Envy thy Neighbor? More Like Annex thy Neighbor

[Argabarga]

I hope ya'll appreciate the investigative journalism I had to do to get the facts on this one, as it took me tracking down three other towers to get all the major blanks filled in, but I had a feeling it would be worth it.

Monday I come into work and notice a lump of corroded steel that could charitably be called a car in the back corner where hopeless junk goes to die.

According to registration/inspection, it was last legally on the road in 2010, or, would have been allowed on it through 2010, making me believe the last time it actually could drive was 2009 and became immobile sometime after that last inspection. Something is seriously broken inside this car's suspension, as putting the left front wheel up on top of a spare chunk of 4x4 wood only makes it sit LEVEL from side to side. Take that away, and it'd be listing to port by almost 18 degrees, Captain! It's clearly never going to see pavement under it's own power ever again.

Anyway, what really got me interested was the insides of the windows were plastered with bleached, albeit still legible canned-warning posters you can get at a hardware store that say "PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO TRESPASSING VIOLATORS PROSECUTED!" (How exactly do you trespass on a car? I hear you say? It will all make sense eventually, but I wondered the very same thing too)

Someone being extremely protective of their precious junk is nothing new, I think it was Bon Jovi who pointed out that you live for the fight when that's all that you've got.... and some people are fiercely territorial over their turf, whatever it may be, because the stakes are just that LOW.

So, I'm imagining some toothless redneck in a "DON'T TREAD ON ME!" ballcap was the owner of this, and wasn't lettin' any no-good varmint' run off with it. That $250 scrap-unit value was HIS by-golly! And this is MURRICA! Where all he has to do is declare it's his, and that entitles him to shoot anyone who looks at it funny!

Well, I was closer to the mark than I ever could have imagined.

Here's how we ended up with this lovely little nugget of automotive technology.




Turns out this came all the way from Hickston, a town four exits up the interstate where the signs all say "NO SERVICES THIS EXIT", seriously, this town is so poor, it has only one traffic light, and that only has one color, red, and it's only turned on half the time, as it blinks constantly!

Well, in this humble little burg', lived a man who was apparently in the military and was recently deployed somewhere for an extended period of time, upwards of perhaps 2 years.

While he was gone, his neighbor decided "finders keepers" and claim-jumped his property. Which included a yard, a house, a paved driveway and attached garage.

To keep people out of "his" new property, he parked the aforementioned car sideways in the driveway, about equidistant between the road and the garage. Now the "NO TRESPASS" signs make sense, he didn't mean the car, he meant the neighbors place that he'd just annexed, effectively, he made the car a large, cumbersome and impractical signpost.

Well, as you can imagine, when owner returned from his tour, he was a bit surprised to see a car he didn't recognize in his driveway.

He called his neighbor and asked him to please move the car, neighbor told him not to touch "his" stuff and get off "his" property.

Owner called the State Police

Trooper Friendly shows up, and owner provides documentation that he is, in fact, owner of said property, has no desire for that car to be there, and wants it gone.

Trooper Friendly tries to talk to the neighbor and tells him that he can either remove the car, or, the PSP will have no option but to "call someone who will"

Neighbor threatens Troopers with lawsuits, lawyers and again states he has no intention of moving "his" property off of "his" property because owner of said property doesn't own it despite all evidence to the contrary.

Trooper shrugs and says "have it your way", and he didn't mean go on down to Burger King. Oh no, he calls us, and a truck is sent out. It takes about 45 minutes to get there, but once on scene, it takes barely 5 minutes, under the watchful eye of Trooper Friendly to load it up and follow the Trooper back to the barracks where they can fill out the appropriate forms to let us take possession of an "abandoned/salvage vehicle" since the neighbor's refusal to do anything about it means he's legally abandoned it.

