It was a day in late July or early August 2010. I had just completed the day’s work for the U.S. Census and I sat in my car by the side of a local country road. The sun was out and the weather was warm and I worked on my own, so life couldn’t get much better than this. My wife and I have lived in the Berkshires since 2005, first in a condo in Great Barrington. We came to the Berkshires as an escape from both the weather and politics of Florida and had worked for a combined total of 65 years in public education. I would soon start work as an instructor at a community college in a city in upstate New York and remain there for the next five years.
We needed more room for the visits of our growing family of several grandchildren, and when a house became available on the same road where I had completed census paperwork a year and a half earlier we bought it. We did not exercise what’s called due diligence and ignored a neighboring driveway about 20 feet from one of our property boundaries that led to a house above us. The idea of coming to a nuisance is at work here. If the nuisance is obvious when property is purchased, then the property owner is at a loss for remediation. The opposite is sometimes true when the nuisance appears after an owner takes possession of a property. Of interest in this situation is the fact that an entirely new additional roadway was built at the beginning of the newest of projects on the land above us, cutting an apple orchard roughly in half. There were two houses on that property, both close to each other. The three properties near ours are owned by out-of-state residents.
A series of either repairs or remodeling took place on the property above ours with an armada of work trucks going up and down the driveway at a constant flow for months over several years. One person completing dry wall work on our land asked how we could stand the bedlam.
But nothing, nothing, could prepare us for the assault of noise and traffic that would follow Thanksgiving Day 2022! Another major construction project involving the removal of that property’s pool and the building of a new pool began. Also, an addition began on the main building of the property. In the interim, between the multiple remodeling and repair jobs on the original two houses there, another two-story building had been built. But this was next to nothing compared with what was to come.
Libertarians might say that a person can do anything he/she wants with their land. That’s part of the so-called free market system—although the system is freer for some than for others. Those with lots of disposable income appear to be freer than most. Second homeowners are a boon to local communities because they don’t use public schools which come with a substantial tax price tag.
There was also the accelerated migration to the Berkshires during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. More people came to visit and more stayed. Traffic changed substantially during this period with the influx of people.
While out-of-state residents do pay local taxes with less use of most local services, income is not taxed at the state level. The latter can mean at least tens of thousands of dollars not paid to the state. My wife and I like the fact that we live in Massachusetts, a state with a high level, if not at the highest level, of social services coming from state income taxes. Some out-of-state residents live in states with no state income tax. The benefits from this are obvious.
The services offered by Massachusetts, such as schools, medical care, roads, etc., are what both local and state taxes pay for and what differentiates Massachusetts from many other states. I needed the help of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection last fall because of a small chemical spill on our property, and I got individual help with the issue every step of the way. That service would not have been available in many other states.
The daily bedlam now beside and above our property is unending. Keep in mind that we are fairly older people now, retired, and spend more of our time in and around our home. Hundreds of the huge construction trucks that are common on roads and highways pass close by our property Monday through Friday each week carrying many building materials. The trucks to which I refer have signs on their rear tailgates that read: “Do Not Follow: Construction Vehicle.” The work begins around seven each morning and continues until about five in the afternoon, creating noise and a gaggle of heavy machinery that I never thought could be a constant in a rural environment. When the trucks dump their contents of soil and sand about 50 yards from our property, the slamming shut of their tailgates is like a bomb going off. That alone has happened a countless number of times.
Some might say, well, this creates jobs for people. The constant sound of heavy equipment working on the property invades our home even with windows closed during these colder months. Since this building project began, I have seen the owners on the property only once and all the other properties near us that I mentioned have only weekend owners present and perhaps longer in the summer, so the area appears just as sedate and natural as it has in past years on weekends. A worker from the project told me that the work on that property will take lots of time to complete. He added that it will take many cement trucks to finish the swimming pool.
The buyer beware warning is obvious regarding the driveway that borders our property, but only a wizard could have predicted the continual bedlam we now see daily. The area in which we live has been transformed exponentially from the day when I sat in my car beside the road finishing the paperwork for the census.
