The Noise Children Make

SLEEP SCHEDULES Greg and Janeen Thompson, with their two sons, got complaints from their downstairs neighbor, who doesn’t have children. Both sides say they have tried to be sympathetic to the other’s plight.

By TERI KARUSH ROGERS
Published: July 6, 2008

APARTMENT dwellers in New York City have long endured the trauma of jackhammers, Manolo Blahniks, recycling trucks, sirens, canines and air-conditioning systems.

Alan Fierstein, a Manhattan acoustic consultant, says his business is booming

But, perhaps because the population of children in the city is increasing, the sound of little feet is a complaint being voiced with increasing frequency. And, for reasons ranging from a sense of entitlement to the impossibility of teaching a 3-year-old to glide to the potty like a supermodel, the parents of those little feet are not happy to hear that their children are driving you crazy.

Many, in fact, have heard just about enough of it. They complain that they are being forced to choose between being good neighbors and good parents. “It’s nerve-racking to be constantly shushing my kids and not letting them be normal kids in the morning,” said Janeen Thompson, who lives in a postwar rental building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her two young sons — ages 5 and 2 ½ — have elicited multiple noise complaints from their downstairs neighbor, a 25-year-old woman with no children.

In the morning when the boys are getting ready for the day, Ms. Thompson said, she insists they not roll their little cars down the hallway, or run before 8 a.m. “I tell them the neighbor is still sleeping, and they just look at me — ‘Why is she sleeping?’ ”

Ms. Thompson said she can’t even let her children cry when they need to. “For six months straight, my younger son woke up at 2 a.m. — we kept him quiet for two hours every night so the neighbor wouldn’t hear him,” she said. “Finally, we had to post signs in the building saying we were going to let him cry it out for a weekend, so our neighbor wouldn’t get mad at us.”

The downstairs neighbor, who agreed to give her first name, Jennifer, but not her last, out of fear of being branded antichild, said the children were waking up every single night in the middle of the week, which prompted her to pound on the ceiling after midnight, triggering an even noisier altercation with the children’s father. “The bedrooms of the parents and children are really far apart, so I don’t know if they can hear the children,” she said.

But what bothers her the most, she said, is the sound of the children running — “they don’t walk, ever,” she says — particularly before 8 a.m., when she gets up. “I try to be sympathetic but it’s very hard for me to relate to them because I don’t have children,” Jennifer said. “It’s exhausting. Even my boyfriend doesn’t ever want to come over — it’s so horrible.”

According to the professionals drawn into disputes about child noise — managing agents, lawyers, mediators and acoustical engineers — square-offs like these are increasingly common.

“Fifteen years ago or so, it used to be that the noise complaints were all about loud stereo and TV equipment,” said Stuart M. Saft, a real estate lawyer at Dewey & LeBoeuf in Manhattan, which represents about 100 full-service co-op and condominium buildings in Manhattan. “Now it’s kid noise more than anything else, and I think it demonstrates the changing demographic of the city. You have more kids living in the apartment buildings, and parents who feel their children have the right to be children.”

At the same time, even as New York City has become a magnet for young families, the escalating price of real estate has contributed to the feeling that people ought to get what they want and expect for their money.

“People’s expectations of quiet for their very expensive apartments have risen, so something that might not have bothered somebody 20 years ago because real estate was so inexpensive then does become an issue now,” said John Hauenstein, the president of JRH Acoustical Consulting Inc., which assesses and mitigates child noise issues.

Parents, meanwhile, feel persecuted.

The problems of an Upper West Side mother who did not want her name used, out of fear of reigniting old tensions, began four years ago. Two days after she and her family moved into their $1.8 million prewar unit, they received a hostile missive from the 30-something married couple living below.

“It was a typewritten note in a typewritten envelope with a formal return address. It said something like, ‘We never heard a sound from the older couple who lived in your apartment, and now that you moved in, our peace is being disrupted and we don’t appreciate it.’ It set such the wrong tone, almost like a lawyer had sent it, and we had been in the building less than a week. It would have been better even if it had just been handwritten instead of typed. It was like the punishment didn’t fit the crime.”

Still, she said: “I wanted to take the high road. They left their phone number so I called and introduced myself and left ours.” It was a decision she quickly came to regret.

Despite the wall-to-wall carpeting in her children’s bedrooms and a firm policy against bouncing balls indoors and leaping off beds, she fielded a series of “incredibly nasty” telephone calls that “were confrontational, upset and accusatory, not like, ‘Hey, do you mind — it’s getting a little noisy.’ ”

“Over the course of the next year, we felt we were living on eggshells,” she said. “It became almost a mantra, saying to the kids, ‘The neighbors, the neighbors.’ ”

A frosty détente set in when the couple downstairs had their first child two years ago.

“I think you become a more sensitive person when you have a kid — you have to become more tolerant and understanding,” the Upper West Side mother said. “You kind of realize that life is not as tidy as you’d like it to be.”

Indeed, the vast majority of child-noise complaints are said by those called to intervene to be lodged by neighbors with no children or grown children. Trouble also tends to flare when a family replaces an especially quiet resident, when renovations render layouts incongruent (so that a hallway now runs over a bedroom, for example), and when neighbors have different sleeping schedules.

