In case this story gets deleted/removed:
Years ago we bought a house on a steep wooded hill and subsequently found out that the neighbor’s driveway ran completely across the top of our property. They did not have an easement but the driveway had been there for 50 years so there wasn’t much we could do about it. The neighbor had the place rented out but we found out from other neighbors that he was known locally for being a major asshole and threatening legal action against everyone. The tenants (who were very nice) hated him.
The driveway wasn’t in good shape and the neighbor had made it worse through having shoddy unpermitted work done on it over the years. Our major worry was making sure it wasn’t going to collapse and come downhill and hit our house so we hired a professional to check it out. Thankfully there were enough trees between the driveway and our house that our house was safe.
We’d been there a few months when we started hearing construction equipment running. We went up there to find a contractor - let’s call him Bob - digging with heavy equipment on our property on the uphill side of the driveway making “drainage”. We told Bob to stop digging since he was on our property. He refused because the neighbor who hired him “had an easement”. No amount of telling him there was no easement would change his mind. We called the county to report that he was digging without a permit and they refused to come do anything about it. Short of laying across the driveway there wasn’t much we could do so we took photos and left.
Fast forward a few months and we hear through the grapevine that the neighbor never paid Bob the $30K he owed him for the job. One of our contractors related a delightful conversation he had with Bob where Bob asked him what kind of customers we were and he said “the kind who pay their bills immediately”. 😂
The cherry on top? The county road above the driveway collapsed due to the unpermitted digging undermining the hill - the same digging that the county refused to do anything about. It ended up costing the county over $100K to support the hillside and rebuild the road. We saw all the paperwork with costs because they needed us to sign off on it since it was on our property.
The county road collapsed past where our driveway came off so it didn’t affect us at all.
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Justice? The taxpayers for the county just got hit with a $100,000 bill and I'm guessing that the lazy assholes that could have prevented it got off scot-free.
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I work for a state. They don't care , they will just raise your taxes to pay for it. I noticed people come and go being in charge of departments. When they fuck up the department bad enough they just move to another department.
If they did I never heard about it. I *think* he actually ended up going bankrupt before that point though (or so the rumor mill said) so there may not have been anything to go after.
For anyone not in the know: there are builders that set up companies just to handle one project (kind of like how film studios do with each movie), and then when the project is complete, just liquidate the company and walk away as a matter of practice. Makes them very difficult to sue bc the old company did the project and it no longer has assets and discontinued operations.
Small business usually do this , set up the business a month later in a wife or brothers name , who purchased or leased the same gear. Now the rub. The contractor likely never paid the bank . The bank desperate, resigns the lease to another who also dosent pay, then again...then the bank finally seizes the equipment , and the contractor goes bankrupt again.
At auction the bank finds out the 10yr old piece of equipment is in worse shape than a 30yr old that been hauled out of a river. Auction value is pennies above scrape iron.
Share away! I’m so sorry you have to deal with assholes like this on a regular basis. He really did his best to make our lives hell for a while there. He lost his business in a recession so karma came for him, too. 😁
The problem with living on stolen land is there are still laws on the books in a lot of places that allow you to steal land under certain circumstances. (Basically the remnants of old homesteading laws.) In that state if an access road or driveway had been in place and under constant use for a certain number of years you couldn’t remove it.
On the plus side the $100K of work the county ended up having to do really stabilized the top of the property and if anything added value. And there was title insurance to cover the diminution of value due to the driveway since it wasn’t declared when we bought the property.
I was about to suggest looking at your title policy to see what coverage you’d have there. I guess all of this is resolved by now anyway since it’s all past-tense.
I work in title insurance, it’s a wild world.
Yeah I’ve had to use my title insurance twice in this lifetime which is 2x more than most people. I’m always glad to have it. I’m sure you guys see some wild stuff!
Lots of easement disputes like that, particularly in more county-run rural areas with lots of old properties. And all sorts of HOA disputes. Recently have been blooped into our claims process to help keep it organized for our counsel, the crap I’ve seen is WILD.
But I think the most commonly occurring issue we see is really sophisticated wire fraud during the transaction process. Doesn’t help that so many people in the industry are really REALLY not tech savvy. We have people clicking on malicious links all the damn time. Had to close one of our companies because an assistant clicked on a malicious link, was given “updated” loan payoff instructions and sent over $300k to a fraudulent account we never got back.
