Your anonymous note probably isn’t going to help.
Tens of millions of Americans live on top of, below, or directly next to their neighbors — which means, statistically speaking, some of us are going to end up in close proximity to an extremely irritating stranger.
The source of annoyance could be someone who appears to be hosting illegal raves every weekend. Or it could be a neighbor whose kids enjoy lobbing balls, toys, trash, food, any object in sight, over the fence. Ugly lawns, heavy-footed walkers, driveway blockers, early morning vacuumers…these everyday exasperations come in all shapes and sizes, and exist everywhere: big cities, rural areas, college dorms, upstairs, downstairs, next door, or across the street.
While phone calls, texts, and friendly in-person conversations are all tried-and-true ways to address proximal nuisances, many partake in the dreaded form of communication known as the neighbor note. Judging from the multiple, hand-wringing posts on social media and Reddit about the labor of writing one, as well as an unfathomable number of messages about the anxiety of receiving them, these letters are a bit of a trap. Most people don’t really want to scold another adult, or be scolded — especially anonymously — for things they’re not aware that they’re doing.
“Neighbor interactions tend to be difficult for people when they don’t necessarily know the individual personally,” Elaine Swann, a lifestyle and etiquette expert, told me. “The thing about it is we’re not going to our neighbor with something positive like, Have a great day! or Happy anniversary! or Happy baby! — whatever. You’re going to them with something that’s bad.”
Swann explained that a lot of the anxiety and awkwardness about dealing with neighbor problems would be alleviated if you had a relationship that exists beyond complaining, and an understanding that this one complaint isn’t going to eternally define the relationship.
What makes things complicated, Swann said, is that we live in a culture where it’s becoming increasingly easy to live happily isolated. Doorbell cameras tell us who’s out front and any visitors that we might have missed. It’s now possible to know which packages we’re getting and when. If you run out of sugar or need cold medicine for your kid, you can simply pay a stranger to deliver it. Message boards and forums have made gossip easily accessible, and require no buy-in or relationship building. These major changes have eliminated a lot of the small interactions we might have had with people next door.
All of this means that we don’t know each other, and many of us feel like a note is our best bet to get through to people. And while these notes are often about petty things — about someone making too much noise or parking in the wrong space or not picking up dog poop — they speak to an anxiety about having a conversation with someone you see every day. That apprehension is so pronounced that it makes a neighbor note an appealing option, even when they tend to be a completely futile form of communication.
To live a day in this world and have not one person annoy you would be an anomaly. But think about it this way: many of us are actually extremely fortunate that the small things that other people do to bother us are, relatively, fleeting. Whether it’s someone cutting you off in traffic or open-mouth coughing on a display of baked goods, there’s some relief — as difficult it may be to realize in the moment — in the fact that you likely won’t see this person or their obnoxious oddities again.
The actual horror story is a nuisance that follows you home, or is in your home. Like a geyser of soiled toilet water erupting into your apartment.
This is a woman named Sam’s reality. (Vox agreed to let Sam and other people interviewed for this article use pseudonyms so that they could talk about their neighbors freely.) She and her fiance moved to a new apartment in October and eventually learned that it came with a disgustingly catastrophic feature that she didn’t ask for: First, her toilet started gurgling. Then the bathtub began filling with “sewage water,” followed by flooding from the main drain under her dishwasher.
She had overheard maintenance people saying that it might be due to a neighbor who is flushing wipes, but wasn’t told specifics beyond that management was aware. Whatever the cause, it creates a smelly and wet chain reaction that she has to deal with. Her apartment complex left her with a Shop-Vac to help slurp up the filthy problem.
After this biological fountain occurred a second time, Sam posted a note to everyone in her building, complete with illustrations and instructions about what and what not to flush. “I was just done avoiding conflict and being the nice guy,” Sam told Vox.
