Question:
Our apartment in Israel is next to a car ramp that leads in turn to an underground car park for project residents. We were assured verbally by the developer that the ramp would not be noisy and the ramp per se is not noisy. However, the ramp has two water drainage canals. Each canal is covered by iron grates. Every time a car passes over the grates, we hear the noise in our living room even when the windows are closed and even when using the air conditioning. We also used to hear the noise in our bedroom. However, at significant personal expense, I moved a bathroom to the wall closest to the grates. This muffles the noise but imperfectly. In order to eliminate the noise in the bedroom completely I have to turn on the air conditioner if only in fan mode. Leaving the windows to the bedroom open is impossible because of the noise.The grates are noisy because they are not attached to the sides of the water canal so that they can be lifted out to clean the canal every few months. There are perfect solutions to this noise problem including a grate system that connects to the side of the canal that can be unscrewed. In fact, the city put such a system in the canal on a public street on the other side of our building. There is no noise there. The cost of this system including instillation is around 15,000 shekels for one canal. We pay the vaad bayit a significant amount beyond the norm (706 shekels a month) to take care of the building, including cleaning the canals and fixing problems that arise to the building. They hired a management company for this. So far the vaad bayit has refused to do the work to eliminate the noise because of the expense. This is complicated by the fact that access to the ramp will be given to two other buildings currently under construction (owned by a different developer). The vaad wants to wait until these buildings are finished and populated in order to share the costs. Meanwhile I have been suffering from the noise and it is very unclear if the other builder will fact be willing to share the costs (according to my vaad). I would like my vaad bayit to solve the problem now by puting in a proper noiseless grating system. This whole noise problem is seriously affecting our quality of life. What are my halachic options?
Answer:
Answer from Orav Y. Fleishman shlit”a
I would think you should start with the developer and force him to pay since he promised you that it would be solved.
Best wishes
