That Racket? It's the Sound of Suburbia ...
Gregory Morrow
July 22, 2007
That Racket? It's the Sound of Suburbia
By PAUL VITELLO
"You don't have to be a certified acoustical engineer to know that peace and
quiet, while perhaps still a talking point for real estate brokers, is not
quite what it used to be in the suburbs.
Ask the people in the dozens of towns around the region who have sought over
the last few years to defeat or at least contain the deafening tyranny of
the leaf blower.
Ask the man in the tight-knit Long Island waterfront community of Bayville
who decided last month, after three years of unsuccessful back-fence
negotiations, to sic village code enforcement officers on the parents of the
two little girls next door, ages 5 and 11 - claiming that the sisters' daily
frolicking in the family's pool violated Bayville's ordinance against "the
crying of peddlers, hawkers and vendors." "I don't work 12 hours a day to
come home and listen to this," said Mark Kotsakis, the neighbor.
Ask the people in Beach Haven Terrace on Long Beach Island in New Jersey who
filed suit in February against Michael Mercurio's 35-foot windmill - because
it was not only too tall, but too noisy in a brisk wind.
Talk to residents of the small South Jersey city of Vineland whose
relentless complaints about stereophonically enhanced "boom cars" prompted
the police to begin a crackdown last month. One, Jake Golley, said the sound
"literally shakes the glass in the windows of my house, even from a few
blocks away."
Or just step outside on any weekday afternoon.
If you live on anything more modest than a 30-acre waterfront estate, you
will more than likely hear the sound of the factory that manufactures this
thing that people in the suburbs like to call their "quality of life."
It is an assembly-line sound of lawn mowers, leaf blowers, snowblowers (each
in their seasons), school buses, fuel trucks, kids with basketballs, kids
with motor-powered vehicles they probably should not have, dogs, errant car
alarms, errant home alarms, pool parties, intestine-rattling home
entertainment centers that leak high-volume audio into the street; and,
during periodic real estate market upticks, those heavy construction
vehicles that go beep beep backing up as they tear down the old and reinvent
the newest model of the suburban home's apotheosis - the dream house.
That is the general impression, at least.
But let's say you did happen to be a certified acoustical engineer. Someone,
say, like Jeff Szymanski, who works for Black & Veatch, a global engineering
firm based in Overland Park, Kan.
Mr. Szymanski does most of his work in American suburbs. He helps companies
reduce factory noise, and advises municipalities on setting noise ordinance
guidelines.
Could someone like Mr. Szymanski translate our general impression of noise
affliction into scientific observation?
First some background.
When the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970, it conducted
the nation's first official noise surveys. Staff members established
average-24-hour baseline levels in three categories of noise environment:
the city, the suburbs and the country.
The average measurement in urban environments, the agency said, was 59
decibels. In suburbs, it was 49 decibels, and in rural areas, 43. The E.P.A.
never updated the survey. While president, Ronald Reagan shut down the
agency's Office of Noise Abatement and Control.
But Mr. Szymanski and a co-worker, Brent Ferron, took a stab at an update by
gathering 24-hour samples of ambient noise from dozens of suburban
communities in which they worked during the last eight years. They tested
noise in suburbs from Maryland and Miami to Las Vegas, and in a few cities
and rural areas in between.
Their findings, delivered on June 8 in Salt Lake City at the 153rd biannual
meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, indicate that the noise level
in the average suburb is approaching the noise level in the average city.
"The level of noise in the urban and rural areas we tested remained pretty
consistent with the 1970 E.P.A. figures" - about 59 decibels in the city and
43 in the country, Mr. Szymanski said.
But in the suburbs, the average ambient noise level was 56 decibels - a
whisper less than the average noise level in the average city, and 7
decibels higher than it was in 1970.
"We don't claim that this was a definitive study," Mr. Szymanski said. "But
I would guess our results were pretty much in keeping with the increasing
density in the suburbs, more cars, more roads, more houses, et cetera. For
whatever reason, there seems to be a growing homogeneity."
