Impressions matter—first impressions, and sometimes above all, gut instincts.

What kinds of impressions are we making in our home-buying, or in our urban home redevelopment (not to mention our drab and ugly home aesthetics)? Do choices we make and greed we treasure intentionally harm others for years through disruptions we don’t personally ever experience?

How many people are we putting out with heavy machinery noise, street trash and debris, sidewalks clogged with construction detritus or fully blocked with construction materials, abusive migrant workers, and years-long unending job sites, in our quest for a de-luxe townhome (or in our quest to capitalize on building one)?

As a homebuyer or developer, or future resident, do you care? And if you don’t know and don’t care or don’t seem to, why would your neighbors who put up with the upheaval for years care for you?

Your choices may mean your future neighbors will dislike you even before they’ve had a chance to meet you, based upon the nasty and often illegal behavior of developers, contractors, and workers who turned a six-month, two-home build into a three-and-a-half year torture of residents within blocks of the jobsite; and consequently based upon your own obliviousness.

You rewarded these crooks for that, new neighbor. What’d I get out of it besides years of headaches and abuse?

“Those guys on the corner are real jerks,” I overheard my mellow septuagenarian neighbor Dick say to someone the other day on his porch, talking about the workers finishing the home down the street—from Spanish-speaking countries, and loudly insolent.

In the rush of some Americans to cash in on urban neighborhoods by turning them into gray, gay collectives of 10,000-square-foot yuckohaciendas, I think we forgot not only about neighborliness, but also civility.

To be a good neighbor, you try not to tick off other neighbors, especially when you’re new to, or have not yet moved into the neighborhood.

So, the new homeowners I reference—though oblivious as they are to the effects of the redevelopment that provided their de-luxe home-tel, made a bad impression by association, before they moved in.

I know it’s not loving your neighbor. More like protecting yourself from urban blight.

For these newcomers to urban Smokytown, my quiet neighborhood was turned upside down (and even having moved in, they turn a blind eye to tons of construction debris and mulch/manure mix on city steps and sidewalks, the construction debris two feet thick and three high with trees growing in it in the gutter by the steps, and the idle front-loader parked across the side-street from their new home).

And that’s this story’s seed: Walking by that home on the corner that’s still left the neighborhood a shambles, and as I walked around piles of aforementioned materials, a couple of gals from the new house were in the side yard, and the first one who saw me waved, and a few moments later a second one twenty feet down the street happily working in the yard greeted me with a cheery: “Hello!”

I gave them rather dirty looks, as I was walking around all the crap deposited on the city steps and sidewalks from their home. At least I didn’t start flailing my arms wildly to point out all the crap wrought by their new home and never cleaned up for years now. They’ll probably never figure out why I was unfriendly, or how often I’ve fruitlessly called the “helpline” to complain about their construction workers’ scummy behavior, and I’ll never tell. And BTW, their house, like most of the new builds around here, is rather intentionally ugly.

Because of you, neighbor, foreign job thieves and American scoundrels invaded my neighborhood and treated residents like dirt who they could wantonly abuse, and you in the end paid them well for it. You didn’t know? It’s no excuse; the scoundrels still haven’t vacated entirely, but you have your loveshack.

These homebuyers helped unscrupulous developers and contractors and local zoning officials, illegal tax-dodging foreign workers, and abusive pig farmers/part-time contractors from outside Smokytown to turn my neighborhood into a racket of construction sites, supply depots and debris sites, for close to four years (to ease logistics to redevelop other properties blocks away, increasing the disruption radius).

That means the roar of heavy machinery for years, and a noisy (with heavy machinery and terrible music) jobsite used for three-and-a-half years but not being actually built on for half that time. Complaining to the city’s “helpline” invites abuse.

The other day as I walked by Palazzo Plastico, one construction worker repeatedly called in a fine Hervé Villiechaize impression (I think it was actually his version of English). I didn’t respond.

It’s cause and effect: these homes are made for obliviously rich buyers, who don’t care who’s being abused and how many lawbreakers are being enriched so they can have a city palace. If they weren’t a willing market, we wouldn’t still have an illegal mini supply depot in our neighborhood today.

As Daniel Goleman pointed out, rich people often just care less, compared to poorer folks who depend more on others to survive.

I don’t care for the new neighbors’ attitude. And I care less every day for my lifelong home, Smokytown.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.