What Can I Do About a Neighbor Who Is Exploiting Our Property Line?

Q: A shared alley separates my Staten Island property from my neighbor’s. The residence line operates down the center of the alley, so we every single very own fifty percent of it. A gate attaches the two qualities. My neighbor place a padlock on the gate, and has not specified me a crucial. So I have no access to my assets from that aspect — I just can’t obtain the air-conditioning condenser and equipment. I have penned to my neighbor inquiring for a critical, but she has not responded. What can I do? If I have to have to make repairs on that side of my dwelling can I slice the lock with a bolt cutter?

A: You can lower the lock if it’s proscribing obtain to your house. But to start with, give your neighbor the advantage of the question. Most likely she skipped the letter and doesn’t know that you can not access your very own assets. Knock on her doorway and request her if she been given the letter. Ask for a spare essential, and consider it from there.

If she does not react, or if she rebuffs your request, write a next letter. Send this a single certified mail so you have a record that you sent it, said Eric D. Sherman, a true estate law firm and a husband or wife in the Manhattan place of work of the regulation firm Pryor Cashman. Make clear that you need accessibility to your house and would like a copy of the essential by a established day. If you really do not acquire a key by the deadline, notify her that you will slash the lock and swap it with a new one particular.

“If the deadline passes and you still haven’t listened to anything at all, cutting the lock would seem acceptable below the instances, as long as you give a important to your neighbor,” Mr. Sherman mentioned.

Involve a copy of the initial letter with the second a person you deliver her, as very well as the essential for the new lock that you approach to set up so you really don’t have to go to the problems of creating her once more if you have to adjust the lock.

However, right before you place on a new lock, make positive that the gate must be locked at all. If a utility meter, for illustration, is on the gated side of a person of your houses, it’s unquestionably doable the gate requirements to continue to be unlocked.

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