This is serious. Peace and quiet, after all, must be one of the top reasons
people move to the suburbs. Noise was cited as the top "neighborhood
complaint" among those listed as serious enough to make people consider
moving, according to a 1999 Census Bureau housing survey. (Crime, odors and
poor public services came in a distant second, third and fourth on the list,
respectively.)
What to do?
In an increasing number of suburban municipalities, the answer over the last
several years has been to adopt or tighten noise ordinances.
Les Blomberg, executive director of an 11-year-old national organization
called the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, based in Montpelier, Vt., said
noise issues resonate in the suburbs more than anywhere else because "for 50
years anybody who did not like noise, and had the means, fled the big city
for the suburbs."
He added, "What's been happening lately is that suburbs are reaching full
capacity, in-filling, and getting noisier as a result."
In Greenwich, Conn.; Montclair, N.J.; and a dozen communities in
Westchester, including Yonkers, landscapers have been barred from using leaf
blowers (which typically operate at 95 to 105 decibels) and weed whackers
(94 to 96 decibels) - in some cases year-round, in others only in summer,
when people are more likely to be outdoors. More than 100 communities in
California have adopted similar restrictions, according to Mr. Blomberg.
But some of the civic sensibilities that helped create those crowded suburbs
in the first place - a sense of self-governance, property rights, pride of
ownership - might be working against easy noise abatement.
In Middletown, N.J., and Guilford, Conn., for example, local legislators
have agonized for two years over ordinances to restrict the times of day
people can use machinery outdoors. Should the ordinance say not before 7 or
8 a.m.? Not after 6 or 7 or 8 in the evening?
In each case, they say, the public peace has to be weighed against
individual rights, a "don't tread on me" tradition articulated by a man who
recently wrote to the mayor of Bernardsville, N.J., where a similar
ordinance is under review. "I really have a problem when a government tells
me when I can and can't cut my grass," said the letter from David Neill, a
longtime resident and local businessman.
In Vineland, where the police have been taking on boom cars, alleged
offenders have found their champion in David Arsenault, the owner of a local
car stereo store, Eagle Mobile Electronics. "The problem with noise
ordinances is that they are subjective," Mr. Arsenault said in a telephone
interview. "There's no way to defend yourself once a cop gives you a ticket.
He becomes the judge and jury." The Vineland law defines a noise violation
as "any sound that can be detected by a person using unaided hearing
faculties at a distance of 25 feet from the sound source."
Mr. Arsenault said, "By that definition, you and I talking at a party - we'
re violating the Vineland noise ordinance."
On Long Island, Andrew J. Campanelli, a Mineola lawyer who represented the
Bayville couple who were ticketed for the poolside noise made by their
daughters, said another impediment to enacting enforceable noise ordinances
is the simple fact that noise is a subjective experience.
What sounds to one person like children's pitch-perfect exhalations of
happiness may sound to another like children causing "an unreasonable
nuisance" with their "screaming and shouting," as the code officer described
it on the noise summons issued to Mr. Campanelli's clients, William and
Rachel Poczatek.
"The 14th Amendment's safeguards require that a person of ordinary
intelligence, reading the statute, must have fair notice of what constitutes
a violation under the law," he said. "In Bayville's law, and a lot of other
local ordinances, the statute is not clear."
The 14th Amendment is the one that guarantees due process and equal
protection. The Poczateks faced up to 15 days in jail under a law that
specifically barred only "the crying of peddlers, hawkers and vendors" on
the street, Mr. Campanelli said.
"A reasonable person would not read this as fair notice that children are
barred from making noise in their own backyard," he told the village justice
who heard the case on June 20. The charge was dismissed.
Virginia Woolf may have had a point when she wrote, in a 1930 essay called
"Street Haunting," "The eye has this strange property: It rests only on
beauty." But she could not have said the same thing about the ear.