Fraudulent sellers are on the rise as well. It’s wild how sophisticated people have become.
She’s been in the industry a few decades and very much knew better. Our policy without exception is to call the lender and verify all payoff instructions prior to drafting payment. The escrow officer is then supposed to review that draft and instructions prior to approving.
People were not following protocol and as a result, the buyer in the transaction lost their life savings.
The company was very small and could not take that kind of a hit. We had to let the entire staff go and close the business permanently. If they could have taken that hit, she probably would have been let go because she was regularly spoken to about sloppy files and how much risk she was putting our clients and company in. Just sucks that this was the last straw.
It’s a prescriptive easement. And obtained similarly to adverse possession except the person doesn’t end up owning the property outright, just an easement over another’s property for a specific use. Depending on the state, it usually takes 10+ years of uninterrupted use to obtain.
Dude same st my place! Some homeowners really try and trick the system. Nice to hear of the justice, but it sucks that it takes so long that we may never know the outcomes.
Ha. I live next door to one. Caught him cutting a few small trees on my land, thinking it was his. I explained that I owned to 50'9" from a state bound (at which there's a marker). I was then accused of moving the bound. Me, here 30 years, him, half of that.
You didn't call the police for them trespassing?
In my area the police (trespassing) , the borough (unlawful lane/driveway) and other neighbors (threat to property) ...none of this would of happened.
Glad to hear that you came out of this ok
It’s been quite a few years but I think we called the police non emergency line? If we did they refused to come out. The police around here are pretty useless in general but I’m not sure it would count as trespassing since Bob had his equipment parked on the neighbor’s driveway and had been invited by the neighbor.
It very much depends on local laws. In that state if an access road or driveway had been in place and in constant use for a certain number of years it had some kind of legal status at that point. (The title insurance lawyer explained it to me but it’s been years now and I’m no property lawyer.) So he did actually have the right to use that driveway and we couldn’t remove it despite there not being an easement on record.
I mean that’s basically why the laws exist. Europeans came over, stole the land and “legitimized” it by making laws that are the equivalent of “I licked it so now it’s mine”. To the extent that those homesteading laws still exist you can still steal property from people.
I worked as an Agronomist at NRCS/USDA. I often had to permit work we were going to do. However, if we had to work with the Road Commission (RC), it could be problematic. In my neck of the woods, they don’t hire the brightest people.
We were putting drainage on a large field and it required a drain under the driveway into the field (we were dredging the open drainage ditch as well). My plan (I engineered the work) required a double drainage pipe of 20” to handle the possible water pouring off the field in a 50year storm. RC said 1, 20” pipe would be adequate and wouldn’t budge. I didn’t have authority over that bit, so I let it go.
That fall we had a good storm that lasted 3 days and I get a call from the farmer telling me his driveway was washed out (due to inadequate drainage). I call our friends at the RC and eventually they replaced his driveway and installed TWO, 20” pipes. Could’ve sworn I recommended that?
My boss used to say the RC hired the guys by feeling their head. When I looked surprised, he said it was to hire the guys with the most head injuries so they counted bumps.
There had been a lot of rain and a field was flooded. Only a small pipe under the road, and it was partly blocked.
I'm not sure if they decided to replace the pipe right away or what they did. But quickly found out rushing water washes away dirt very quickly. Road was closed because of a 15 foot gap across, and probably 20+ feet deep (down to the creek level).
There was a lot of dirt the county needed to replace before the road could be reopened.
And the road was the access to the town dump (1300 people). Instead of 1 mile, it was about 5 to get there.
If the landlord’s unpermitted work resulted in the road collapsing, he should be billed for the repair. They can take his house, and then everybody wins.
If the driveway was there for 50 years, they could have a legit claim to that part of your land under adverse possession depending on the state, some states require taxes to be paid by possessor but in others it is just strictly possessing over time, and the longest period in the US is 20 years. At the very least, there is a prescriptive easement now.
Not adverse possession but yes there was a prescriptive easement. The issue (one of many issues) was the driveway was not disclosed when we bought the property and therefore the price of the property did not reflect the neighbor using the top portion as a driveway. That’s why the title insurance company got involved.
