how to win friends and alienate your enemies

Disclaimer: This is gonna be a long post. :p

On Friday, I was workin from home when our housemate shows us this horribly creepy note from an anonymous neighbor that was in our mailbox:

PLEASE CLEAN UP YOUR YARD! [this is in red marker across the top]

Letting your property repeatedly become an ugly eyesore spoils our neighborhood and is grossly inconsiderate of us, your neighbors.

Fortunately, the city of Oakland has stiff laws with high fines for dealing with this situation.

If your property is not adequately cleared of weeds, debris, etc. by this Monday, May 9, we will file a formal complaint with the city, triggering the Blight Control Department to police your cleanup.

We felt that this needed a response, as the most annoying thing about this was that for the last few weeks, Seppo, with my help, has been working his butt off trying to get things cleaned up. If you looked at our yard today, it would be clear that things were happening. We wrote a note, hoping to achieve two desired effects:

1. Assure our neighbors that things are getting done and
2. Paint the anonymous note-writer as the bad guy who is disrupting the harmony and peace our (inclusive of all the other neighbors) neighborhood.

Seppo went around yesterday and distributed 20 copies of our note (which follows), and spoke to those whose lights were on. They were uniformly surprised, supportive, and friendly, which was great. This morning, another guy came by from across the street to say hello and to sympathize. That was awesome, and really something we appreciate. Our neighbors ROCK!

Our note:

Hello dear neighbors!

We are your neighbors at [house information deleted]. First, let us apologize for the state of our front yard and for asking you to read this note. We are writing because we recently received a very confrontational anonymous letter threatening to call the authorities on us for the state of our front yard, which feels very scary and alienating for us.

As people who have met us know, we’ve been trying hard to bring the lawn into order lately. We knew that unfortunately this would look worse for a short time before it looked better, which we feel terrible about, but we hadn’t realized that someone would feel the need to harass and intimidate us. We place extreme value on our home and know that you do too. Our home is not just a huge investment (both financially and emotionally) for us but truly a home, as it is for everyone else here who calls this great neighborhood home. We value the neighborliness and history of our street which is a rare gem to find, and we certainly don’t mean to cause a problem, which is precisely why have been taking action to make improvements.

Please rest assured that this is not the permanent state of things and that we are actively working on the lawn. Due to severe allergies, we’ve even resorted to doing some yard work in the late evenings when the pollen count is generally lower, but we are making steady progress. We have been doing research on pretty plants that will grow well in this climate, because we’ve come to the realization that between the terrain and allergies, grass can’t really be our face to the neighborhood. It took us a few seasons, but we’ve learned that we can’t keep up with it and we don’t want it to be ugly as it has been in the past – that’s bad for everyone on our street. In order to make everything tidier, we’ve been looking around at our fellow [street name deleted] yards to pick up hints and determined that we should rip out the lawn and replace it with other plants, which we are in the process of doing. This will go on for a few more weeks, as there is a big space to clear. Many fellow neighbors on this street know that we love our neighborhood, and that we’ve worked hard to make improvements on our home over the years to modernize and contribute to the ongoing beautification of our neighborhood. Sadly, it is taking a longer amount of time than any of us had hoped. For this, we apologize.

Everyone we’ve met out here has been wonderful the last few years, so it is shocking to have the threat of having the City called and being heavily fined hanging over us. To us, issuing anonymous threats causes a bigger damage to our neighborhood than a lawn that is getting ripped out. We feel violated in our own home over this threat because

1. The writer assumes we don’t care about our home or our neighborhood
2. The writer assumes we will not comply
3. The writer acted alone to give us a very short deadline determined by himself or herself
4. The writer feels it’s acceptable to make threats against neighbors by hiding behind anonymity
5. The writer had never made any other attempt to speak to us about this problem before

If the intent wasn’t to harass and intimidate us, then we are relieved and in fact grateful for letting us know that there are people who are frustrated, but the wording was very clear and straightforward. This is pretty terrible and un-neighborly. 🙁 As it will be impossible to clear out all of the grass by Monday (the deadline in the letter), we understand we may still get reported and will cooperate in every way with the Blight Control Department.

To us, this has always been the kind of wonderful neighborhood were people always say hello, neighbors tell neighbors when our cars have the lights on, and generally go out of our ways to work well together. We’ve traded great stories with people who have been there for generations, as well as people like us who are relatively new to the area. We remember when there was a fire on the block and people came out in the middle of the night to make sure everyone was evacuated and safe. This is the neighborhood we care for.

Please don’t ever hesitate to stop us in the street, knock on our door, or drop us a note to have a little chat over neighborhood concerns! We love to meet more neighbors and we won’t ever hold it against you to address neighborhood issues – they are our shared issues and welcomed responsibilities. The only thing no neighbor can welcome is a threat. 🙁 We know it can feel awkward to stop a stranger for a chat, but we aren’t really strangers – we’re neighbors and will be for many years to come. 🙂 We love the friendly feel of this street and are eager make sure that we contribute to a cooperative neighborhood and not detract from it in any way. Again, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but hope that you understand that it will look much better soon.

Your friendly neighbors at [house information deleted],
Seppo and Ei-Nyung

My feeling is that this note, along with Seppo going in person to speak to people, really put everyone on our side. It was important for us to portray this person as not being in line with everyone else, to paint him/her as the “them” and all the other neighbors as a collective “us”. I think we won.

Us: 1
Anonymous jerky neighbor: 0