nickd

the yard sale went well. erin and i sold about $180 worth of junk, which helped tremendously towards getting a few more things that i need to do a proper lit review in advance of writing my book. thanks for coming out if you did.

what i want to discuss today is condo associations. our building is a u-shaped courtyard building, not unlike many in chicago (especially around rogers park and edgewater, but also on some boulevards - erin and i live on palmer square, part of the original burnham-devised boulevard system). it’s unique, though, in that our half of the building is rental apartments, and the other half is condos. one side has a plaque saying “managed by ______”; the other has a slightly fancier-looking plaque with “_____ condo association”.

so at like 9:30a we start setting up, putting stuff out there on our building’s front yard. it’s perhaps worth noting that our building’s yard is similarly bifurcated, with a clear-cut lawn on the condo side and a few little bush plants on the apartment side. we set up our stuff spanning both sides. around 10:45a, a resident from the condo side comes out to walk his dog and voices his concerns about the existence of a yard sale. he walks his dog around the block and comes back to apologize and say “i personally think it’s great that you’re selling, but there are a few other residents who don’t want this sort of thing happening.” he then tells us about how a cadre of three condo residents set up a palmer-square-wide yard sale at the end of the summer, and routinely call the police and cite obscure laws to get any “competitors” to fold.

none of this is illegal, but it’s underhanded and offensive all the same: basically, it’s entirely possible to be a jerk to your neighbors within the bounds of the law, and you can either choose to do so or not. i don’t want to wait two months to put on a yard sale; neither do any of the several other households that have teamed up with us to sell, and neither do any of the dozens of friends who came by to check out our wares and grill some meats with us.

in the next two hours we receive two similar warnings from two other residents. both were on our side but expressed worry about the aforementioned three residents. one even apologized for the existence of these residents. during this period a middle-age-looking woman is spotted at a second-floor window staring directly at us, talking on the phone, and looking pretty pissed.

around 5pm, three hours before the yard sale is supposed to end, one of said residents comes by and says “nobody wants you here” and leaves. ten minutes later a cop car pulls up, asks what’s up, we tell them we’re holding a yard sale, they laugh and leave. i’m guessing if you call the police as frequently as this person does, in an area much more known for gang turf wars than bourgeois complaints, then the police believe you’re the middle-aged woman who cried wolf, and stop taking you very seriously.

also: “nobody wants you here.” really? that’s funny, i thought the several hundred folks who came past, smiled, purchased merchandise, and thanked us for putting this on would indicate otherwise. perhaps they should have been more honest and said that the only people that didn’t want us there was them. perhaps they should know that living in an urban context means accepting the actions of reasonable neighbors. none of us were making any noise beyond talking. we planned to fold up the yard sale before sunset. nobody was in the way of these peoples’ existence, and yet they made the decision to raise a stink about it. and for what?

oh, but this isn’t the end of it, boys and girls. on tuesday, on my walk to work, the exact person who i saw in the second-floor window was outside our (our!) building, reseeding the lawn that we had a yard sale on only 72 hours prior. the lawn that, mind you, was already almost entirely dead because a densely leafy tree was choking out all the sunlight and water on the grass. the lawn that she reseeded, with the tree that she didn’t prune the branches of. and then a day later, this passive-aggressive sign was posted, gloriously replete with snarky, self-righteous tone, right down to the “i’m” as if they alone owned the lawn:

, the final sentence of which is likely aimed at another neighbor on our half of the building, whose dog routinely relieves himself on a corner of said yard. apparently people keep dogs, and apparently they have to pee.

this isn’t the first time that i’ve witnessed such disrespect for urban contexts out of people who live in them. living in a dense environment like this means respecting the intentions of other people, meeting them halfway and holding a conversation with them that involves more empathy and rationality than writing off their existence and wasting the police’s time. a majority (and as of press time, over two-thirds) of humanity has lived like this for hundreds of years.

if you’re going to treat your environment like this, then maybe you should sell your condo to someone that gives a legit, impassioned crap about their neighborhood, and harbors greater tolerance for the actions of their neighbors. then you can move to bolingbrook and tend your meadow with all the other sheep. nobody wants you here.