By the time our driver and the Trooper make it back to base, the dispatcher inside said barracks is already on the line with Mr. Bad Neighbor, getting his ear chewed off for all the "illegal" things they just did! Namely, trespassing! (OH THE IRONY!) and stealing! and allkindsofstufflikethatthere! And he's going to get a lawyer! A TRUCKLOAD of them! And sue! and sue! and

*click*

The dispatcher hung up on him.

Driver gets his paperwork stamped, and makes the 45 minute ride back to town with the rustbucket car-cum-roadblock in tow.

No sooner does he get back to our shop and walk in to deposit the paperwork in the office, than he finds not one, but TWO of OUR dispatchers with phones akimbo being yelled at by both Mr. Bad Neighbor and someone who was presumably Mrs. Bad Neighbor, again threatening to drop an airborne division worth of lawyers on us for trespassing, stealing, and otherwise doing ILLEGAL things to him!

Both our people told him "Tough sh*t, you owe us $480 or you don't get the car back" and hung up (Nope, not a typo. It's $115 for an illegal, and then there's the added per-mile charges, both en route and towed. Per borough towing ordinance, if you go over 10 miles either out or back on an illegal call, you can charge mileage. For 99.9% of all tows in town here, you go no more than 4 at the most. But, like I said, 45 minute drive out? and back? That was a not insignificant number of miles he got charged on top, for something that wasn't worth half as much )

Haven't heard from Bad Neighbor since then, and I don't expect I will, but if I do, I'll keep you posted.

And what's the moral of our story? Some people really DO think they own the world. And, dumb people seem pathologically incapable of realizing that they're, well, dumb.

[Jay 2K Winger]

I think Bad Neighbor done got shelled by a PWNZER.

[Sapphire Silk]

Bad Neighbor tried to seize his neighbor's property under the legal theory of adverse possession aka squatters rights.

Basically it works like this; if you abandon property, someone else can claim it and use it unless you tell them to stop. You can LEGALLY steal someone else's house under these laws, which vary WIDELY from state to state. However, there are two principles in common.

Firstly, you must live there obviously. It is a hostile takeover; you don't ask permission. If you ask permission you are a tenant and you can never claim adverse possession. It must be your primary continuous dwelling, you must open utilities in your name, get your mail there, etc. If you can stay without being told to clear out by the actual owner before the end of a period of time, the property legally becomes yours.

Secondly: if the owner DOES tell you to clear out, you must do so AT ONCE (in spite of the hostile possession requirement).

In Pennsylvania, the time requirement is 21 years. That is not a typo folks: twenty one years is required.

Bad Neighbor was never going to get the property this way. He might have thought it was a foreclosure or abandoned, and not realized the owner was simply deployed and coming home. Or he didn't investigate the law.

[Argabarga]

Oh, I'm pretty sure he "investigated" it, and all he proved is that 9 times out of 10, there's a reason you need a lawyer to read it for you, because what you THINK it says is often not what it really means.

[Shalom]

I'm guessing that Mr BN wasn't in fact on the "annexed" property at the time, or he would have been arrested for trespassing.

I should probably talk to a lawyer myself. A close look at my title deed shows the fence at the edge of my backyard is about 2 feet into my neighbor's property, and has been for many years, with nothing ever said about it. My neighbor is recently deceased, and the house is now vacant; his family will probably be trying to sell the house soon. I wonder if I now can or should claim ownership of that two-foot strip of land, before a prospective buyer starts making trouble over me occupying it for the past 9 years (and the previous owners for many more years before me).

[mathnerd]

I'm guessing that Mr BN wasn't in fact on the "annexed" property at the time, or he would have been arrested for trespassing.

I should probably talk to a lawyer myself. A close look at my title deed shows the fence at the edge of my backyard is about 2 feet into my neighbor's property, and has been for many years, with nothing ever said about it. My neighbor is recently deceased, and the house is now vacant; his family will probably be trying to sell the house soon. I wonder if I now can or should claim ownership of that two-foot strip of land, before a prospective buyer starts making trouble over me occupying it for the past 9 years (and the previous owners for many more years before me).