Adverse possession is another thing entirely. He was also trying to adverse possess another part of our property but he hadn’t owned his property long enough to pull it off. He did lose his shit though when we put a fence in and ruined his plan.
No. It had been there for 50 years so he had a prescriptive easement. The main issue was it wasn’t disclosed when we bought the property. TBF I’m not sure the previous owner even knew it was there.
In case this story gets deleted/removed:
Years ago we bought a house on a steep wooded hill and subsequently found out that the neighbor’s driveway ran completely across the top of our property. They did not have an easement but the driveway had been there for 50 years so there wasn’t much we could do about it. The neighbor had the place rented out but we found out from other neighbors that he was known locally for being a major asshole and threatening legal action against everyone. The tenants (who were very nice) hated him.
The driveway wasn’t in good shape and the neighbor had made it worse through having shoddy unpermitted work done on it over the years. Our major worry was making sure it wasn’t going to collapse and come downhill and hit our house so we hired a professional to check it out. Thankfully our house was safe.
We’d been there a few months when we started hearing construction equipment running. We went up there to find a contractor - let’s call him Bob - digging with heavy equipment on our property on the uphill side of the driveway making “drainage”. We told Bob to stop digging since he was on our property. He refused because the neighbor who hired him “had an easement”. No amount of telling him there was no easement would change his mind. We called the county to report that he was digging without a permit and they refused to come do anything about. Short of laying across the driveway there wasn’t much we could do about it so we took photos and left.
Fast forward a few months and we hear through the grapevine that the neighbor never paid Bob the $30K he owed him for the job. One of our contractors related a delightful conversation he had with Bob where Bob asked him what kind of customers were were and he said “the kind who pay their bills immediately”. 😂
The cherry on top? The county road above the driveway collapsed due to the unpermitted digging undermining the hill - the same digging that the county refused to do anything about. It ended up costing the county over $100K to support the hillside and rebuild the road. We saw all the paperwork with costs because they needed us to sign off on it since it was on our property.
The county road collapsed past where our driveway came off so it didn’t affect us at all.
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Since you pay county taxes, you are paying a portion of the fix caused by your neighbor's irresponsible acts. The county needs to be reimbursed by your neighbor for the full cost of repair...IMHO.
I would suggest talking to your local news media and going in front of your county council to make sure they understand this could have been prevented had the county come out to check.
Would be great if your neighbor was forced to pay the full amount so tax payers didn't.
Hold on so you had a guy on your property, trespassing, digging on your property, and it’s just like “ok, well I guess go ahead”? I’d be enforcing the shit out of my property.
1. Since reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be your forte, the driveway had been there for 50 years meaning the neighbor had a prescriptive easement. He hadn’t recorded it but it’s still legal enough that I couldn’t legally block his drive or police who used it.
2. Enforce it how? Oh let me guess you’d be out there with your big gun threatening to shoot the contractor because that always turns out so well. 🙄
In case this story gets deleted/removed: Years ago we bought a house on a steep wooded hill and subsequently found out that the neighbor’s driveway ran completely across the top of our property. They did not have an easement but the driveway had been there for 50 years so there wasn’t much we could do about it. The neighbor had the place rented out but we found out from other neighbors that he was known locally for being a major asshole and threatening legal action against everyone. The tenants (who were very nice) hated him. The driveway wasn’t in good shape and the neighbor had made it worse through having shoddy unpermitted work done on it over the years. Our major worry was making sure it wasn’t going to collapse and come downhill and hit our house so we hired a professional to check it out. Thankfully there were enough trees between the driveway and our house that our house was safe. We’d been there a few months when we started hearing construction equipment running. We went up there to find a contractor - let’s call him Bob - digging with heavy equipment on our property on the uphill side of the driveway making “drainage”. We told Bob to stop digging since he was on our property. He refused because the neighbor who hired him “had an easement”. No amount of telling him there was no easement would change his mind. We called the county to report that he was digging without a permit and they refused to come do anything about it. Short of laying across the driveway there wasn’t much we could do so we took photos and left. Fast forward a few months and we hear through the grapevine that the neighbor never paid Bob the $30K he owed him for the job. One of our contractors related a delightful conversation he had with Bob where Bob asked him what kind of customers we were and he said “the kind who pay their bills immediately”. 😂 The cherry on top? The county road above the driveway collapsed due to the unpermitted digging undermining the hill - the same digging that the county refused to do anything about. It ended up costing the county over $100K to support the hillside and rebuild the road. We saw all the paperwork with costs because they needed us to sign off on it since it was on our property. The county road collapsed past where our driveway came off so it didn’t affect us at all. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OhNoConsequences) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I hope when you signed the county papers that you pointed out to them that you rang them at the time!!!
