Adverse possession in gentrifying neighborhoods

[PolishHeadlock]

http://www.philly.com/philly/living/South_Kensington_gardeners_take_on_developer_in_court.html

This is an interesting case where a group of urban farmers had been taking care of a piece of land in a shitty neighborhood since it was abandoned.

Now the neighborhood is turning around and a developer went to the land owner and paid the back taxes to claim ownership. It looks like the farmers are trying to fight for the land and will have to pay the txes if they win. Seems like a pretty interesting case to me because I guess there aren't many instances of adverse possession on the books.

http://www.philly.com/philly/living/South_Kensington_gardeners_take_on_developer_in_court.html

Since 1988 -- long before South Kensington's recent renaissance -- generations of gardeners have cared for the land at Master and Lawrence streets that once housed a Pyramid Tire & Rubber Co. factory. With the creation of the Philadelphia Land Bank in 2013, the gardeners hoped they might finally have a shot at formal ownership. So, they were shocked in January when they found a lock on the gate of the farm, called La Finquita, and no-trespassing signs.



Now, they're staking their claim to the property in court. In a complaint filed Friday in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, the gardeners and Philadelphia Catholic Worker, the nearby nonprofit that helped neighbors create the farm and maintain it, are claiming rights of adverse possession, a rarely used legal maneuver that says an entity that openly occupies a property for 21 years or longer has ownership rights.

"It's a real equity issue," said Amy Laura Cahn, a lawyer with the Public Interest Law Center who filed the claim on behalf of Catholic Worker. "It recognizes the time and effort and expense that Philadelphia Catholic Worker and the generations of gardeners working with them have put into the space when this corporate owner completely abandoned it."

According to the complaint, a developer doing business as Mayrone LLC, based in Glenside, had acquired the property from executors of the beneficiary of the estate of Pyramid Tire and had paid off $60,000 in property taxes on the parcel. Gerard Regan, listed on the deed as a member of Mayrone, did not immediately respond to a phone call.


Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/living...n_developer_in_court.html#Tk2TIKWPxfgpX4Q6.99

 

[panamaican]

I think they're SOL. If they've been there for the 21 years and never executed their adverse possession rights then ownership stayed with the defunct company until new ownership claimed it. I can see the argument - that their adverse possession rights gave them ownership even if they never exercised them - but my (possibly wrong interpretation) is that it still requires the active effort to exercise those rights. They don't vest automatically.

Which makes sense. What if someone didn't want to be legally responsible for the taxes. Forcing ownership through adverse possession without some indication of interest from the person using the property would open them up to debts and liabilities that they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.

Funnily enough, I just finished an adverse possession claim. The biggest problem? An outstanding tax debt that the client wasn't responsible for because they weren't the legal property owner. So to keep the property out of a tax auction they had to legally take on the tax debt and the only way they could negotiate the payments...adverse possession for ownership. But if there was no tax sale on the horizon, they could have avoided ownership and the taxes would belong to the owner who was AWOL.

So eff these guys. They left the $60k tax debt hanging out there rather than taking ownership and having to pay it.

 

[PolishHeadlock]

I think they're SOL. If they've been there for the 21 years and never executed their adverse possession rights then ownership stayed with the defunct company until new ownership claimed it. I can see the argument - that their adverse possession rights gave them ownership even if they never exercised them - but my (possibly wrong interpretation) is that it still requires the active effort to exercise those rights. They don't vest automatically.

Which makes sense. What if someone didn't want to be legally responsible for the taxes. Forcing ownership through adverse possession without some indication of interest from the person using the property would open them up to debts and liabilities that they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.

Funnily enough, I just finished an adverse possession claim. The biggest problem? An outstanding tax debt that the client wasn't responsible for because they weren't the legal property owner. So to keep the property out of a tax auction they had to legally take on the tax debt and the only way they could negotiate the payments...adverse possession for ownership. But if there was no tax sale on the horizon, they could have avoided ownership and the taxes would belong to the owner who was AWOL.

So eff these guys. They left the $60k tax debt hanging out there rather than taking ownership and having to pay it.

I never thought about back property taxes in this kind of situation until I read this case.

I don't think it ever occurred to anyone that somebody would want this land until a couple of years ago when the real estate prices started jumping up in the surrounding neighborhoods. At that point they were waiting for the new Land Bank to be approved so they could get the land without going through the courts and paying taxes.

 

[panamaican]

I never thought about back property taxes in this kind of situation until I read this case.

I don't think it ever occurred to anyone that somebody would want this land until a couple of years ago when the real estate prices started jumping up in the surrounding neighborhoods. At that point they were waiting for the new Land Bank to be approved so they could get the land without going through the courts and paying taxes.

They gambled then and sometimes you lose. They wanted the property without paying the taxes. Understandable but sometimes waiting is a losing strategy.