Residential home for troubled teens opening across the road

[Foxglove21]

Today we found out that a house directly across the road from us is being converted into a residential home for teenagers in care who have severe behavioural issues and are thus unsuitable for fostering.

We are absolutely devastated. We have only lived in our home one year; it was a big move for us as it was at the very top of our budget, which we have worked really hard to save for. It is in a quiet, small rural village which has 2 Ofsted outstanding schools and we have paid a premium for this. We have a toddler and another baby on the way, and sought a quiet village to move to, and were so excited and felt so lucky to have purchased our forever home to raise our family. In the past year we have spent thousands redecorating to make it our own.

The house across the street that is becoming the residential home was a regular 4-bed family home that has just been sold. We had no way of knowing this would happen when purchasing our house (we would never have bought it had it been there already). The new owners/the company who will run the home have not had to request planning permission for this change to the dwelling and so we were not consulted at all- we've just found out now via word-of-mouth from a contractor who has started to convert it.

We're extra concerned as this house is next door to an old and unused village police station which will inevitably also go up for sale soon. This would obviously now be a very unattractive purchase for a family and thus would no doubt become a second purchase to extend the residential home (and increasing the number of residents).

It seems a very unusual choice of location for such a home; as I mentioned it's a very small and quiet village with absolutely nothing recreational nearby to offer young people in their teens; there's one pub and one little shop. The house itself wasn't exactly cheap- £500k for a 4 bed house which requires conversion (we live up North, so that's definitely on the pricier end)- so it seems a very strange investment for them really. Our house has a large playing field and small playground for toddlers directly behind it and again I'm worried this will inevitably become the hangout for the residents as there is nowhere else for them to go.

Anyway, I guess I just partly wanted to rant as I've been in tears today about this as I feel our life savings/all our hard work are about to go down the drain and we're in for a miserable time.

But I also wondered if this has happened to anyone else, and if so what the reality was. We're expecting there to be a lot of anti-social behaviour and for all the surrounding house prices to plummet, but maybe we're overreacting?

From a quick google other peoples' experiences seem to rely largely on 1) the type of home it is/who will be living there, and 2) the reputation of the company running it... so it's not looking good for us :( We have 2 friends who coincidentally work in these types of homes and they have also suggested it could very likely cause us problems from their experiences.

I lived in a house behind a home for teenagers with behavioural problems and it was a nightmare.

Constant antisocial behaviour. Noise issues, shouting and screaming. Young teenagers out in the garden and back lane all night. Including the early hours.

Social workers and support staff would try and negotiate for them to go inside but failed all the time.

Loud music, drug paraphernalia, drunken behaviour. Overly sexual behaviour in broad daylight. It became a magnet for local youth with big groups gathering most nights.

I would call the home at 3am and ask if they could try to get their residents to go inside. They would say there was nothing they could do. They would come out and ask nicely. Be met with a torrid of abuse and go back inside. It was relentless.

The police were there constantly.

It was so bad we sold up and moved.

2 years later it was closed down.

I am sure there are some examples of lovely homes that are well run with no issues. A smaller home with 4 rooms will be a lot better than the one behind me that had 15 residents and insufficient staff to care for them.

I live in a “nice” village with no such children’s home. Even in the nice village there are teens out and about causing low level trouble, throwing chips at cars, kicking someone’s gate in, playing chicken with cars on the main rd, swearing at younger kids in the park. So with or without such a home you can expect such stuff, often from kids from nice families.

It’s always a risk when you buy a house, and I think you’re overreacting. Even if they extend surely it’ll be single-figure number of rooms. You could get local teenagers on the park anyway. It’s not like they’re building an adults halfway house or something.

We bought a house next door to a residential home for 3 children between the ages of 3 and 13. There would also be 2 staff to each child, so potentially 6 cars, and high risk kids. They had to make provisions for parking as we are on a single track, no through road.

We've been here for 18 months and no one moved in, and it's been empty since we moved in. It's now gone back up for sale as a normal house. The people who sold us our home are gutted as they only sold because they didn't want to live next to a children's home.

Our thought process was:

It's run as a business, so we can be as aggressive with what's acceptable (or not) as we don't have to worry about falling out with neighbours.