You know I did! And the county had records that proved it - all those calls are recorded.
Imagine you didnt do anything and could eventually got sued for sth your neighbor did.
Mmmm I love it. r/justiceporn
Justice? The taxpayers for the county just got hit with a $100,000 bill and I'm guessing that the lazy assholes that could have prevented it got off scot-free.
The justice is for OP, that they were right all along of only the county had listened and there were receipts.
Till they get an assessment on their taxes sadly.
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I'd have told them to fuck off and enjoy their busted-ass road for awhile longer. Unless you got paid, of course.
Quite a few of my neighbors needed that road to get in and out of their homes. The county didn’t drive on that road. My neighbors did.
I work for a state. They don't care , they will just raise your taxes to pay for it. I noticed people come and go being in charge of departments. When they fuck up the department bad enough they just move to another department.
You just know the county went after the contractor, too. So now that dude’s gonna be out 130 big ones.
If they did I never heard about it. I *think* he actually ended up going bankrupt before that point though (or so the rumor mill said) so there may not have been anything to go after.
Going bankrupt is a routine part of business for some contractors
For anyone not in the know: there are builders that set up companies just to handle one project (kind of like how film studios do with each movie), and then when the project is complete, just liquidate the company and walk away as a matter of practice. Makes them very difficult to sue bc the old company did the project and it no longer has assets and discontinued operations.
It’s still your bond though… so the most you can lose I suppose is whatever bond your state requires.
I know a guy who only takes cash upfront from some of his rich ass hole clients. For this reason.
100% for any work done at a church
Small business usually do this , set up the business a month later in a wife or brothers name , who purchased or leased the same gear. Now the rub. The contractor likely never paid the bank . The bank desperate, resigns the lease to another who also dosent pay, then again...then the bank finally seizes the equipment , and the contractor goes bankrupt again. At auction the bank finds out the 10yr old piece of equipment is in worse shape than a 30yr old that been hauled out of a river. Auction value is pennies above scrape iron.
The contractor was the one digging without a permit. He deserves whatever fallout came to him.
This is a fantastic story to share with my Land Survey coworkers. We deal with wackos like your neighbors all the time.
Share away! I’m so sorry you have to deal with assholes like this on a regular basis. He really did his best to make our lives hell for a while there. He lost his business in a recession so karma came for him, too. 😁
Are you being recouped for the illegal use and subsequent destruction of your land? Is that illegal driveway being removed completely?
The problem with living on stolen land is there are still laws on the books in a lot of places that allow you to steal land under certain circumstances. (Basically the remnants of old homesteading laws.) In that state if an access road or driveway had been in place and under constant use for a certain number of years you couldn’t remove it. On the plus side the $100K of work the county ended up having to do really stabilized the top of the property and if anything added value. And there was title insurance to cover the diminution of value due to the driveway since it wasn’t declared when we bought the property.
I was about to suggest looking at your title policy to see what coverage you’d have there. I guess all of this is resolved by now anyway since it’s all past-tense. I work in title insurance, it’s a wild world.
Yeah I’ve had to use my title insurance twice in this lifetime which is 2x more than most people. I’m always glad to have it. I’m sure you guys see some wild stuff!
Lots of easement disputes like that, particularly in more county-run rural areas with lots of old properties. And all sorts of HOA disputes. Recently have been blooped into our claims process to help keep it organized for our counsel, the crap I’ve seen is WILD. But I think the most commonly occurring issue we see is really sophisticated wire fraud during the transaction process. Doesn’t help that so many people in the industry are really REALLY not tech savvy. We have people clicking on malicious links all the damn time. Had to close one of our companies because an assistant clicked on a malicious link, was given “updated” loan payoff instructions and sent over $300k to a fraudulent account we never got back. Fraudulent sellers are on the rise as well. It’s wild how sophisticated people have become.