Deborah Orr’s former downstairs neighbor, a lawyer in her 30s with no children, waited six months after moving in to complain about the noise produced by Ms. Orr’s son and daughter, who were 4 and 1 at the time.

“I think she tried a little too hard to tolerate it, then I think basically she kind of snapped,” said Ms. Orr, 40, a music publicist who lived in a Park Slope brownstone co-op. “When she complained, we bought thick rugs and pads, but I think it was just too late.”

Still, Ms. Orr and her husband tried.

“There was a point,” she said, “where every time the kids would go into the hall we would get this kind of twitchy ‘don’t run — walk, walk.’ We probably tried a little too hard to eliminate the noise because we wanted to have good relationships with the neighbors and to have good kids that other people enjoy being around and not like this focus of resentment. They were not doing anything outrageous. They were just doing normal kid things. But small children, especially toddlers, have this clumsy flatfooted walk. It’s impossible to control.”

The Orrs eventually moved, because they wanted more space.

Parents who hope to avoid having angry neighbors are not presented with many good choices in New York unless they can afford a house. Many of the prewar buildings and brownstones that seem especially solid are worse when it comes to noise.

“Any building that has a wood beam floor construction” — which includes most prewar buildings up to six stories tall — “is going to be more prone to these problems,” said Mr. Hauenstein, the acoustics expert. And even high-rise prewar buildings, with masonry floors, don’t necessarily live up to their reputation for being quiet. The insulation, which resembles ashy debris, can settle over time, and contractors sometimes remove it by mistake during renovation.

Postwar construction is hit or miss as well. Concrete floors are common but can mean little in terms of noise-proofing without a good underlayer or a dropped ceiling below, Mr. Hauenstein said.

Meanwhile, acoustical engineers say they are fielding a rash of noise complaints from owners of fancy new condominiums who never thought to inquire beyond soundproof windows.

“There’s been a rush to develop apartments, and in that rush I think developers have been taking shortcuts,” said Alan Fierstein, the president of Acoustilog Inc., a Manhattan acoustic consultant. “I see these amazingly flagrant violations of the building code with regard to soundproofing. Typically I see floors that don’t have the required insulation or they don’t have the proper resilient materials in the floor above or ceiling below. If the space is hollow, it tends to amplify or make booming sounds, which are very difficult to stop unless you put in good insulation or padding.”

For acoustical engineers, business is also booming from co-ops, which are increasingly taking a preventive stance on noise control in an era where expensive apartments often entail extensive renovations when they change hands.

“In many cases they’re combining apartments, so now you have a problem with people putting walkways where there was just a bedroom before, so it’s no longer bedroom over bedroom or kitchen over kitchen,” Mr. Fierstein said. “They’re also worried that people are coming in with new giant stereo systems and home theater media rooms.” Because of that, some co-ops are demanding that new buyers put in soundproofing when they renovate.

Michael J. Wolfe, the president of Midboro Management, which manages about 75 buildings in Manhattan, encourages neighbors to talk it out first. “If they don’t want to, we set up an inspection in the apartment and make sure it’s in compliance with the lease,” he said, referring to rules in many buildings requiring that 80 percent of a floor be covered with rugs. The type of rug matters too. “A throw rug with no padding would certainly make a lot of noise,” he said.

If the problem remains, according to Mr. Saft, the lawyer, boards will often have a sound meter installed in the afflicted apartment to determine whether the sound is excessive. “At least half the time it doesn’t show enough noise,” he said. “At that point the board sends a letter saying they looked into the situation and the noise is not excessive and the complainant should be more understanding of their neighbors.”

The other half of the time, parents must address the problem, such as by agreeing to limit their children’s activities to certain types, times and locations. Failure to comply can trigger fines by co-op boards along the lines of $100 per violation. Theoretically, parents who own their apartments could be forced to sell them. Though Mr. Saft said he had never seen a family turned out on the streets, he said co-op boards frequently threaten to cancel proprietary leases.

In resolving conflicts, face-to-face communication works best. “It may feel like you’re parroting, but literally just repeat back to them what you heard them saying in a calm and neutral voice, so they’re able to feel they’ve been heard enough and it’s your turn to talk,” said Elena Bayrock, the assistant director of the Manhattan Mediation Center, a nonprofit group that provides free mediation services. In mediation, solutions often revolve around sleep schedules, work patterns, and floor plans.

“By now, I kind of know that our bedroom is over their bedroom and if we drop stuff on the floor it’s really loud for them, so if the baby has a loud toy I just shut the door so she doesn’t come in,” said Margaret Hundley Parker, a 39-year-old freelance writer who rents a postwar apartment on Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn.

“We do indeed walk on eggshells, and I find myself on tiptoes if I have high heels on, even when I’m not home,” wrote Ms. Parker in an earlier e-mail message. “I’m a trained monkey. But my 19-month-old is not.”

“We’d love to move,” she continued, “but did I mention the rent-stabilized apartment?”