. As an extra precaution, we had bollards professionally installed alongside our house just in case.

For problems that we feel can’t be resolved with hostile neighbors, I have the phone numbers to the landlords that we’ve gotten to know very well. The only time we have called the police it when a neighbor came into our yard late one night trying to stab her boyfriend to death. Now we lock the gate up at night to prevent future issues where we find a knife in our garden, that fortunately wasn’t used for a homicide.

Have you had to deal with neighbors in the past? What kind of issues did you face, and how did you resolve them? Let us know in the comments below.