Neighbor Is Letting A Homeless Encampment Be Created In Their Backyard

So to start. We live next to a corner lot, and the house next to the corner on the other side is letting homeless people live in their backyard. Our backyard and their backyard share about 20 feet of fence separating the two lots. There is no HOA, but it’s a suburban neighborhood in Florida.

This has been going on for a while, where our neighbor has been letting homeless people live in the shed in his backyard. We have sucked it up and dealt with it for a year or two. We tried hard to not make waves and create enemies. Honestly, I know it must be hard for the homeless and even though I would rather they not be there, I made a real effort to fight my NIMBY urges. However, things escalated a few months ago, and I’m done. It started with homeless people from all over the area coming by and hanging around their front yard chopping up bicycles. When the neighbors complained about that they moved their operation to the back yard.

Soon after that complaint (that our name was not on) they threw shit over the fence. Literal human shit, on paper towels, with their toilet paper. We called the cops, and they basically told us there is nothing they can do. If we don’t have it on camera, it’s just “he said she said”. The officer let us know he is familiar with the house and was reluctant but finally we talked him into talking to them. As soon as he showed up, we hear multiple people dart out the back gate into the woods. Then we heard the homeowner go into the back yard where there was very colorful language about us.

Without making this post too long some bullet points I still should touch on:

• We have also had multiple instances of trash being thrown in our yard from them. (as well the feces)

• Twice we have found human feces in our front yard. We can’t prove it was them, but I mean who else?

• Our neighbors and I have called the city ordinance because the home looks like an episode of hoarders. They are attempting to address the hoarding situation but are making no effort in the fact that there is an active homeless encampment in the backyard. Their efforts to address the hoarding are minimal at best. They basically just check once every other week to see if they threw trash away that week. If they try to go into the back yard, they have to show up with a police escort and a warrant. They have only done this once.

• The homeless are not allowed to go inside the house, so we suspect they are using the bathroom in the preserve behind our houses. It smells like urine back there and in our yard now.

• There is a bunch of trash in that preserve now.

• There were a couple OD deaths at the address before we moved here.

• The cops suspect 2 of the people living back there are selling fentanyl.

• We haven’t found needles, but our neighbors say they have seen them around their yard.

• We have now had to call the cops for a fist fight. When the cops showed up, they were not “allowed in the backyard”. The couple suspected of selling fentanyl darted into the woods behind our house. I have it all on camera. The cops didn’t even care to look at it, let alone step back there. The homeless told the cops to go fuck themselves and go away. The cops basically did that.

• They will periodically have a bunch of bicycles around that they are “recycling”. (aka stealing and chopping them up for scrap).

• When we called the city and complained we were told that yes, you are not allowed to live in a shed in a backyard, however we are never told what to do about it. If we call the cops, the cops show up, the homeowner says they live in the house not the back yard, and then that’s that. The homeless have never stepped foot inside the house. I have them on grainy camera back there all day and night. (I am working on getting a better security camera that isn’t Wi-Fi)

I am running out of ideas at this point. My wife is afraid to even use our backyard now, and we can't even let our dog play back there because we don't know what they will throw over the fence next.