It's possible to get some sort of legal easement for the property in question, but it's not likely to be easy.

My parents' property is kind of weird. Legally, their address is 123 street, however, 123 street doesn't actually exist. The driveway actually goes out to 124 street. How it got that way is a complicated mess, but the bottom line is that my parents needed to make the access to their house legally air tight. It was a long and drawn out process, but in the end, my parents have the exclusive, legal use of the chunk of land that the driveway goes though, and the plant nursery, while being the legal owners (and having the tax liability for it), have no legal right to be on it. In exchange, the county legally looks the other way when it comes to the shade houses that currently sit atop the land that should be 123 street. What's amusing is that every time the nursery changes ownership (which it has at least 4 times in the last 20 or so years), the new owners always try to get that driveway property back. The get the wind knocked out of their sails when they find out that my father is more than happy to do so, but under the terms of the legal agreement made decades ago, that stays intact through all ownership transfers, they'd have to knock down the buildings on 123 Street and build the road, at their own expense.

[NecessaryCatharsis]

It's possible to get some sort of legal easement for the property in question, but it's not likely to be easy....

My friends parents, and all their neighbours, went through something similar a decade or so ago. They couldn't get street repairs, a stop sign, a street sign or garbage collection because the street didn't exist (on the town maps). A similar street did exist (on the maps) and similar lots to the ones they lived on existed, with building permits etc. on the area placed directly over a lake. So the entire neighbourhood stopped paying their land taxes. In a town of 2000 even 16 families not paying the taxes was a noticeable problem. When the first eviction notice was issued, the whole neighbourhood hired a lawyer for the one family, who argued the eviction notice wasn't valid, because it didn't state the address the family actually lived at. The town maps were changed shortly after to indicate where all 16 lots actually were, and the town had to pay the legal fees involved as well. A stop sign and some garbage pick up would have been a lot cheaper

[Shalom]

Reminds me of something. There used to be a street in Brooklyn called Tapscott Avenue (not to be confused with Tapscott Street, which was nearby), running diagonally from East New York Avenue to E 94th St. This street was maybe a third of a block long; I'm told by the guys at forgotten-ny.com that it was a remnant of the street grid of the defunct neighborhood of Pig Town (yes, really). The street was decommissioned and de-mapped when I was a very young child, probably about 1972, and a building has since been built across the ENY Ave end of it; the other end is still extant, but it's just an blind alley now.

The funny thing is, there are still four properties listed on the tax rolls on that address: 19, 23, 25 and 27 Tapscott Ave., Brooklyn NY 11212. Even though the street on which these addresses are does not exist anymore.

(Some of the online map apps still show the street. Google and Yahoo do not; Mapquest does. Google used to not show the street, but still let you plot directions to there, then get confused when it gets to its nonexistant destination.)

[EvilEmpryss]

I should probably talk to a lawyer myself. A close look at my title deed shows the fence at the edge of my backyard is about 2 feet into my neighbor's property, and has been for many years, with nothing ever said about it. My neighbor is recently deceased, and the house is now vacant; his family will probably be trying to sell the house soon. I wonder if I now can or should claim ownership of that two-foot strip of land, before a prospective buyer starts making trouble over me occupying it for the past 9 years (and the previous owners for many more years before me).

I can tell you what is most likely going to happen:

When they go to sell it, the buyer's lender will send someone out to appraise the property and a new survey will be performed. When they realize that the fence is improperly on their property you will receive a letter telling you that you have X number of days to remove it, move it to comply with local zoning ordinances regarding fences and property lines, or sign over ownership.

These were the options the bank told me they would present to owner of a fence that was on some property I was considering buying. The bank prefers that the fence owner remove it completely and restore the property (i.e. fill in the holes from the fence posts).

[earl colby pottinger]

Let me get this right

The scum bucket is trying to take over the home of a soldier who has spent the last two years over-seas.

