Some would say that blocking someone’s driveway with your car is being a bigger dick 
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Have had one block mine just one time. Soooo wanted to call it in… It also appeared to be a “guest” of the neighbor who started the fire. And they have also left trash in the grass by the sidewalk in front of my house.
Honorable mention is consistently blocking the sidewalks, but blocking the driveway is much worse.
I think most would agree that blocking someone’s driveway with your car is being an enormous dick, inconveniencing them, and making them have to call to get it towed and wait for the tow to occur before getting to leave their garage.
The other side of the equation is – you did something wrong and paid a consequence (blocked a driveway, got towed).
Compared to – you did nothing wrong and paid a consequence (living my normal life, and someone blocks me into my driveway preventing me from leaving)
There are some “retirement age” HOA communities I’ve seen where they are regular houses covered by an HOA and you have to be 55 years old to buy into it.
I wonder if there’s a legal work around where I have my elderly parents buy the property and I just live there. Assuming I’m not a dick, the neighbors probably won’t mind. And since I want a quiet place without fireworks, barking dogs, screaming children, or loud music, it might be exactly where I want to live.
I’m actually surprised more people in their 20s to 50s don’t want to live in a place without barking dogs, screaming children, fireworks or loud music? My only guess is those people either have a higher tolerance for shutting out obnoxious noises, or they want to partake in reproduction, pyrotechnics and loud disco themselves.
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I’ve never lived anywhere that I’d even know that my neighbor was smoking in their back yard. See them, sure, hear them, maybe, but not smell them.
Beware airports. Even in a very well insulated house with triple-pane windows, you will hear planes. Moreso on humid days. Depending on prevailing winds, you may smell the kerosene or even feel the rumble of takeoff rolls.
Aircraft exhaust is very sooty and all that soot falls onto whatever is in the path. Decks, skylights, outdoor furniture, solar panels, etc.
Most en-route air traffic overflies airports, so you will likely hear some of that traffic. If you live near a military base, the aircraft noise can be much louder, but it isn’t as constant as a commercial airport.
In the country, think about utilities—electricity is often first to go out and last to be restored. No city water or sewer, so that means well and septic tank or cesspool. Internet, cable/OTA TV, and cell service can be spotty.
Country acreage can also cost a lot more to insure since there are usually no fire hydrants and limited fire-fighting water sources. First responders take longer to get there.
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Some (if not most) of the 55 and better communities have covenants that severely restrict under-age occupants. Unless you can prove some sort of disability, you generally can visit for X number of days, but usually can’t live there full time.
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Avoid living in the poor part of town. No offense to the poor people… but if given an option I doubt they’d chose to live their either.
I’d think most of the common neighbor type problems aren’t really specific to homeowners. apartment dwellers aren’t immune from fireworks, barking dogs, screaming kids, 2nd hand smoke, etc. Of course a renter can just pick up and easily move.
I assume you are single no kids or plans?
I grew up on 3 acres outside of town and that size lot was plenty sufficient to avoid any neighbor conflicts that I can remember or think of. Id think a larger lot say ~1 acre in the suburbs might work great, but those often come at a premium.
Vdeltachi mentioned airports. I live 10-20 miles from the airport but we seem to be under the flight path so we get planes going over pretty regular and they aren’t quiet. You get used to it and I can’t hear them inside. But if you’re buying look out for that.
Our current lot is pretty small and lots of houses packed in, however we have a newer built house only ~6 years old and I can’t hear much of any noise from outside. A newer house can be a lot better insulated to outside noise. Also can’t hear the planes indoors at all.
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Lots of great comments already. There are no certainties. Neighborhoods change over time and so can the noise/nuisance levels. We’ve lived in our home for 22 years in a development, no HOA. The development was still a work-in-progress when we built here. In that time, the neighborhood has gone from a mix of young families with toddlers (including us) and elderly retirees (who mainly bought the ranches w/o basements), to middle-aged families with older teens/young adults (including us) and elderly retirees.
Toddlers make noise, young kids make noise, teenagers make noise, all at different levels, some grating on the nerves, other levels easier to tune out. (Try listening to a basketball bouncing for hours, literally. But, it’s legal around here to put up a basketball hoop by the road, which 2 neighbors did, right across from each other, making their own mini-basketball court in the roadway. Which attracted every teenage male in the neighborhood whenever the temp was above 50 degrees. Every day.) When they become young adults with jobs/college, perhaps moving away in time, that’s when the noise level can become next-to-nothing. Until the family with the now-grown kids moves away and a new family with young kids moves in. It’s just part of a normal neighborhood cycle.
Unless you also live next to the neighborhood babysitter with a built-in swimming pool and outdoor trampoline, in which case, there’s always a certain noise level, except when it’s hot enough for me to have the windows shut and the AC on. And that’s something that you can’t really find out about ahead of time, especially when you’re house hunting during cold weather and most everyone stays indoors.
We’re on our 4th neighbor in the house in back of us. A nice retired couple. No noise unless he’s cutting grass, edging, weed whacking, just normal stuff. The people before him, an utter nightmare. Constantly barking dog that got on several of the neighbor’s nerves. He was a landscaper with his own business who let his own property go to trash. (The retired couple have fixed it up and appear to take care of it well.) He’d start chainsawing wood at 11 PM. Noise ordinances be damned. Around here the police are too short-staffed to bother with stuff like that. The neighbors before him were a nice family and the original owner was a single guy who we hardly ever saw or heard.
