Do good flower boxes make good neighbors?

There's a bit of a construction boom going on in Theresa's (that's what we're calling her here) neighborhood. Once a quiet, tightly knit neighborhood on the outskirts of a relatively small city, it had recently been discovered by a new generation of buyers and developers looking to invest in the next hot city neighborhood. By virtue of having been born and raised there, Theresa had discovered the neighborhood long ago.

Some of the activity has involved people buying older homes in a new neighborhood for themselves. Other activity has resulted from developers buying older properties and either renovating them and flipping them to sell or knocking them down and building larger, more modern units to sell.

While the activity has driven up the value of most of the houses in the neighborhood, including Theresa's, it's also resulted in a lot of noise and construction traffic during the week and often on weekends. Theresa says she will be happy when the activity dies down.

For about a year, developers have been working on a multi-family house behind Theresa's house. The backs of the two houses share a private road, along with four or five other houses. Most of the homeowners keep their trash cans out back and don't pay nearly as much attention to how the area looks as they do with the area in front of their houses.

But the developers next door are hoping to charge a premium price for the units behind Theresa's house and they're not sure prospective buyers are going to love the idea of looking out onto random trash cans and old porch stoops.

"The developer asked if he could attach a flower box to the railing of my back porch," Theresa says. He's indicated that he'd pay to have the flower box attached and also planted with flowers once it's installed. Apparently, according to Theresa, he's asked the owners of other houses on that shared road the same thing.

"I don't want to be a bad neighbor," says Theresa. "But I don't want to have a flower box out there that I have to keep up all the time. It's where I keep my trash." As long as the trash is neatly secured, Theresa says she doesn't care as much how it looks behind her house as she cares about the lawn and gardens in the front and side yards.

"He did offer to pay for it," she says. "But would it be wrong to decline his offer?"

Of course it wouldn't be wrong to decline his offer. It's her house and the right thing is to decide what to do and what not to do to it, regardless of who pays. It's not Theresa's or her neighbors' responsibility to tidy up so the developer next door can get top dollar for his new units.

But if Theresa or any of her neighbors always wanted a flower box for their back stoop, there'd be nothing wrong with seizing the opportunity to have someone else pay to install it and to plant the first round of flowers, knowing they would be footing the bill for any flowers to come. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

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