Man, I wish I could have hacked a solution together like this with my neighbor. We moved away 4 weeks ago because it ended up as the only viable solution. Story went like this:

Living in dense city apartments, large German city, our thoughtful upstairs neighbors decided to play very loud hardcore techno at 2am (!) during weekdays - every single day. They were students but the area is not cheap at all. Without external support, German students would have a very hard time paying rent in that area. This area is primarily for well-off yuppies with large incomes. For those students, I strongly suspected mommy and daddy pay for the rent (and the drugs, see below).

Aside from breaking mentally down and degenerating into thoughts of vengeance over this insane level of assholeness, we recovered and tried to be productive according to following steps:

1) Go upstairs, ask them to turn it down -> no response at the door, tried and retried 6 times in total over several days in between the following resolution attempts

2) Intermittently, random screaming and banging against our walls in frustration

3) After doors were never opened and a conversation was not possible, we emailed facility management/landlord -> quiet nights for a handful of days

3) After loud music started up again one day (because why not?) we finally called the police. A step which is somehow both radical and useless at once. Police, annoyed by our noise complaint, banged against the neighbors doors. It took > 5min of banging and police yelling until neighbors opened the door. You could hear the excuse: "Sorry, fell asleep with the music on."

That's like falling asleep in a laser-light electronic music club. Bullshit excuse for "we are drugged up as shit and don't care about our neighbors who have to go to work at 7am because <insert garbage justification>"

Well, it became quiet for 3 weeks. Thought they learned their lesson. Then it started over again and at that point we had exhausted all rational options.

Repeated complaints against landlord lead to nothing. So there was no leverage left. In the end we moved. Thankfully that wasn't our only motivation to move but if you're a bit unlucky, noisy neighbors can mess your life up. Finding apartments here is really hard and I don't want to imagine if we had built our dream apartment in our dream area and were screwed over by these people for no reason at all.

You have to keep calling the police to get documentation that the landlord can use to evict.

If you don't share a landlord their landlord will likely not care.

Well then you go through the HOA or at some point the cops or city will declare it a public nuisance etc... you know disturbing the peace.

Home ownership and dealing with neighbors is all about picking your battles. Getting into a war over a light is just not worth the effort, when you have a simple solution. Chances are someone else will bitch anyhow. Save your ammunition for the inevitable future issues.

> How the fuck can someone be so rude to put a light so bright on

From their POV, they probably think they’re doing the neighborhood a favor. Better lighting tends to reduce crime

There's no real evidence of this. I could argue that bright, blinding lights actually help conceal criminals by the sheer lighting difference.

I’m not saying they’re right. I’m just pointing out that they’re probably not being purposefully inconsiderate like people playing really loud music

Also there is some evidence https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/crime-lights-study