So, my wife and I have been really struggling with our neighbor situation lately. We live in a decent area and a nicer neighborhood; however, the house next to ours is extremely problematic. Rather than take you through the entire backstory of the last year (which is a complete sh**show), I'll just quickly list some of the issues that we're dealing with:
- It's a known drug house (low-level stuff like weed), and several of them have had recent drug charges, including in the past week;
- They're now considered a "nuisance property" per our city's Criminal Activity Nuisance Ordinances (CANO), and the landlord will now be charged each time the police have to come to the property, which is a lot;
- In the last two years, they have a rap sheet of (literally) over 30 pages worth of instances where police and/or EMS have had to report to their house for complaints or emergency calls;
- They lack any type of social awareness or common courtesy, as they regularly play basketball in the street bouncing balls off of parked cars, running in other people's yards, yelling and screaming outside in the middle of the night, etc.;
- They CONSTANTLY fight and curse at each other outside or have music blaring to the point of the police being called, and on at least three occasions one or more of them have been arrested for disorderly conduct;
- On several occasions we've watched the daughter punch her boyfriend outside, along with the boyfriend threatening the other neighbors, and once one of their arguments spilled over into our yard with the daughter trying to come into our house out of fear of her boyfriend;
- This weekend my car was struck as one of them was fighting with his girlfriend, who sped off and struck my car parked on the side of the street at 4 am in the morning.
And this is only the half of it with many other things happening the year before we moved here. The local councilwoman and police department are actively trying to get these people evicted; however, the landlord is an older lady who has the rent paid to a living trust with an associated lawyer that we cannot locate. So we're kind of stuck at the moment with no recourse for eviction.
But this is all beside the main point of this post - the care of their two children, a two year old boy and a seventh month old boy. The main issue that gives us concern is the fact that they let their two year old boy run around naked outside virtually everyday, regardless of the temperatures, and this is in a suburb with at least fifty houses on our street on a fairly busy street. We've seen him outside naked in both July in 100 degrees weather and November in 30 degrees weather.
Beyond the whole issue of modesty and the appropriateness of a toddler running around outside naked, we've only seen the kid in diapers a couple of times, and we highly suspect that they simply don't put diapers on him, let alone the actual baby, which is probably due to none of them having a job (and they openly brag about this).
In addition to this, their house is in terrible condition, and my wife, who once took them some of our old baby clothes, says that the inside is even worse and extremely filthy.
So we really don't know what to do here. Obviously, we find it very strange that anyone would let their toddler run around naked outside in full view of probably hundreds of people, but we're a bit unsure if the other issues that we've experienced with them are clouding our judgment. We're seriously considering calling CPS on them, as I seriously question whether that is a safe environment for those kids given all of these issues with substandard care, drug use, violence, and potentially inappropriate parenting decisions.
What does everyone else think; what would you do in this situation? Also, any general advice for dealing with this issue would be appreciated. I'm finishing out the second year of my postdoctoral fellowship with anywhere from 4 to 9 months before moving and taking a more permanent job, so we're simply trying to "tough it out" rather than going through the hassle of moving once again. So any practical recommendations would be greatly appreciated.