They have to adhere to ofsted and ss so if things get out of hand we know where to complain

It's children, not prisoners, in other words get it into perspective

As a pp said, disturbances will be internal to the home

However that said, the children were not teenagers and I might have reconsidered buying if it had been teens. For obvious reasons they won't be locked in, so could come and go as they please. There is always the risk of drugs, break ins etc. but I I used to work closely with Ss and in a similar home there were 2 teens who were lovely, and not a spot of bother. If you say the staff ratio is 2 to 1 then it means the children don't require 2 staff with them so not 'high risk'

For all those judging the OP and her justified concerns ...
We had something similar happen two doors down from us on a quiet street. The council rented the house from my friend and used it to home troubled teens. They had a chaperone living there, maybe two, but they were just as bad as the teens - often drunk. They set their Christmas tree on fire and the fire brigade had to be called, one girl went on a rampage smashing the windows and then chucking bricks at neighbours houses, throwing one at a lady who shut her door just in time and it left a huge dent. Music on full volume from 7am - 4am most days. Sitting out the front of the house smoking and being intimidating to people walking past. If it wasn't police it was ambulances being called. Their chaperone knocked on my door once when he thought I'd called the police and tried to intimidate me. Put his foot up on the doorstep so I couldn't close the door.

Luckily my friend who was the other side of the world owned the house so I messaged him regular updates, and he quite quickly got the ball rolling to evict or end the agreement with the council. It still took a few months.

So yes it can be absolutely awful, I really feel for you. But hopefully yours will be properly managed with fully trained staff. I filed a complaint once it was over at the incompetence of the staff paid to keep these children safe. In fact several residents did.

👏 👏 👏

There were two of these homes, in the town I used to live in, both were situated in the towns, private what was considered the premier road. These were mainly children that needed a new start, far away from the city they used to live in. They had serious behavioural issues. It created employment for the town. No one I knew ever complained about the homes. They seemed to be well managed.

I've spent many years working in an environment where LAC are involved.

These children just want to feel safe and loved. The reason residential care as opposed to foster care is better is because of staff ratios and the specialist support they need.

I once did some work in a secure unit where there were 13/14 yo girls who were victims of CSE. Locked up for their own safety. They fair much better in a residential foster care home where they get some semblance of a normal lifestyle experience away from the area they've been recruited in and within a loving family type environment. My biggest eye opener was seeing these girls who've been put in secure housing due to their lifestyle walking around in fluffy slippers and carrying teddy bears. These are lost children in many cases rather than the thugs people assume.

Of course you'll worry - everyone worries about new neighbours because no one can ever know who is moving in and what they're like.

But in reality these young people need a chance in life, a loving environment and the people around them to believe in them and believe they can have a fruitful future. Hopefully you'll be able to do that as one of their neighbours.

Also I grew up just behind a "mental hospital" as they were called back then.

Full of men and woman (adult) with special needs who would happily live in the community in supported living in this decade.

They use to come to the corner shop after school to scav share our sweets

I do think my life has been richer for mixing with people who would otherwise have been locked away (they started coming out as this was at the time of the warnock report) and often wonder if that's why I went into that line of work. I just always felt these were people in our community and they shouldn't have been locked away from it to save other people feelings for the years running up to that.

It is a small dwelling and staff will be on site as well as the teenagers.

It likely not to house more than 3 teens and you are catastrophizing that this will become a bigger centre without any evidence that it will be the case.

The fact that this is a tiny unit in a small village, rather than say a big centre with 50 residents in somewhere like London, will make a difference.

They are not your next door neighbours anyway so I really don't see what your issue is.

You can't control who your neighbours are and who buys a home in your street.

You could have a problem family with 4 kids privately buying a house on your street tomorrow...

At least with the shelter you know that it is supervised by staff who you can complain to should anything go wrong.

As you can see from the range of experiences on this thread, you can't really tell what it will be like until it's functioning. If it does turn out to be difficult to live near, then you have to let go of the "forever home" mentality and move (someone will buy your house, they either won't care about the home or can't afford elsewhere). Or wait it out and see if it shuts.

We're in the process of buying a house near a home for teens in care. We only know because we had a look at all the planning permission granted. It came up as some form of change of use application from a few years ago. It's a 6 bed house (ours is one of the smallest houses on that section of the road) so probably has 6 teens plus staff.

It hasn't put us off buying and very few houses on the road come on the market so presumably the other residents have been unaffected. We visited the area quite a few times during the day and evening to see what the neighbourhood was like. We wouldn't have known it was there without searching the planning portal.

