In article , Alexander Pensky
wrote:
wrote:
yeah? tell my mother that after 5,000 bucks in lawyers fees when the
neighbors sued
for adverse possession and it went to trial and was not instantly
thrown out. they
claimed THEY, AND THE PREVIOUS owners mowed the lawn next to my
mothers driveway and
so THEY OWNED IT. This was after they insisted it WAS theirs and my
mother had us
put up a fence to establish our ownership over the property. Ingrid
Alexander Pensky wrote:
"The law" you are thinking of is called "adverse possession." There's
always a lot of misinformation floating around about adverse possession
and it's not as easy to lose land that way as people seem to think.
I appreciate what your mother went through... I followed the thread here
last month... but
#1 It cost $5000 and was not instantly thrown out, but did your mother
actually lose the case? Did she have to relinquish the land?
#2 For every landowner who experiences the nightmare your mother did,
there are 100 more who hear about it and are convinced they too will
lose their land simply because their neighbor has a habit of mowing a 2
foot strip on the wrong side of the lot line.
Bottom line: the common law principle of adverse possession is mainly
intended to allow squatters to obtain neglected or abandoned property
simply by treating it as their own without being challenged. It is not
intended to be used with owner-occupied property where there's an active
dispute as to who owns what.
In the case of lot line encroachments... all you have to do to protect
against adverse possession is to grant explicit permission for the
neighbor to encroach. If you've done a survey and neighbor's fence is
on your land, but you don't mind and don't need it removed, then get a
survey copy showing lot lines & encroaching fence, add a statement
granting neighbor permission to have a fence there, sign it and get
neighbor to sign it.
Of course the neighbor can still take you to court if they don't agree
with the survey and think there is no encroachment. But the document
will prevent them from successfully claiming adverse possession.
It's kind of like common-law marriage. The court can't rule that two
people are in a common-law marriage, against their will. Common-law
marriage exists only when the spouses BOTH claim they are married and
nobody disagrees with them. Likewise -- you can only claim land by
adverse possession if you state that you've taken over the land as yours
for 20 years, and *nobody disagrees with you* including the current
owner if the owner can be located.
- Alex
Forty-odd years ago in a rural neighborhood, there was a road that passed
right down a property line with one property to the south & four
properties to the north, so five households used that one looooong private
dirt road. A new owner of the largest property upon discovering her
property line encompassed about half the width of the road put a fence
right down the middle (which forced her to widen her side of the road to
get to her house, so it hardly benefited her any). This left three out of
five properties with no access to their houses further back along the
divided road. It went to court on the idea that after 30 years of
continuous right of way, it was by then a public road. But the case was
lost, the fence remained, & the abused property owners just had to widen
the road further onto their own properties (with the continued mutual
agreement that everyone could use it, which I suppose was even then not a
deeded right of way, & some new owner could've refused to honor if they'd
been assholes too). The anger & hatreds that resulted from the case were
permanent & the woman on the other side of the fence never had even one
friend anywhere in the area. And there were thereafter two separate roads
immediately side-by-side, one on each side of a fence, when a single much
narrower road had sufficed for decades. The troublemaker was the same old
witch who ate my sweet old pet drake; I found his head & feathers on a
hillside where she'd tossed what was left of him. I still wonder if the
Recording Angel ever had an opportunity to jot down even one good deed on
her plaguey page.
-paghat the ratgirl
--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl:
http://www.paghat.com/