The ear seems to work in the opposite way, resting on the most maddening, if
not always the loudest, thing in its range. The dripping faucet. Toenail
clipping. People humming.
The Mister Softee truck in Hartford whose operator was ticketed a dozen
times in 2002 for noise violations might be the most famous recent public
example. It wasn't just the volume of the jingle, people in the South End
neighborhood told The Hartford Courant. "I can't stand it anymore," said one
complainant, articulating the problem more precisely. In the end, a judge
ruled that the truck could play the jingle exactly six times in a row and
would then have to either turn it off, or move to a new spot, out of hearing
range of the last one.
In Garfield, N.J., a retired truck driver, Joseph Dorman, sued the mosque
one block from his house in March when it tested a loudspeaker system for
its call to prayer. In this case, too, volume was not the main issue. In Mr.
Dorman's view "there is a big difference between ding-dong, ding-dong and a
pronouncement that Allah is God," he told The Record of Hackensack,
comparing the ringing of church bells with the Islamic call to prayer.
Largely in response to his suit, the Garfield City Council amended the noise
ordinance to specifically exempt bell ringing, calls to prayer and all other
religious summonses.
Ultimately, people's problems with noise may reflect their problems with
fellow people. Mr. Blomberg, the anti-noise activist, calls it a "tragic
breakdown of community."
"Noise problems happen when you don't have a sense of community," he said.
"If you can't talk to your neighbor about something like noise, you have
more than a noise problem in your neighborhood."
Or consider the view of Glenn Kern, president of the town council in Lower
Saucon Township, an eastern Pennsylvania community that has undergone a
housing boom over the last 10 years.
Mr. Kern presided over a vote last year that scrapped a proposed noise
ordinance that local builders and homeowners said was too restrictive; it
would have banned construction work on weekends and holidays before 7 a.m.,
and after 6 p.m. in winter or 8 p.m. in summer.
"This is America in action," Mr. Kern said, addressing a meeting hall filled
with contractors and other opponents of the measure.
He was referring to the democratic process. But he might as well have been
talking about the noise."
</>
Sciuro
Gregory Morrow skribis:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/22rNoise.html
>
> July 22, 2007
>
> That Racket? It's the Sound of Suburbia
>
> By PAUL VITELLO
>
American suburbia sound like a haven of peace compared to a Spanish
neighbourhood... we're the world's 2nd noisiest country after Japan.
You'd need something in the region of 90 dB for the authorities to
intervene, and even so it may mean a long legal battle.
http://youth.hear-it.org/page.dsp?page=3251
Regards
A.P.
Chris
> You'd need something in the region of 90 dB for the authorities to
> intervene, and even so it may mean a long legal battle.
Yup. 90 dB is about a lawn mower and that sounds about right. What
burns me the most are these damn kid punks and the boom-cars.
Every generation pushes the perceived envelope of their time but the
21 and under (i.e. raised by TV and Playstation) are getting worse.
Jeri Jo Thomas
the mic and said...
The only consolation with those kids and their boomcars is one day
they'll be stone deaf and it'll serve 'em right.
--
Jeri Jo & Little Garcia Bear
Marten Kemp
IMHO what drives the boom-cars and suchlike is that the
damn kid punks severely damaged their hearing early on
and now they can't hear anything less than 87dB.
--
-- Marten Kemp
(Fix name and ISP to reply)
Stephen J. Rush
There's also the "I spent more than you can afford!" factor.
Fountain of Filth
being bulldozed. I can hear it clearly, yet all the windows
and doors are closed.
After this, I get to hear the sounds of construction.
After that, I get to hear the sounds of fucktrophies whose
parents want to move to a small town.
A pox on the asshole who decided that building houses when
CA is seeing a lot of foreclosures was a good idea.
~FoF
--
"A lot of Christians wear crosses. Do you
think when Jesus comes back,
he's going to want to see a fucking cross?"
~Bill Hicks