Before he pushes his claim too hard I suggest he find out where and what he was doing there. There are a large number of people who just lived thru hell, and after what they faced there they don't get scared easy by anyone here in North America.

Once he has proved it is his property, he can toss out anything he wants, I am not going to try and stop him.

[sirwired]

Yeah, adverse possession doesn't work like a bunch of scammy websites tells you it works. It's really meant to keep you from, say, building a fence, maybe eventually sticking a building there, and then some crazy-butt time later find out that due to a surveying error, you built your fence and building four inches over your neighbors property line. (That said, it's usually cheaper to move the damn fence than to go through the process of having the deeds amended.) It also covers things like buying the house from a false heir, and preventing another (true) heir from taking the house from your grandkids fifty years later.

The statute of limitations is long, and courts generally don't like these claims very much if you don't have any other reason to think the property was yours and you just decided to take it. Any such claim is gone over with a fine-toothed comb before you can expect the court to actually issue you a deed. Some jurisdictions require you to do things like pay property tax and utilities (no just mooching off the rightful owner) and keep the maintenance in good order. (Otherwise you aren't truly "acting like an owner", since real owners pay the bills.)

In any case, I hope the local DA finds a whole long list of charges for this a$$-clown; trying to take the home of a soldier on tour puts you in a special circle of hell.

[Gilhelmi]

*twitch*

uh oh, my anger levels are rising, we are in the yellow zone. This "person" thought it would be alright to steal from my brother-in-arms while he/she was serving honorable over seas????

There is no law that would ever allow the thief of this property, not even the squatters-rights crap would apply because of the Service Members Relief Act, because civil actions are not legally allowed to be taken against an active-duty service member while they are mobilized.

Even if, a service-member was deployed for 21+ years (paperwork mix-up, amIright?). The Service Members Relief Act would prevent any civil actions from happening.

[Argabarga]

As far as I can tell, Bad Neighbor never set foot in the home/garage.

Like most have probably figured out, due to a combination of laziness and half-baked understanding of the law, probably from his attendance of the "Google Law School", with a few beers as his consultants, he just assumed he could call "Tag! Mine! No tag-backs!" and that would be it.

As soon as it turned out there would be more to it than that, he made some blind lawyer threats and then gave up, as the lazily stupid are prone to do, and the towing away of the "car" represents the total loss of this guys "investment" and everyone on earth, except him, is happy now and will being getting on with life.

[sirwired]

How much is the piece of broken-down junk worth as scrap? Will you be able to cover your costs when the thing gets disposed of at auction?

[Shalom]

When they realize that the fence is improperly on their property you will receive a letter telling you that you have X number of days to remove it, move it to comply with local zoning ordinances regarding fences and property lines, or sign over ownership.

Why should I do anything about the fence? It's his fence, on his property, or at least I'm so assuming; it was there when I bought the house. (And if it was built by whoever owned my house way back then, I'm quite content to let him own it if he wants it.) He, or more likely, his parents, simply built it to enclose two feet less of their own land than they were entitled to. If the heirs of the property owner, or whoever they sell to, want to move the fence to the actual property line, there might not be much I could do about it, bar the adverse possession thing.

What I'm more worried about is if they come to me with a bill for 50+ years of back rent for occupying that two foot strip of "my" backyard that actually belongs to them.

As far as I can tell, Bad Neighbor never set foot in the home/garage.

Thank $DEITY for that. I've heard horror stories of squatters breaking into vacant properties, moving all their shit in, and changing the locks. At least he didn't get that far. Probably just set in his own house, looking at the neighbor's property with a stupid grin on his face, and rubbed his hands together saying "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

As others have stated above, it's not only a really assholish thing to do to try and take away anyone's house, let alone someone who's Over There trying to fight for your own liberty, but also it's not a very smart idea to tangle with someone who's been trained to fight.

This guy sounds about four years old, really.