A California woman’s decision to plaster emojis on her outside walls, a move neighbors say came after they reported her for renting out her home on Airbnb, has made headlines around the world. But the war in Manhattan Beach, a city in southern California, sums up a wider problem for neighborhoods transformed by the tech platform: what happens if your neighbors hate it?

Neighborly disputes over Airbnb and other home-share properties are frequent, said Dan Weber, the founder of Airbnb Hell, a website that collects horror stories from hosts, renters and neighbors of Airbnb homes.

“It is fairly common, unfortunately, for neighbors of Airbnb rentals to suffer just for living next to a space,” he said. “People staying in an Airbnb rental are usually on vacation, and what happens is that the neighbors end up inadvertently living next to a party house.”

Dozens of accounts on the site complain about noise levels, parking hazards and drug use near their homes. “I have listened to countless nights trying to sleep, through drunken, drugged behaviour, people roaring and screaming, night and early morning,” one user wrote. “The latest rave resulted in a near riot in front of the house when drunken partygoers screamed and fought in the front yard when the police came for the third time that day,” another said.

Weber said he had looked into class-action lawsuits against Airbnb, to be brought by both hosts and guests, but the company’s air-tight terms of service agreement generally prevents any kind of legal action. Neighbor complaints may be a loophole, however, as they “never consented to this”, he said. Cities such as New York and San Francisco have created hotlines to allow neighbors to report illegal short-term rentals in their buildings. Weber said Airbnb should be doing more to address the issue.

“If Airbnb did a better job of policing their own platform, this would be less of a problem,” he said. “It seems they choose profit over the safety, health and wellbeing of both their users and the neighbors.”

Airbnb said it launched its “Neighbor Tool” in 2016 to help community members to “be good neighbors in the places they call home”. “Hosting is a big responsibility and those who fail to meet our standards and expectations will be subject to suspension or removal,” an Airbnb spokeswoman told the Guardian. The online form allows people who live near rental properties to file complaints about problems including “noise, party, or disturbances”, common spaces such as parking and trash collection, and “ general concerns”.

And beyond just becoming a neighborly nuisance, Airbnb has faced a global backlash for the effects that converting permanent housing into holiday homes can have on entire communities. One paper from UCLA found Airbnb was “having a significant effect on Los Angeles’ housing market and is contributing to the housing crisis” in the city. The short-term rental economy has been blamed for upending housing markets in cities such as Barcelona and Paris, displacing locals and exacerbating urban inequality.

Apostolos Filippas, an economist who authored the paper The Tragedy of Your Upstairs Neighbors: When Is the Home-Sharing Externality Internalized?, said the immediate effects were complicated and difficult to measure. Short-term rentals might have positive effects such as bringing money to local economies and neighborhoods often overlooked by tourists, but they in turn might raise rental costs for local residents.

He and his co-author discussed both monetary and non-monetary impacts: will Airbnb cause your rents to go up? And perhaps more importantly, what does it do for your quality of life?

“How do you measure noise? The effect noise has on me may be different than the effects [it has] on others,” he said. “In the end, strangers are not subject to the same social norms as long-term neighbors, and they may not behave the same way.”

In Manhattan Beach, the community where the emoji house is located, neighbors say owner Kathryn Kidd retaliated with a bright paint job after the community reported her for renting out her home on Airbnb illegally.

The house is now bright pink and emblazoned with two large emojis, one with a zipper mouth (neighbors say it’s a “shut up” emoji) and another with eyes pointing in different directions and its tongue sticking out, both with exaggerated eyelashes. Locals say the piece amounts to “bullying” and an “F-U to the rest of the street”. Kidd claims it’s all in good fun.

She hired a local artist, Z the Art, to paint the mural after she was fined $4,000 for violating city laws on short-term rentals. The unit has now been relisted on Airbnb for rentals of a minimum of 30 days at a time, in keeping with local laws.

Kidd did not respond to a request for comment but previously told Easy Reader News the emojis were not intended to mock neighbors. “I’m trying not to offend anybody,” Kidd said. “I did it for the purpose of being happy, being positive, and I think it’s cute and quirky and kind of funny, and certainly was a time for the emoji.”

Z the Art said Kidd mentioned none of these issues to him when he was hired for the job. She did have “three or four specific emojis in mind” and they decided on two after he made some designs. He never expected his work to be at the center of a neighborhood war.

“The whole area is right up the street from the beach – I would kill to ever be able to afford property like that,” he said. “This just seems like way too much attention for a paint job; there’s a lot going on in the world.”