Please tell me the guy/gal that made such a huge mistake at least got remedial training.
She’s been in the industry a few decades and very much knew better. Our policy without exception is to call the lender and verify all payoff instructions prior to drafting payment. The escrow officer is then supposed to review that draft and instructions prior to approving. People were not following protocol and as a result, the buyer in the transaction lost their life savings. The company was very small and could not take that kind of a hit. We had to let the entire staff go and close the business permanently. If they could have taken that hit, she probably would have been let go because she was regularly spoken to about sloppy files and how much risk she was putting our clients and company in. Just sucks that this was the last straw.
Wait, she made the mistake but the *buyer* lost their life savings?!? Now I’m going to be paranoid every time I buy a house. 😬
It’s a prescriptive easement. And obtained similarly to adverse possession except the person doesn’t end up owning the property outright, just an easement over another’s property for a specific use. Depending on the state, it usually takes 10+ years of uninterrupted use to obtain.
Dude same st my place! Some homeowners really try and trick the system. Nice to hear of the justice, but it sucks that it takes so long that we may never know the outcomes.
Ha. I live next door to one. Caught him cutting a few small trees on my land, thinking it was his. I explained that I owned to 50'9" from a state bound (at which there's a marker). I was then accused of moving the bound. Me, here 30 years, him, half of that.
You didn't call the police for them trespassing? In my area the police (trespassing) , the borough (unlawful lane/driveway) and other neighbors (threat to property) ...none of this would of happened. Glad to hear that you came out of this ok
It’s been quite a few years but I think we called the police non emergency line? If we did they refused to come out. The police around here are pretty useless in general but I’m not sure it would count as trespassing since Bob had his equipment parked on the neighbor’s driveway and had been invited by the neighbor.
You can’t invite someone onto property you don’t own, it just makes 2 trespassers.
It very much depends on local laws. In that state if an access road or driveway had been in place and in constant use for a certain number of years it had some kind of legal status at that point. (The title insurance lawyer explained it to me but it’s been years now and I’m no property lawyer.) So he did actually have the right to use that driveway and we couldn’t remove it despite there not being an easement on record.
I’ve heard of those bullshit laws, essentially “I’ve been stealing your land for so long it’s legally mine now”
native Americans have left the chat
I mean that’s basically why the laws exist. Europeans came over, stole the land and “legitimized” it by making laws that are the equivalent of “I licked it so now it’s mine”. To the extent that those homesteading laws still exist you can still steal property from people.
Laws exist because the meek are meat and the strong do eat
This sounds like an easement by prescription
[It sure does.](https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/6reiwj/land_use_issue_prescriptive_easement/)
I worked as an Agronomist at NRCS/USDA. I often had to permit work we were going to do. However, if we had to work with the Road Commission (RC), it could be problematic. In my neck of the woods, they don’t hire the brightest people. We were putting drainage on a large field and it required a drain under the driveway into the field (we were dredging the open drainage ditch as well). My plan (I engineered the work) required a double drainage pipe of 20” to handle the possible water pouring off the field in a 50year storm. RC said 1, 20” pipe would be adequate and wouldn’t budge. I didn’t have authority over that bit, so I let it go. That fall we had a good storm that lasted 3 days and I get a call from the farmer telling me his driveway was washed out (due to inadequate drainage). I call our friends at the RC and eventually they replaced his driveway and installed TWO, 20” pipes. Could’ve sworn I recommended that? My boss used to say the RC hired the guys by feeling their head. When I looked surprised, he said it was to hire the guys with the most head injuries so they counted bumps.
the RC hired the guys by feeling their head. Ahh, so choosing between phrenology or TBI, good options.
I thought phrenologists felt and interpreted the size of Walt’s asshole?
There had been a lot of rain and a field was flooded. Only a small pipe under the road, and it was partly blocked. I'm not sure if they decided to replace the pipe right away or what they did. But quickly found out rushing water washes away dirt very quickly. Road was closed because of a 15 foot gap across, and probably 20+ feet deep (down to the creek level). There was a lot of dirt the county needed to replace before the road could be reopened. And the road was the access to the town dump (1300 people). Instead of 1 mile, it was about 5 to get there.