Fireworks are a big thing around here. You know the 4th of July is coming a couple of weeks in advance. And Memorial Day. And New Years Day. And…you get the picture.
The last neighborhood I lived in was older, although still a mix of young families and elderly people who’d spent their entire lives there. A couple of young kids, around 3 or 4 years old, lived on either side of us. They’d run through our yard back and forth to each other’s houses. I had to yell at them one time when I caught them walking on our garage roof. I caught a couple of different kids flicking lighters in back of the garage of my elderly neighbor’s house once. The neighbors 2 doors down revved motorcycles quite often.
It doesn’t matter if it’s an established neighborhood, built several decades ago, no fences, no swimming pools, with neighborhood playgrounds for the kids to play at, or a newer neighborhood where every other neighbor has a 6 foot privacy fence, above-ground or in-ground swimming pool, basketball hoop, and backyard play sets. Point being, again, there are no certainties. Neighbors are not set in stone. You will have noise. You’ll learn to adjust. 
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Properties right under the flight path and close to the airport usually have depressed value and include higher density, cheaper rentals. There are exceptions, of course (like Newport Beach, CA).
Before I bought my current home I made a map with the following information overlaid to reduce the search area:
- hospitals, fire and police stations: noise.
- industrial zones, military airports, freeways, street traffic: noise & pollution.
- flight paths for all nearby airports: noise, pollution, … debris?
- high voltage power lines & radio/cellular towers: tinfoil hat cook brain.
- water / sewage processing plants: ew!
- flood zones: flood insurance.
- geological fault lines and liquefaction zones: earthquake insurance.
- school rankings: better neighborhoods.
- schools: noise (I want to be in the right neighborhood, but not so close).
- this one I thought of later: churches with a bell tower (noise).
And that’s just for the neighborhood. The property itself had separate requirements. I have yet to meet anyone who cared as much , which is surprising, considering that this is one of the biggest decisions people make.
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I could see all that if one were retired or unemployed. Most of that has no choice if one doesn’t want an absurd commute time. I just put a ~10 minute radius around work and then removed the 95% crappy neighborhoods within and not much was left.
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or WFH…
I’ve thought of one thing regarding smoke – find a property that doesn’t have nearby neighbors upwind. I have a neighbor on a north-east street corner, and the breeze is usually from the south-west. He has nothing blocking the breeze, so his house cools down much faster and is always a few degrees cooler than mine. I guess any smoke from neighbors has more distance to dissipate before reaching his house.
I had an airport house for a while near BNA. It had such serious windows that you couldn’t hear it at all inside. And outside wasn’t something I cared about. I also wouldn’t open the windows unless the house was burning down, due to living in areas that vacillated between trailer trash hot and cold except for a few months of the year.
The big problem is with all of this is it’s going to vary depending on what hours you keep. If you’re a bartender who works at night, normal daytime kids playing and lawn care is a nightmare, but late night parties are a non issue. Opposite if you work during the day.
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Alternative view: They’ve got lots of grandkids to visit, and the parents do less parenting on vacation. The rock music may not be as loud, but their NPR and Rush Limbaugh are so loud that you can hear it with their car windows up. Also, their conversations are really loud. Oh, with older people, the fireworks are a little different - more bodily function related. 
The explanation that I see most frequently is that their fireworks, children, and music aren’t a problem. It’s everyone else who can’t keep the noise down.
I could be wrong since I’ve never lived in a 55+ community, but I imagine grand children visiting is rare. At least because I always hear old people complain they never get visitors.
And I would rather NPR and Rush Limbaugh be loud than Hip Hop music because there’s so much bass in the music that you can feel it through your windows and drywall, whereas talk radio lacks the bass.]
Good point on the issue being people always think it’s other people’s stuff that’s a problem not theres. Like if you block your neighbors driveawy with your car and it gets towed, your neighbor is the asshole 
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I should elaborate. Yes, we (my husband) were clearly in the wrong for blocking it by 2’, but it was sort of our last straw with this neighbor, between the roosters and the frequent outside parties with amplified music.
He admitted he only did it because he didn’t recognize the car, and thought it belonged to an airbnber, and was profusely apologetic. He did offer free eggs.
Living in an urban area is a sort of give and take, I’d be within my rights to call the law over his noise transgressions, but I haven’t, in the interest of neighborhood harmony.
I’m still not seeing the connection as to how he was wrong for having your car towed.
The analogy would be like if I was dating a woman and she borrowed my car without permission but I let it go and kept dating her. Then she cheated on me but I let it go and kept dating her.
However, once I accidentally left the door open to the house when I left, her dog got loose, was hit by a car and then she bitched me out and demanded I pay $2k for a new dog. That was the last straw. How dare she bitch me out and make me pay $2k for accidentally leaving the door open! It was an accident! So I broke up with her.
That’s the same logic I see. Neighbor acts poorly once. Neighbor acts poorly twice. You accidentally block his driveway and neighbor acts reasonably (having it towed) but that was the last straw!
I think this goes to illustrate the cognitive bias referenced earlier in the thread. That no one thinks what they do is that bad, but always thinks if their neighbor does it (music, fireworks, screaming children, etc) it’s awful even when it’s the same thing.
I imagine it’s because people don’t want to see themselves as the ‘bad guy’ so they do mental gymnastics to make their actions appear less bad with various justifications. “It was an accident” “The music wasn’t that loud” “Kids will be kids” “Dogs will be dogs” etc
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He’s not wrong, I’m only explaining why I’m angry.
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