The nuisance next door

They nag about noise. They bark about baying dogs. They complain about fallen leaves or cats that prowl their lawns. They call the police when parties go on into the wee hours.

They’re the neighbors, and they’re angry.

Resident disputes -- whether they’re over trees, views, property lines, noisy gatherings, late-night construction, pets or parking -- can become nasty, destroying a neighborhood’s sense of community or, much worse, turning violent.

More than a dozen neighbor disputes in the city and county of Los Angeles erupted into violence in 2003, and police estimate at least that many in 2004 when that year is tallied. Some people ended up in the city attorney’s office facing disorderly conduct charges and forced mediation. Four died and at least half a dozen went to the hospital in 2003.

But disagreements needn’t end this way. Many can be resolved through mediation, a peaceful and inexpensive route to settling problems.

Lance Widman of the South Bay Center for Dispute Resolution in Hermosa Beach has seen hundreds of disputes in the 15 years he’s been a mediator.

“Some people come to us, some go to their church for help, some just tough it out and hope people will move,” said Widman, a professor of political science at El Camino College who first began mediating with the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. But with the difficulties and expense of moving, especially for homeowners, toughing it out is impractical and may only cause the problem to fester.

“Whatever starts it, by the time we see it, these disputes have grown to the point where people aren’t speaking, they aren’t waving hello, they’re not looking out for each other and all the neighborliness is gone,” he said. “People tell me they’re staying in their homes to avoid running into their neighbors.”

Los Angeles County-funded mediation services work with about 700 sets of unhappy neighbors a year over issues including who should pay for tree trimming and misunderstandings fed by language barriers.

Noise, boundary and view disputes and friction over home and yard maintenance top the list of the most frequently mediated problems. Unruly pets and kids and parking complaints follow closely.

“We had a woman come in and cry because she felt like she couldn’t go out in her frontyard when the neighbors were home,” Widman said. “People need to talk to each other so they can have some peace.”

Terry Dushenko, a Hermosa Beach resident, went to mediation with his neighbors after disagreements over his sprinklers. The Dushenkos had tried to work out the differences over several months without succuss.

“They felt it was too much water, so we’d reduced the frequency, then the frequency and amount, then adjusted the sprinkler so it pointed away, then took more steps,” Dushenko said. “No matter what we tried, their perception was that there was too much water, and things were getting testy.

“We were frustrated that we were trying to accommodate them and getting nowhere and they felt that we weren’t trying to solve the problem,” he said. Fortunately, the Dushenkos knew about mediation through neighbor Widman, whom they turned to for help.

The neighbors not only worked out a barrier system, things improved so much that they are now sharing the job of replacing a fence, he said.

“Going to mediation, and hearing their side and being heard, alleviated the tension dramatically and made it so we could be neighbors instead of combatants,” Dushenko said.

Kenneth Sullivan, a Colorado mediator, once saw a case of four neighbors on a cul-de-sac who all had restraining orders against each other by the time they turned to mediation.

Mediators work with neighbors to help them craft their own agreements in order to avoid dragging the argument out longer and spending money on costly attorney fees. If mediation fails, the next step is arbitration or a lawsuit, both of which involve a judgment of facts by a third party, and the solution is legally binding.

In the last five years, Los Angeles County has funded 15 mediation programs to help with neighbor conflicts. Those programs provide free or low-cost -- usually less than $20 -- help from about 2,500 volunteer mediators, according to Ester Soriano, who manages the county’s dispute resolution program.

Neighbor dispute mediation is also offered by churches and by the city attorney’s office, which gets its referrals from the police. The mediators have at least 40 hours of training, followed by supervised practice sessions and supervised mediations for their first year of practice.

Senior and residential complexes, such as Beyond Shelter, which has built more than a dozen affordable apartment complexes for seniors and poor families, often have mediators on staff to deal with disputes.

No group or region has the corner on un-neighborly behavior, however. Mediation center clients come from neighborhoods from the beach communities to East L.A., from Long Beach to Westlake Village.

But, mediators say, they see a common theme throughout all the work they do, whether in English, Spanish, Tagalog or Cantonese -- languages mediators speak at the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center on Wilshire Boulevard where Joumana Silyan-Saba is executive director.