“My hope is that by mentioning management’s looking into who it is — they are looking into who is responsible and will hold them accountable — that it would scare them into just stopping,” Sam said. “I own a lot of antiques, oddities, and my own paintings/art that are worth close to $15k all together, most being irreplaceable, and I would absolutely lose it if they were ruined because of someone else’s selfishness.”
Even with all those valuables at risk and the constant threat of a surprise poop waterfall, engaging with a neighbor isn’t exactly easy. The dilemma of a neighbor note is that it’s ultimately a gamble. If said neighbor takes the complaint well, it could mean a better quality of life — no more kids trekking across the lawn, no more smoking in the building, no more TV at weird hours, etc. But if they don’t, it means living with the same problems…but with added tension and perhaps, in worse situations, active hostility. Many people make a calculation, weighing whether the annoyances are bad enough to further jeopardize the living situation.
“It was a little stressful — just the anxiety of if someone gets overly offended and tries to cause more problems for us, or showing up at our door looking for a fight because we called them out,” Sam said.
Unfortunately for Sam, it appears that the gamble did not pay off.
After she posted the note on both entry doors of her building, she returned later to find one of her desperate pleas and illustrations of non-flushable items ripped up and scattered on the staircase. Unless someone stops the source of the flooding, all Sam can do is fire up the Shop-Vac while asking management if she can break her lease.
Fifteen years ago, Harry, now 37, got his first and only note from a neighbor. It was about a year after he got his first job, and he was living on his own in Washington, DC. The letter was left in front of his door and he had no idea who sent it.
Neighbor notes are, by their design, an awkward form of communication. No one really ever wants to be the one to tell someone that they’re being annoying, specifically that they’re so obnoxious that living in their vicinity is unbearable. But experts I spoke to did give me some tips to make the process less painful for everyone.
Come from a place of empathy. One of the major cornerstones of etiquette is extending grace to the people around you. You never know what someone is going through, and they may not know that their behavior (e.g., loud music, using the wrong parking space, vacuuming during the morning hours) is bothering their neighbors. Think about how you’d like to be treated if you were in a similar situation.
Treat the note like a conversation. When writing a neighbor note, it might be helpful to think about the letter as an ongoing dialogue. Leaving your name and phone number makes the note feel less prickly and gives the receiver an opportunity to explain their side of the story.
Treat your neighbor like your ally, not your opposition. Instead of seeing them as a stranger, think of your neighbor as the person who’ll call you if your house is on fire, who will text you if your food delivery gets left on your stoop, who will tell you juicy neighborhood gossip. The more you see your neighbors as people you can rely on, the better your relationship will be, and the easier it will be to come to them if you have a complaint.
“The note suggested that I was being too loud and that I was stomping around or dancing,” he told me, adding that he suspected it was sent by the tenant in the apartment directly below his. “It made accusations that were not true, but indicated that I was louder than, I guess, realized.”
Harry represents how it feels to be on the receiving end of the neighbor note. Dealing with an annoying neighbor can be, as Sam’s sewage problem has shown us, an ordeal. It’s an entirely different feeling — a combination of shame and annoyance — being told you’re the actual problem.
Although Harry does dance occasionally and knows himself to be a heel-first walker, he still believes that he wasn’t extraordinarily loud. His apartment was carpeted, he says, so there’s no way that he was making enough sound to bother his downstairs neighbor because he is actually tiny. Petite beings aren’t usually noisy ones, his logic goes.
“I’m a single small person,” he said. (Harry is 5’7”.)
Still, the note changed the trajectory of Harry’s life in that apartment. After feeling “accosted” and “embarrassed,” Harry began watching his gait and tried to make sure that he was living a quieter life out of fear that he would upset his neighbor. He and his note-writer didn’t have any other interactions while he lived there, perhaps thanks to his diligence. Living like that, though, with a heightened awareness of one’s own footsteps, isn’t particularly pleasurable.
