agonyaunt | (no subject)

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My house sits on a cul-de-sac. Most of my neighbors are retirees or young families. As a result, the street is treated as a playground, with the kids constantly out and leaving their crap in the road. My house is the one with the steepest drive and I can’t tell you the number of times I had to tell the kids to stop playing in my driveway and watch out because my truck doesn’t have a backup camera. I chalked it up as an ordinary annoyance, until my neighbor across the way started to close off the entire street with cones and “kids at play” signs. Meaning it is an entire ordeal if I have to run errands or want to get take out. It takes forever to get the kids and all their stuff out of the road, and my neighbors treat it as a giant favor to get them to clear the road. I am usually a live-and-let-live guy, but there is literally a park two miles away. I have already spoken several times with my neighbors about the issue but it still happens. We do have an HOA, and I am really tempted to throw the entire issue out at the next meeting. Can I get some advice?

—Street Side

Dear Street Side,

Ha! Haha! I’m sorry, Street Side. I don’t mean to cackle. But look. The entire country scolds and chastises parents for not “letting” kids play outside anymore, mourns the fact that neighborhood-kid friendships and long, sunny days spent riding bikes seem to be a thing of the past, and holds up phenomena like after-school overscheduling and Halloween trunk-or-treats as evidence that American childhood has gotten far too adult- and car-dependent. And here you are living on Throwback Street, where the children frolic wholesomely amongst themselves, and you’re pissed off about it! This kind of thing drives parents mad. We just can’t win!

A park two miles away? That’s not the same thing, at all. Almost any child, besides, I guess, an older one you’d be confident to allow to bike two miles, would need to be ferried there in a car.
That means you need to make a plan to get there, and make a plan with the parents of their friends to make sure they are in the same place at the same time, probably have at least one set of adults stay there to supervise, and so forth. That is not the same thing as having a neighborhood where kids can go out and see who’s around, while the adults cook dinner and periodically look out the window to see how things are going, or hang out in their front yards to sort-of supervise, sort-of be around to chit-chat with neighbors. That is the fabric of community, right there. You’re not going to weave it at a park that’s two miles away.

All that said: People shouldn’t put cones out and close off a street, I don’t think. But if what you’re mad about is just kids that are not scuttling fast enough to clear their scooters away when you approach in your truck, maybe time what you mean by “not fast enough”? How many seconds of you sitting in your truck is too many, when what’s being gained is living in a place where people actually know one another and their kids play together outside—the loss of which, I think, is partially responsible for the sense of disconnection and the mental health issues a lot of us currently have? If the cone and toy blockade is truly making it difficult to leave your home in a timely fashion, that’s worth bringing up at the HOA meeting (it’s likely illegal)—the parents should be reasonable about providing a safe egress for everyone. But try to balance your annoyance with all the good that seems to be gamboling about in your front yard.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/obstacle-course-care-and-feeding.html

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Two miles is a forty minute walk. That's not a reasonable response to the fact that the kids are outside.

In my neighborhood, the kids are in the street. They're always in the street, including after dark, and it's been like that since we moved here in the 1990s. Sometimes they go through phases, like the time about 15 years ago they built a skateboard ramp and just kept it at the corner for all those times they wanted to use it in the middle of the street. Or the time they had a basketball hoop there for the same purpose - into the street when they played, right next to the street if a car came by.

Are the kids sometimes annoying? I mean, yeah? But if you don't like having neighbors, don't live in a neighborhood.

As for the driveway thing, it's safer to back into a parking spot than to back out of that same parking spot later. LW should put up a gate at the base of the driveway and start backing into his driveway. Then he won't be so worried about hitting kids when he leaves. I'd also recommend he reconsiders his truck. He probably doesn't need a truck. Nearly everybody who lives in a suburb does not need a truck. If he's one of those retirees he'd be better served with a nice sedan, and then he won't even need a backup camera. The increase in completely purposeless trucks and SUVs is absolutely correlated with the rise of pedestrian deaths in the past decade.

All vehicles should have backup cameras, truck or no.

This guy can retrofit a backup camera on his truck easily. There are kits and there are places that will do it for him. He just doesn't wanna.

Mr. Dude is an asshole, hands down, but for what it's worth, retrofitting a backup camera, especially if you don't already have the kinds of screens in your car that you need with a backup camera, is kind of ludicrously expensive. I looked into it after I rented a car with a backup camera and Apple Car Play built in.

My gripe with the neighborhood parents is "maybe you shouldn't let your child under ten drive a golf cart unsupervised to their friend's house four blocks away" but that's because we've got main streets (40mph traffic) on two sides of the subdivision and canals on the other two. I don't care about having to drive slow because of kids on bikes or basketball games. It's part of living in a neighborhood.

If you don't want to live near other people, start looking for houses in more remote areas.

I want kids to be able to play and ride bikes, and I absolutely lived on a cul-de-sac where kids were playing in the parking area all the time, but parents putting up cones and blocking residents from backing out is a bit much.