“At the heart of nearly all our disputes is the feeling of a lack of respect, a lack of knowledge and understanding of the other people,” Silyan-Saba said. “Many of our mediations are resolved with a simple apology.”

Cultural differences fuel many disputes in this diverse region.

Widman had a case where one family had recently moved from Vietnam, and their neighbor was a Vietnam War veteran still suffering from nightmares caused by post-traumatic stress.

“His worst nightmare moved in next door,” Widman said. “And they thought he was incredibly crazy and difficult because when they saw him, he was.”

Although the two households came in over complaints about the family’s dogs, it soon became clear that the veteran’s experiences were the problem. Widman encouraged the man to get help from the Department of Veterans Affairs for his nightmares, and the neighbors haven’t made any more complaints, Widman said.

The Asian Pacific Center also handles many disputes that involve language and cultural barriers.

“We see people who think they said something innocent where the other people are very offended by what was said,” Silyan-Saba said. “For example, Chinese people are terribly offended to be called Japanese or Korean, and vice versa.”

Silyan-Saba’s volunteer mediators use their multiple languages frequently in mediations.

“Our clients are low-income, often monolingual, new immigrants,” she said. “There are two important barriers for our clients: language and mobility, so we go to them and find them through community centers, day labor centers and churches.”

The disputes can be minor, or they can be mind-boggling. Widman, for example, has worked on more than one flare-up over wind chimes. And, he said, most of the people involved in disagreements just got caught in problems that seemed unsolvable.

“You pick a situation where neighbors can get twisted around and they will,” he said.

Barbara Goldfarb, a volunteer mediator with the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s program, had two families, one Latino and one African American, come in over a barking dog.

“One family had been there for a long time and the mother had been close friends with the neighbor who left,” Goldfarb said. “Then the new family came, and the mom didn’t speak much English, had to work long hours and was wrapped up in her family and church. They just never warmed up to the neighbors.”

It didn’t take long before the longtime residents wanted mediators to help with complaints over the new family’s barking dog, Goldfarb said.

“The Latino family’s son had just gotten back from Afghanistan -- he came to translate -- and the African American family’s son was just enlisting, so they found a lot to talk about while they were waiting” for the mediation session to begin, she said. “Both families watched these fine young men warm up to each other and the chill between them thawed. It ended with the two young men going together to train the dog to not bark.

“We haven’t heard from them,” she said, “and that’s great.”

Marty Graham can be reached at martygraham@adnc.com.

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Where to go for help

Where to go for help

Here are some of the organizations offering mediation services:

* Loyola Law School’s Western Law Center for Disability Rights, Los Angeles, (213) 736-8104; www.lls.edu/community/dmc.htm

* Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center, Los Angeles, (213) 250-8190; www.apadrc.org

* California Lawyers for the Arts; Arts Arbitration and Mediation Services, Santa Monica, (310) 998-5590; www.calawyersforthearts.org/aams.html

* City of Norwalk, Dispute Resolution Program, (562) 929-5603; www.ci.norwalk.ca.us/socialservices2.asp

* Mediation Resources Claremont, (909) 621-0092; e-mail: admin@mediation resources.org

* Inland Valley Arbitration Mediation Service ARVAM, Pomona, (909) 629-6301

* 4.29 Center: Korean American Coalition, Los Angeles, (213) 383-4290 (direct), (213) 365-5999 (general information)

* L.A. County Bar Assn., Dispute Resolution Services Inc., Los Angeles, (877) 473-7658, (213) 896-6533; e-mail: drs@lacba.org; www.lacba.org/community/drs

* L.A. County Department of Community and Senior Services, Voluntary Mediation Services, East Los Angeles, (323) 260-2855; Florence/Firestone, (323) 586-6520; Santa Clarita Valley, (661) 254-0375; San Gabriel Valley, (626) 575-5418; San Fernando Valley, (818) 901-3169

* The Loyola Law School

Center for Conflict Resolution Los Angeles, (213) 736-1145

* Martin Luther King Dispute Resolution Center, Los Angeles, (323) 290-4132

* Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney, Dispute Resolution Program, (213) 485-8324; e-mail: mediate@atty.lacity.org;

West Los Angeles office, (310) 202-2837; San Fernando Valley office, (818) 756-9601

* South Bay Center for Dispute Resolution, Hermosa Beach, (310) 376-7007

-- Marty Graham