Reply #8: My opinion is that those people made bad choices of where to live.

[woodsprite]

Those battles shouldn't be going on. The newbies should either live with it or move.

When hubby and I got married, we were moving out of our parents homes into a place of our own. We couldn't afford much, but figured we could certainly find something in our price range. One thing we did was "watch" the neighborhood at different times of the day/night, week, etc., before we made a decision. We picked a heavily Italian neighborhood. Woke up one morning to someone walking on our roof to hang banners for the Italian festival - said "Hi" from our bedroom window. The only thing we hadn't seen was the crime issue there. We lived there 18 yrs and it cycled several times because it was mainly kids doing it -- petty stuff, vandalism, harrassment, etc. The cops haulled they're butts home and that was that. That was the only thing we DID try to change (youth club down the street, home watch when people were gone).

Unfortunately, we moved because it went from that lightweight stuff to teen drug users/dealers sitting on our stoop waiting for the local highschool bus to drop off the kids at the corner. Cops even told us to watch who we let our daughter play with because these were the little girls brothers that had "claimed" our stoop. Wouldn't even move to let us get the mail. It wasn't worth putting up with since we had a 7yo and a 1yo.

All those other things - the pig farm, celebrations, church bells and sirens, that's part of a community and they should have put 2+2 together before they made a commitment to the area.