I agree that a park 2 miles away isn’t the solution, but they need to work out a way for people to get out of their driveways, possibly blocking off part of the cul-de-sac in front of THEIR houses and specifying that this is the play area, or having an adult stationed next to the cones who can move them immediately.

Seriously, I love having the neighbor kids playing in our street, but one of the rules you learn when you play street hockey is to shout, "CAR!" and that everybody clears the street they hear it. You can't close the street off for street hockey, it is A STREET. What if Kathy at the end of the block has one of her spells and needs to go to the hospital again, you grab the goal out of the street and you scramble because part of living in a community is that Kathy cheers when you make a really good goal but part of living in a community is that when you play IN the thoroughfare, you get OUT OF the thoroughfare so she can get through. Even if it's just one of her non-emergency doctor appointments.

Exactly! I lived on a cul-de-sac growing up and all the neighborhood kids would gather there - if we heard a car coming up the street, we immediately ran onto the grass and took bikes/balls/etc with us

Yeah, it sounds like the problem here isn't the kids, it's the parents encouraging the kids to act like the street is their private play space. It's not!

We had a neighborhood as kids where the kids played in the streets, biked around, and went back and forth to each other's yards, but we knew the road belonged to cars first and we had to be careful on it, and we knew you didn't go on yards or driveways unless you knew for a fact it was OK with the people who lived there. The parents who are blocking off OP's street and encouraging them to play in the cranky kid-hating neighbor's driveway need to figure this out.

I live on a cul-de-sac, and while sometimes older kids will play ball in the street, they're also moving out of the way when a car comes through. My kids don't play in the street except for bicycling (we have a big yard and a long enough driveway for a tricycle sprint race), but we didn't let them bike in the street even supervised until they'd demonstrated they were paying attention to cars.

I've seen another cul-de-sac in my neighborhood that does have traffic cones across part of it. As far as I can tell from regularly passing by, the traffic cones are only blocking off an area in front of one or two houses that the playing kids live in; all the other houses are still easily accessible.

There is a park two miles from my house. When my kids were small, the only way they were going there was if Spouse or I took them. Great if we had time for one of us to sit for 45 minutes; not great if we were busy with house or work.

Everyone in this neighborhood needs to be more considerate -- the LW of the kids who should be able to play outside together and whose parents can't always spare the time to drive them to a park; the other neighbors of LW's desire to leave their house on errands and, you know, NOT ACCIDENTALLY INJURE OR KILL THEIR CHILDREN.

Sadly relevant to this whole situation:

Edited 2024-02-03 09:08 (UTC)

I think LW should bring it up at the next HOA meeting, and frame closing off the entire cul de sac for playing as a safety issue. Vehicles do need to enter and leave, sometimes very quickly. A dedicated space on the street to play is imho a better and safer option.

LW should also consider whether they might be happier living elsewhere, like a 55+ community.

Where I live, backing out of a driveway onto a road is illegal. LW needs to learn how to back into their driveway. It's safer for everyone, including them.

And if kids really are playing in LW's driveway--as opposed to playing on the street in front of it--that does need to stop, because a driveway is private property.

I don't think a retiree community would help - LW is listing retirees as part of the problem (presumably because of grandkids coming over? IDK). Retiree communities don't let kids live there, usually to avoid school zoning restrictions, but they're still often around.

Although most retiree communities I've visited have much better common space options than your average cul-de-sac suburb, so it might help other ways!

I'm surprised that the advice just skipped over the kids in LW's driveway.

Dude if you think these kids are gonna go two miles to the park you can park outside the cul-de-sac and walk to your truck.

POINT.

Oh, I'm gonna be the killjoy. If kids are playing on LW's driveway, that's not just a nuisance. It's a liability issue. I'd bet anything that the steep driveway is used for bike and skate purposes. I know I did that with a neighbor's driveway as a kid (with their permission, when they were out of town). Also, kids leaving stuff in the street is just not okay. I grew up on a street with a cul-de-sac, and sure, we used it for wiffle ball games (it had natural bases!), but we picked our stuff up after we were done. I think going to the HOA and talking about 1. designated play areas and 2. rules for those areas is a reasonable response.

As someone who spent two years managing condominium complexes, including one with roadways and private driveways...there's no logical reason for this guy to wait until the next meeting to bring it to the board's attention. He could call/email the board or, if they have one, the property manager and say "Hey, not sure if you're aware but this has been an issue near Units X, Y, and Z - I worry that saying something to my neighbors directly would be seen as confrontational or unneighborly, but I'm pretty sure that blocking common areas is a violation of the rules and regulations. Could someone please check this out and address this with the community?"

In my role as manager, I would have either taken photos of the blockade while on site or, if it was happening outside of normal business hours, asked LW (or a member of the board) to send me a photo. I would likely initially address this with a community memo (or a memo to the owners and residents on XYZ street) rather than target any specific individual because a "friendly reminder" will usually get you just as far as a violation notice but without the animosity. If it continued or if there was pushback from a specific individual, then I would escalate as needed.

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