When your neighbour is also your tormentor
The constant harassment and intimidation that comes over the fence every day is driving a New Plymouth family to despair.
The abuse ranges from the annoying to the downright scary. It never stops.
At one end of the scale, the neighbour gets her leaf blower out and blows leaves from all along the street on to the family’s driveway. Every morning.
But that’s just the petty stuff. The majority of the harassment is a lot more sinister.
She performs sexual acts in her window, yells obscene abuse across the fence, and has followed her neighbour as he walked his children to primary school, filming the whole way.
And nobody will do anything about it. John, for whom the Taranaki Daily News has chosen to use a pseudonym for safety reasons, thought things would improve when Housing Minister Chris Bishop said the Government would crack down on disruptive Kāinga Ora tenants. But nothing has changed.
So New Plymouth District councillor Sam Bennett, who has been trying to help the family for months, contacted New Plymouth MP David MacLeod, of the National Party.
“I went and met with David. Nothing. Just hopeless,” Bennett said.
Last week there was a glimmer of hope, when the neighbour was arrested after verbally abusing John and exposing herself to him outside on the street. But, a few hours later, she was home – and everything started up again.
Over the years, John has tried to help the woman when she had issues with the police, but then she turned on him and his family. She needs help, he says.
And so do his family, which is why he is talking about the situation. There is nowhere else to go.
What they have to deal with is deeply disturbing, John says.
“Where the fence is now, there used to be a hedge. She chopped it down really low – in places, it was pretty much nothing. She then went and put a paddling pool there, and then she’d get naked in the paddling pool and splash around. She’d wait for my wife to go out in the backyard.”
Police told them that because it was happening on private property, it wasn’t criminal, he says.
“She set up a bed in her kitchen area. There are bifold windows that look into her backyard and across into mine. She was flashing me, and would lie on the bed and do all sorts of things to herself.”
John and his wife have banned their children from playing on one side of their house. They walk them to school the long way around, and are constantly shielding them from the disgusting comments coming from next door.
“My 6-year-old doesn’t need to deal with that. It’s not acceptable,” he says.
“It’s really nasty and ongoing. And I don’t know what her limit is. She’s so volatile. We can’t get protection from anyone.”
The police don’t always come if John calls them, because of the risk that the neighbour will “go off’’ and things will get worse.
After he and his wife complained to police about their neighbour masturbating and flashing them, she made a complaint against them that she sent to police and other organisations, including Kāinga Ora and Oranga Tamariki, he says.
He believes that if their neighbour were a man, that person would have been arrested and moved long ago. Because the neighbour is a woman, the issue isn’t being treated with such gravity, he says.
“The stress is huge. We finally had enough in January, and asked for the fence. It went up just before Easter.”
Kāinga Ora put up the fence, but the Crown agency has not done anything else to help, John says.
“Generally, what happens is they go, ‘We’re working on it’. If you get a response.”
The advice from police was to put up security cameras. And every time John goes outside or to his neighbour’s side of the house, he sets his phone to record because he doesn’t know what she’ll accuse him of, and he needs proof of what is occurring.
The Taranaki Daily News has listened to some of the recordings of the obscene abuse that has been yelled across the fence. It has seen an email trail of complaints to Kāinga Ora and requests for help, for both the agency’s tenant and the family.
But, despite the overwhelmingly unacceptable behaviour, the family say nothing is happening.
John and his wife are considering moving, but the school is good and they have other family living nearby. And would they get a good price for their house?
“The relentless stress ... we’re powerless to do anything about it. People we thought would help can’t or won’t.
“We want our kids to be independent and we want them to be safe and walk to school. But we can’t trust they can walk out the gate safely by themselves now.”
Other people in the street have also had issues with the neighbour, who was jailed a few years ago for relentlessly abusing neighbours in a different part of town.
Another neighbour says they watched John’s family being tormented.
It’s really appalling, he says, adding that she is winding everyone up on purpose.
For years, she put her stereo out the window, blasting the neighbourhood with loud music. So they’d call noise control, but it only ever brought brief respite.
And he also wrote to Kāinga Ora, which got him nowhere. “It’s like banging your head on a rock.”
Bennett agrees. He accompanied John to a meeting with Kāinga Ora, which he says was a waste of time.
“Nobody’s been listening. What needs to happen for somebody to take notice?”
Neighbours consistently put in complaints to the council, he says.
“She absolutely destroyed the footpath, she dug up the berm, she cut down the council tree in the front. She had signs on the poles that were very inappropriate, so I have been dealing with that stuff because I can,” Bennett says.
“Eviction is the ultimate outcome, but we want to see her in the right care.”
Yesterday, MacLeod said his office had been in correspondence with Kāinga Ora regarding the case, and would continue to do so.
Earlier this year, Bishop announced that he expected Kāinga Ora to end its sustaining tenancies framework. “This framework has allowed tenants to stay living in a state house no matter how threatening or disruptive their behaviour, or how much damage they cause to the property. In 2023, this meant that only three tenancies were ended due to disruptive behaviour.”
Graeme Broderick, Kāinga Ora’s regional director for Taranaki, Whanganui and Manawatū, said the agency didn’t expect people to put up with situations like John’s, and it had been working to address the disruptive behaviour.
“While we can’t talk about the specific actions we have taken, for privacy reasons, we can assure you that we are using the tools available to us as a landlord under the Residential Tenancies Act, and are working to get a resolution as quickly as possible.”
“Nobody’s been listening. What needs to happen for somebody to take notice?”
Sam Bennett, New Plymouth District councillor