It isn't judgemental to tell the truth - you chose to post here and you chose to make up loads of negative stuff about a group of young people who you have never met and know nothing about. Depite multiple posts from people with real experience telling you that your "expectations" are not their own experience of such things. Just because some children have had behavioural issues does not in any shape or form mean that they are going to be induging in anti-social behaviour. You have no idea that your perfect children aren't going to grow up to the the local tearaways. And people are allowed to buy houses without your approval - this is no different from any possible large family buying the home.

There are literally thousands of posh people living on council estates across London, in ex local authority properties.

I'm not posh but I'm very well off and bought my own ex local authority property about 7 years ago. Our estate is now roughly 50% owner-occupier and 50% council tenants and aside from the two that I've seen Rightmove and the knowledge I have of my nextdoor neighbour through my friendship with him I have no way of knowing who is private and who is council. Nor do I care. This is London, we all just get on with it.

Who do you think will play you in the movie OP?

So many good points made and interesting and heartening to hear from posters with positive experience of working in or living near these kind of homes. I wish those kids every possible advantage including being looked after in naice villages.

My two pence worth:

I grew up with this type of home, but much bigger, down the road and we never even saw the kids. Would forget it was used as a children's home from one year to the next.

Later in life I've had to move from a lovely house before because well off private owners bought next door and were incredibly antisocial in every way and made our life horrible.

In my current house, horrible anti social private tenants gave us 18 months of misery from their behaviour and dangerous dog.

I'd take well supervised kids over either of the last two.

Sorry, this was in response to the 'binman' post

There's a home like this in my mother's village, just around the corner from her. Very isolated village, no teen centred amenities.

They've had no trouble from the residents at all. The ones who are most difficult are the ones who keep absconding - but that's difficult for the people running the home rather than the locals because they abscond out of area through dangerous means (hitchhiking, calling the wrong kind of people for a lift etc).

Frankly there's more trouble in the village from those born and raised there who live with their parents and think they own the place.

Right!

However I feel like if most people are being honest they wouldn't be happy raising a young family in such close proximity to something like this.

I wouldn’t be phased at all but I grew up and still live in South London. Having something like this opposite your house really isn’t the end of the world. Saying that, I live on the same road as a prison. I’m sure you’d have a fit. Not sure what you’re expecting them to do. Run riot outside your front door or something?!

@Foxglove21

three teenagers live next door to me. Their language is awful, they swear at the top of their voices at all hours of the day, they shout obscenties at each other, I can hear them rampaging round the house in the early hours. They slammed their football into the fence so hard and often that it collapsed, taking a victorian brick wall with it. They have broken pots in my garden and ruined plants.
They use the sheds to trespass into other people’s gardens to get their football back, then exit via the gates which they leave open. They are not pleasant young people.
They are from a ‘nice’ family, mother is a senior nurse, father sells expensive cars, the eldest apparently wants to be a doctor.

I’d take the residential unit any day. Im an adoptive parent, my son’s brother has lived in various units for 8 years, any harm he does is sadly to himself.

Where do you think he should live?

😂😂😂

Good grief OP why even post. You know you'll get dumped in by people damning you for being so heartless. The same people who no doubt would be the first screaming down the council phone lines if a hime for people with behavioural problems was built next to their house 🙄
I know not a single person which would welcome this with open arms

But I would challenge them to consider whether they'd be pleased to live next to a residential home like this without prior knowledge of it

but there's a police station next door?

Where would you prefer them to live?

Why do some posters keep insisting that others would be unhappy about this, even when people have explicitly stated that they wouldn't mind? Do you really think that you're a better judge of how I might feel than I am?Do you think that anyone who feels differently from you must be lying?Presumably, you do realise that everyone is different, and responds to things in different ways?

I have worked in this sort of residential setting previously, and I can categorically say that I wouldn't mind if a property near my house was used for this purpose. The kids were not monsters, they were young people who had experienced a lot of trauma through no fault of their own, and they were trying to rebuild their lives. They need to live somewhere, so why not next to me?

I'm sure you're right. Like all the posters claiming they'd definitely have no problem marrying a binman.

There's absolutely no chance at all they might be saying it to sound virtuous. I mean loads of MC women marry binmen, right?