In a strange twist of fate, Harry unintentionally ended up marrying a fellow heel-walker. (The marriage was intentional but the heel-stepping was not.) After Harry told his husband that I had interviewed him for the article, his husband said that he too once received a neighbor note, pictured below:
Though Harry’s feelings were hurt when he received the noise complaint, he told me that he recently had an experience in which he wished someone had written a note. He and his husband still live in DC and are now homeowners. In 2023, they had a motion sensor light installed in their backyard that they never really paid attention to, though he was aware that the light’s trigger was sensitive and the beam was bright. Later, Harry made a passing comment to a few friends about how “obnoxious” it may be for their next-door neighbors, and found out, accidentally, that his neighbors agreed.
“Our neighbors are friends with our mutual friends,” he told me. “I mentioned it and received a retort that indicated it was in fact pretty obnoxious for people hanging out back there. And I remember wishing someone had told me sooner so I didn’t intrude on their environment.”
It was a Goldilocks moment of sorts for Harry. He felt like the first intervention was an overreaction. This time, there wasn’t one, and he felt like an actual nuisance. Upon learning that they accidentally installed an Eye of Sauron in their backyard, he and his husband adjusted the sensitivity of the light, and said that he and his neighbors are now friends and have a texting relationship. (It’s also worth noting that Harry and his husband live in a single-family home, and do not have any neighbors living underneath them.)
The conundrum at the heart of every neighbor note is that this piece of paper has the power to dictate a relationship with someone who you could encounter frequently and who might be in your life for some time. If you aggravate that person, you’ll ostensibly have to deal with the tension-filled aftermath for a while. On the other hand, saying nothing, or being too nice and not getting the point across, could make for even more awkwardness down the line if escalation is needed.
“You’ll likely see this person again and you have to live next to them,” etiquette coach and consultant Jacqueline Whitmore told me. Whitmore said she’s only had one significantly irritating occurrence — a neighbor with a “rickety fence” — in which she felt compelled to write a note. That person ignored her until he moved away.
What’s important to keep in mind if you do decide to write a note is that while this interaction is rooted in a complaint, it should still come from a place of kindness. Both can exist at once.
“From an etiquette standpoint, you don’t always know what this person is going through,” Whitmore told me. She said she’d want empathy if she were in the offender’s shoes. “I’ve always believed that the neighborly thing is giving people the benefit of the doubt until they give you reason to believe otherwise,” she added.
Swann, the other etiquette expert, echoed that sentiment. Rather than sending a note that is filled with assumptions or that represents some kind of final demand, she sees it as an open conversation with someone you should be building a relationship with. Swann explained that she once sent a note to a neighbor whose guests would park in front of her house and use a spot that her family needed from time to time. Turning this annoyance into a conversation (“we’re happy to coordinate with you if we’re ever not there”) instead of confrontation helped them see eye-to-eye and behave more courteously about sharing the parking space.
Her main piece of advice: Include your contact info at the end of the note. That simple addition can make the correspondence less thorny — which is exactly what you want from someone you’re living next to.
“The person feels like that there’s an open door, that they have the opportunity to communicate effectively with you and it doesn’t feel as though what you’re saying is so final,” Swann said.
“Here’s the way you have to look at it: This is the person who, if they have my phone number, they will call me if my house is burning down. They will call me if my pet gets out. They will contact me if there’s something that’s wrong,” she said, pointing out how valuable and crucial the people living next to us can be, and how we should care about them in the same ways we’d like them to care about us.
“We have to start to shift and think of our neighbors as a community, and not our enemy,” she added.
Being on both sides of the neighbor note has given Harry new insight into what makes for a good, effective neighbor note. To him, it’s all in the delivery.
“A good neighbor note is overly friendly in tone so that you sort of voice the need or the complaint, but in a way that acknowledges that there’s clearly no intent behind it — that they probably don’t know that this is happening,” he said, adding that he would include smiley faces and XOXO’s to get the “friendliness” across.
Or, more effectively, one could just muster up the courage to have a face-to-face conversation with the person living next door, and skip the note entirely.
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