Q: How to address harassment from a condo-neighbor with odors and noise?
I live in a condo and share a wall with a neighbor who is harassing me with unpleasant odors and noise. The odors are foul smells, seemingly from his bathroom, that wake me up in the morning. The noise consists of a loud, intermittent boom occurring every morning until I can no longer sleep. This issue has intensified recently and has been going on for about two months. I've started logging these incidents. The neighbor, who is a board member, seems to be immune to intervention as the board does not mediate in conflicts between neighbors. How can I prove he's responsible and what steps can I take to address this issue?
A: To make certain that the Board does not get involved you should review the Condominium Owners Associations bylaws, rules and regulations, and the Declarations for the Planned united Development that established the condominium development. Once you have assured yourself that those do not apply you can file a private nuisance action. However, filing such an action would be almost impossible to prove. You would have to gather evidence of these incidents, which I believe would require much more than simply making a handwritten notation of the events. You would have to have credible unrelated third persons document these incidents and the frequency of such events. The problem would be that a credible unrelated third person may not be possible or practical to find. Maybe there would be a home monitoring company that might be able to document the incidents.
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