Be very quiet in Palm Springs

Recently we took a quick and almost spontaneous trip to Palm Springs (I had some flight credits that were expiring and had to use them by September 5). We’ve been a number of times before, and why not, Palm Springs is great! There are a lot of retirees, a lot of gays, a lot of gay retirees, and a LOT of rental houses with pools. It’s also very hot! Last weekend it got up to around 104 on Saturday.

If you’ve ever rented a place there, you’ve been alerted to the Palm Spring Noise Ordinance, usually by a sternly-worded sign in the rental that says something like this:

Our rental sported this outdoor sign:

Yikes! The rule, as guests are informed, is that you can ABSOLUTELY NOT PLAY ANY MUSIC OUTSIDE AT ANY TIME, DAY OR NIGHT. I tried researching the history of this draconian rule but didn’t find much. I’m sure that retired homeowners in PS got sick of vacationers bumping tunes by the pool all day and night and finally made it illegal.

A couple of things about this ordinance. I looked up the actual law and technically it’s not illegal to play music outside. Instead, the ordinance sets a decibel level you can’t exceed in residential areas and that level is between 50 and 60 decibels, depending on how dense the residential area is and the time of day. “50 dB is as loud as a quiet conversation, a quiet suburb, a quiet office, or a quiet refrigerator.” So basically if you can hear the sound at the property line, it’s illegal. And since most revelers don’t travel with a dB meter, it’s easier just to say “no music outdoors ever” than “Just keep it below 50 dB.”

Now I am of two minds about this. First of all, I HATE being bothered by neighbor noise and I have a long history of being driven crazy by loud apartment neighbors. I am not proud of this. It is just who I am. Past incidents included:

• Hearing weird chanting and banging through my ceiling and going upstairs to knock on my neighbor’s door and when they opened the door I could see a bunch of people with only candlelight. No idea what was going on there, but it possibly involved human sacrifice. Don’t care, just do your sacrifice more quietly.

• A downstairs neighbor absolutely BLASTING “Flight of the Bumblebee” while I was studying for law school finals. Insane behavior.

• Downstairs tweens who blasted heavy metal when their mother left them along for AN ENTIRE WEEKEND

So you can see that I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who has had to live next door to a bunch of White Claw-addled mouth breathers rocking the Chainsmokers on a loop while jumping into their rental pool.

But I also noticed a weird effect: normally I couldn’t give a shit if I could or couldn’t play music outside. I’ve had rental houses with hot tubs, for example, and I wasn’t moved to set up a speaker and relax to ambient or whale sounds or what have you. BUT as soon as I learned I couldn’t play music outside OH GOD NO why can’t I listen to my tunes poolside? This vacation is ruined!

Anyway, I’ve never seen another ordinance this strict anywhere else. I would love to know the story of how it came into being. (OK, love/hate relationship is a little strong - maybe I have a love/meh relationship with it.)

San Francisco, by contrast, has a hilariously vague noise ordinance:

Wait, does this mean no human or animal noise is allowed between 10 pm and 7 am? If so, I was wrong and it’s WAY more restrictive than Palm Springs.

No, of course not. The actual residential noise ordinance reads:

(1) No person shall produce or allow to be produced by any machine, or device, music or entertainment or any combination of same, on residential property over which the person has ownership or control, a noise level more than five dBA above the ambient at any point outside of the property plane.

(2) No person shall produce or allow to be produced by any machine, or device, music or entertainment or any combination of same, on multi-unit residential property over which the person has ownership or control, a noise level more than five dBA above the local ambient three feet from any wall, floor, or ceiling inside any dwelling unit on the same property, when the windows and doors of the dwelling unit are closed, except within the dwelling unit in which the noise source or sources may be located.

So you can’t make any moise more than 5 dBs above the “ambient,” which is also defined in a very technical way we won’t get into. I would hazard a guess that any time you can hear your neighbor’s music in your apartment, they’re in violation. Good luck getting that enforced!