When you move into your first house or apartment, you’re faced with new problems that you previously never considered before. Things like what kind of paper towels to buy, where to do laundry, how to do laundry, and many other adult tasks. When you decide on a first home, you mainly are focused on appearances. If the potential home looks good, and has everything you need, you’re probably going to jump at the opportunity to rent or own it. What you didn’t pay attention to, are the finer details. For example, you didn’t notice that the neighbors are continuously loud.
Loud neighbors can take away from any exciting moment. You could be watching an intense scene of your favorite show only to be cut off by your neighbor’s home garage band. You could be on the phone with your boss and your boss might hear yelling from your neighbors. This could be frustrating to anyone. First, it’s courteous to give your neighbors the benefit of the doubt. You should try approaching them and explain your grievances about the noise issues.
If confronting your neighbors about the noise issues doesn’t work, the next step is contacting your landlord. If you don’t have a landlord, you’ll skip to the following step of contacting the police. Before you contact the police you need to make sure you’re contacting them for a good reason. Your neighbors need to be either causing excessive noise during quiet hours, high decibel noise, or unreasonable noise.
California has the Noise Control Act that helps provide Californians with silence. The act is a part of the California Health and Safety Code. It acknowledges that excessive noise is detrimental to public health and welfare. The act also recognizes that Californians have the fundamental right to peaceful and quiet enjoyment of their property without unnecessary noise.
Annoying neighbors who cause too much noise can receive fines for disturbing the peace. They could also receive multiple fines if they break their county’s laws about noise. Each county has different laws regarding quiet hours, and what is considered excessive noise.