Originaly posted on NextDoor on May 10
They still call Pompano Beach “Florida’s Warmest Welcome.” Yesterday I discovered that the welcome extends well beyond Pompano Beach, across Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and apparently several zip codes that have never met each other but share the exact same neighbor. You know the one.
If you missed yesterday’s post that started all of this, you can find it here: https://nextdoor.com/p/9kYz-THK7pKX?utm_source=share&extras=NDU2ODA1MDg%3D&utm_campaign=1778451232762&share_action_id=6c001931-dad9-4bd5-8acf-0637b2cc1a53
Yesterday I wrote about noise in the neighborhood. I expected a few people to relate and move on with their evening. Instead, the post traveled across South Florida, ironically, like sound through a residential neighborhood on a Tuesday evening. Many of you read it and nodded along from your own backyards, patios, and guest rooms. You are not alone. There are many of us. We are everywhere. We are exhausted. We should organize. It would be extremely quiet. Nobody would hear us coming.
Then the replies came.
The overwhelming majority of you related immediately and completely. Neighbors from across Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade who have been quietly losing their minds and waiting for someone to document it publicly. To all of you, welcome. Pull up a chair. Tonight’s entertainment has already been selected and as usual nobody asked.
Then came the problem solvers.
A small but extraordinarily committed percentage arrived not with recognition, but with remedies. Move to a 55+ community. The quiet person leaves, the loud person wins, noise pollution takes a victory lap with a commemorative t-shirt. Move to a forest, a desert, the Midwest, a monastery. By final count I’ve been advised to relocate to three separate ecosystems, an entire geographic region, and an institution with a formal vow of silence. Which, at this point sounds less like a punishment and more like a sales pitch. Buy earplugs. Buy a white noise machine. And the crown jewel, become nocturnal. Someone genuinely suggested I restructure my entire sleep schedule around the neighborhood’s entertainment calendar. I considered it. Genuinely. That is how far this comment thread took me. And also, in case anyone needs it spelled out, a deeply troubling indicator of where we are as a society.
Now, one reader arrived armed with a Google search establishing that Pompano Beach qualifies as a mid-sized to large city, presented as though population density and municipal zoning are the same conversation. They are not. Every city on earth regardless of size separates entertainment districts from single family residential neighborhoods on purpose. That decision was planned, legislated, and enforced by people who understood that “everyone lives somewhere” is not a noise policy. It is a statement of geography. Nothing more.
The same reader then delivered what she clearly believed was her unanswerable closing argument. Suggesting I contact someone about the air show noise currently affecting me here in Pompano Beach. The Fort Lauderdale Air Show. Named after Fort Lauderdale. Which is not Pompano Beach. Two cities. Two names. On a map. That is free. Much like Google, the results of which we have apparently been reading very differently.
She entered with population statistics. Missed zoning entirely. Accidentally used her own quiet residential street as a perfect illustration of my argument without appearing to notice. And closed with an air show located in a different city as her knockout punch. That is not a collection of errors. That is an odyssey. With layovers.
Since several people in this thread appear to have read a completely different post than the one I wrote, allow me to clarify. Nobody here suggested neighbors should be silent. Nobody requested a noise curfew. Nobody asked anyone to cancel a party, turn off their music, or stop enjoying their backyard. Have a party. Have several. Play music. Watch television. Do it daily. The only request, as radical as it apparently seems, is that you do it at a volume your own ears can reach without requiring everyone within a three block radius to participate whether they’d like to or not. That’s it. That is the entire ask.. And yet. Here we are.
Here is the part nobody has said out loud. A small percentage of people are running the entire show for everyone else. The majority of neighbors are perfectly decent. They have the occasional party. They play music. They live their lives without once requiring their neighbors to also live their lives for them. But that small percentage…loud, consistent, and burdened by absolutely zero self-awareness…sets the tone for the whole neighborhood. And the rest of us? We adapt. We go inside earlier. We close the windows. We surrender the backyard. We find the guest room. We stop calling it a problem and start calling it Tuesday. And the person making the noise never changes a single thing. It’s a beautiful system. For one of us.
One person in this thread left her dream home because of it. Not due to a financial crisis. Not due to a job relocation. The noise became unbearable, nobody did anything about it, and she left. The people causing the problem stayed. That is the math nobody wants to do out loud. And to the reader whose neighbor actually said, out loud, with apparent sincerity, that they could do whatever they wanted because they pay taxes: taxes fund the roads. The schools. And the noise ordinance that apparently never showed up when you needed it most. I’d want a refund.
For Pompano Beach residents, there is good news that requires no packing. No need to to move to a forest or monastery. After working with city leadership through 2025, the noise ordinance was amended in January of this year. Enforcement no longer relies entirely on BSO showing up, being interested, and following through. As we know, that was never what anyone would describe as a guaranteed three step process. Not a perfect solution. But a real one.
And for everyone else, noise ordinances exist in every municipality. Every city. Every town. And despite what many appear to believe, they are not a 10PM proposition. They apply all day. Every day. Noon on a Saturday is not an exemption. A really good playlist is not an exemption. Write your city commissioners. Call BSO. File the complaint even when it feels pointless. Especially when it feels pointless. Make noise about the noise. Because the people causing it are certainly not going to advocate for your right to sit quietly in your own backyard. That part is on us. And if enough of us do it consistently, persistently, and with the same relentless energy our neighbors bring to a Wednesday evening, we might just get our neighborhoods back.
To everyone who submitted chapters I missed…the AirBnB charter bus unloading forty people for a pool party, you didn’t buy a house next door, you accidentally purchased a timeshare in someone else’s vacation, and nobody disclosed that at closing. The car alarm triggered every three hours all night with what can only be described as deliberate precision, you win this entire thread. The floodlights converting every neighboring backyard into a police interrogation scene after dark because nothing completes a peaceful evening under the stars quite like someone else’s motion sensor. The rest of you know who you are. The adult film production. The DJ who never let a song finish. The Sunday leaf blowers. The modified mufflers. The pre-teen containment facility. And the chickens. I left an entire agricultural chapter unwritten and I owe everyone affected a formal apology. You were seen. You were heard. Unfortunately, so were your neighbors.
Not everyone will relate to any of this. Some neighborhoods still operate on a basic social contract. The quiet, unspoken understanding that other people exist and have an equal claim to their own peace. I’ve heard these places exist. People speak of them in hushed, reverent tones. This post was not written for those people. It was written for the rest of us. The specific, exhausted, and apparently enormous community of South Florida residents who have accepted that the evening’s programming has been chosen for them, that the volume was not up for discussion, and that María’s relationship status is no longer any of their business but somehow became all of their problem.
Who needs peace and quiet when the neighborhood has already decided collectively, enthusiastically, and without a single vote cast in your favor that you are all one household now? You didn’t apply. You didn’t interview. You were assigned. But María has not gone back to Rodrigo. The bass is warming up as you read this. And Florida’s Warmest Welcome shows absolutely no signs of cancellation.
We found each other. In a neighborhood this loud, that is genuinely no small thing.
Stay tuned. My next “verbose diatribe” will address South Florida’s other great residential art forms. The front yard converted entirely into a parking lot, the backyard paved into smooth uninterrupted concrete, and the camper installed on the property with its own quietly rotating cast of paying renters. The neighborhood as a business venture. Nobody applied to live next to a parking facility either. And yet. Here we are.
