Noisy Neigbors

It’s an age-old problem, I know, but I want some fresh advice, if anyone has any.

We’ve lived in our co-op since January, 2008. Since that time, we’ve been dealing with very loud upstairs neighbors. They yell, stomp, and move furniture at all hours of the night and its a rare weekend when we’re not kept up past 1 AM or woken up at 5 AM. Weeknights are no better. It’s a pair of sisters living in a one bedroom. One keeps strange work hours which is contributing to the noise at odd times.

We’ve politely asked them to keep the noise level down or to at least move their loud conversations from the back room into the front when it’s late at night, but they have been extremely hostile to our requests. When we go upstairs to complain, they come to the door, but rarely answer it, even though we can hear them approach the door, and see them look through the peephole. On the rare occasion when they answer, they scream at us, telling us to “go the f*ck away,” calling my wife a b*tch and telling us to die. We never stoop to their level, staying civil and walking away. We’ve left notes or letters, but they usually wind up crumpled up at our door. A letter sent via certified mail was refused upon delivery. We’ve kept a noise log of every occurrence since the summer. We have begun the process of talking to other neighbors — the person who lives above them for example — in the hopes of getting more witnesses.

Our co-op board is doing the bare minimum to help us. They enforced the 80% floor covering rule with these owners, but the problem has not gone away. They have sent them letters reminding them of the building’s noise policy — no loud noise, tv or radio after 11 PM and before 8 AM — but it hasn’t changed anything. The co-op board president has heard the noise in our apartment, as we woke her up at 5 AM on a Saturday to get her as a witness.

However, other than sending them letters, the co-op board refuses to talk directly to the residents. The board president has said she doesn’t want her “team” to get directly involved. At other times when the board president comes over to potentially witness the noise, she winds up talking about random stuff — pictures on our wall, a book on our nightstand — instead of really listening. (At 3 in the morning, I’m not interested in discussing literature.) We’re especially distressed because members of the board seem to have known that these women have been a problem for years before we moved in. (Ironic that at our co-op board meeting we were asked what kind of hours we kept and whether or not we took our shoes off when we came home, yet no one mentioned these crazies to us.)

We don’t want to get a lawyer or call the police, at least not yet. We feel that at the very least, the co-op board should arrange a mediated meeting between us and our upstairs neighbors, thinking that this is a sensible next step. It’s win-win, in our opinion. If they show up and act like crazy people, we’ll have the full board as a witness. If they don’t show up, it shows that we made a good faith effort to resolve this in a civil manner before resorting to more extreme measures.

The only problem is that the board doesn’t want to do this.

So, any advice? Short of continuing to suffer and building a case until we have enough evidence to sue, what can we do? Anyone have good experience with a lawyer who specializes in this kind of situation?