Why do people think they have a right to touch private property they didn’t pay for?

The rules of property should be easy enough: If you haven’t paid for it, it’s not yours, and you have no right to it. When it comes to homeownership, this rule shouldn’t be harder to comprehend, but since some lines are not actually physically visible, people tend to make things a lot more complicated. 

We used to think the border was very straightforward. People buy a house with a fence so that everything within that fence is theirs, and everything outside of it belongs to someone else. However, we never considered the fate of the fence itself… If one fence separates two properties, then who owes the fence? Is it the owner of the house on the left, or the owner of the one on the right? That is exactly the line where people simply love to make everything a lot more complicated than it should be.

If you’re wondering how neighborly relationships can go up in flames because of a fence, the story below is the perfect example. Technically, both homeowners in this story are also the owners of the fence, since it sits exactly on the property line between the two houses. However, after a bad storm, the fence was ruined, and only one owner paid to get it fixed. By that owner’s logic, the new fence now belongs to him, since he is the one who paid for it. The other homeowner, however, begs to differ. He still believes he has a right to the fence since it’s partially on his property. This line of thought led him to cut a gate into the fence, without even running it by the first homeowner.

The first homeowner, the one who paid for the new fence, got really mad when he saw a gate cut into his fence and decided to confront his neighbor about it. The neighbor claimed he had the right to build the gate and refused to take it down. Is that the end of the story? Don’t be so sure…