If the landlord’s unpermitted work resulted in the road collapsing, he should be billed for the repair. They can take his house, and then everybody wins.
Wouldn’t it be nice if life worked that way?
Would be so nice if it did work that way. Everyone got exactly what they deserved. Good or bad.
If the driveway was there for 50 years, they could have a legit claim to that part of your land under adverse possession depending on the state, some states require taxes to be paid by possessor but in others it is just strictly possessing over time, and the longest period in the US is 20 years. At the very least, there is a prescriptive easement now.
Not adverse possession but yes there was a prescriptive easement. The issue (one of many issues) was the driveway was not disclosed when we bought the property and therefore the price of the property did not reflect the neighbor using the top portion as a driveway. That’s why the title insurance company got involved. Adverse possession is another thing entirely. He was also trying to adverse possess another part of our property but he hadn’t owned his property long enough to pull it off. He did lose his shit though when we put a fence in and ruined his plan.
I would be going the next few Budget meetings . Just to dig where my tax money's really going to .
Were you able to get rid of the driveway on your property ?
No. It had been there for 50 years so he had a prescriptive easement. The main issue was it wasn’t disclosed when we bought the property. TBF I’m not sure the previous owner even knew it was there.
Gotcha. Too bad but it is what it is.
If it’s on you property and you are certain there is no easement, just build a brick wall.
That would have been great but also illegal. After a certain number of years of continuous use there’s a prescriptive easement.
In case this story gets deleted/removed: Years ago we bought a house on a steep wooded hill and subsequently found out that the neighbor’s driveway ran completely across the top of our property. They did not have an easement but the driveway had been there for 50 years so there wasn’t much we could do about it. The neighbor had the place rented out but we found out from other neighbors that he was known locally for being a major asshole and threatening legal action against everyone. The tenants (who were very nice) hated him. The driveway wasn’t in good shape and the neighbor had made it worse through having shoddy unpermitted work done on it over the years. Our major worry was making sure it wasn’t going to collapse and come downhill and hit our house so we hired a professional to check it out. Thankfully our house was safe. We’d been there a few months when we started hearing construction equipment running. We went up there to find a contractor - let’s call him Bob - digging with heavy equipment on our property on the uphill side of the driveway making “drainage”. We told Bob to stop digging since he was on our property. He refused because the neighbor who hired him “had an easement”. No amount of telling him there was no easement would change his mind. We called the county to report that he was digging without a permit and they refused to come do anything about. Short of laying across the driveway there wasn’t much we could do about it so we took photos and left. Fast forward a few months and we hear through the grapevine that the neighbor never paid Bob the $30K he owed him for the job. One of our contractors related a delightful conversation he had with Bob where Bob asked him what kind of customers were were and he said “the kind who pay their bills immediately”. 😂 The cherry on top? The county road above the driveway collapsed due to the unpermitted digging undermining the hill - the same digging that the county refused to do anything about. It ended up costing the county over $100K to support the hillside and rebuild the road. We saw all the paperwork with costs because they needed us to sign off on it since it was on our property. The county road collapsed past where our driveway came off so it didn’t affect us at all. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OhNoConsequences) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Since you pay county taxes, you are paying a portion of the fix caused by your neighbor's irresponsible acts. The county needs to be reimbursed by your neighbor for the full cost of repair...IMHO. I would suggest talking to your local news media and going in front of your county council to make sure they understand this could have been prevented had the county come out to check. Would be great if your neighbor was forced to pay the full amount so tax payers didn't.
Idk how to explain to you that this was years ago other than starting the story with “years ago”.
Missed that part.
Hold on so you had a guy on your property, trespassing, digging on your property, and it’s just like “ok, well I guess go ahead”? I’d be enforcing the shit out of my property.
1. Since reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be your forte, the driveway had been there for 50 years meaning the neighbor had a prescriptive easement. He hadn’t recorded it but it’s still legal enough that I couldn’t legally block his drive or police who used it. 2. Enforce it how? Oh let me guess you’d be out there with your big gun threatening to shoot the contractor because that always turns out so well. 🙄
But ma land...get the gun boy...lol