I've unlinked this from the German, French and Polish sentences, which are all in the present tense.

I believe that the Russian and Portuguese variants can be linked here.

I think the Japanese don't match tenses either, which is why some sentences were incorrectly linked

彼らはご近所と仲がよかった。（？）

Actually, can "have been" be considered a form of present tense, since it's continuous and supposedly still occurring?

Present Perfect is rather tricky in that it may better correspond to either past or present tense in context, for languages that do not have a special tense for it. This one seems to be calling for the present tense, as it lacks a temporal qualifier. Saying "they were on good terms with their neighbours" would possibly imply that may not be the case anymore. Now if the sentence read "they have always been...", then the past tense would be appropriate to indicate the action started a long time ago and thus belongs to the past, but the "always" correctly implies it continues to this day, as the English sentence intended.. That's in fact what the Russian translation says, which I'm unlinking for being unfaithful as "always" is not likely implied in the English sentence.