nuisance party ordinance

A law that targets loud residential areas, containing vague clauses that give the police a wide-ranging power to do as they wish when a "situation" presents itself.

For example, a Raleigh (North Carolina) City ordinance bans

"any . . . activity resulting in conditions that annoy,
injure or endanger the safety, health, comfort or repose
of . . . neighboring residents"

--Raleigh City Code 13.3006

Laws such as these, which target college residences and partygoers, have questionable legal precedent but often are not challenged in Court because the group being targeted does not have the resources to fight a legal battle.

There was a big to-do in Fort Collins, Colorado concerning a new nuisance ordinance. When it was originally proposed, the city could literally take your property away if there were more than (if I recall) three "incidents" in a one-year period. This caused a huge uprising with the populace, as you can imagine. If it had passed, then there would be nobody within city limits who would dare rent to college students attending Colorado State University out of fear of losing their property. The law was severely toned down, but the owner of a property is still the one who gets hit with the repercussions if there are too many "incidents". As a result, many property owners have a "no party" clause, which would allow the landlord to break the lease and kick out the tenants with a 30-day notice.

My personal take on the subject is that it should fall upon the tenant to bear the brunt of the action. I lived near a bunch of college yahoos who had the occasional loud party, and I've found bottles of booze on my lawn the next day. I took it up with the folks who were renting the house. They apologized and cleaned up the mess. If it were a weekly event, I'd have to call in their landlord or call the police in, but they're decent kids blowing off steam every two months. There are jerks who are so inconsiderate that they get chased from rental to rental, and I think going to their college administration would be best in that circumstance. Hey, in my younger days I'd have the occasional blowout, so I won't begrudge the good kids from having a good time, as long as it does not involve property damage or someone getting hurt or assaulted.

If the party is too loud, ask them to quiet it down a notch. If it's happening too often, have the police give them a ticket (money hurts more than anything to a college student). But don't take it out on the property owners, else the college students will have to live in tents in the engineering quad because there will not be any available housing.

Living in a neighborhood that is almost 100% rental housing I wish that landords would be penalized for the actions of their tenants far more often than they are. When a landlord does not care who he rents to, one or two bad tenants can badly affect a neighborhood in fairly short order.

If this means that students (or sailors in this area) can't find housing tough, I have rights too. They'll be gone shortly, and I'll still be here having to deal with the repercussions of their behavior. (Which landlords should also be penalized for. At least here in Bremerton, the city does not do a very good job of getting landlords to clean up after their tenants.)

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And yes, I've been on both sides of this issue. Once upon a time I was a young sailor and suffered greatly from the reputation caused by generations of my peers. Now I'm a landlord and quite aware of how expensive it can be to clean up after a bad tenant, and how hard it is to find good ones.