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Comment by majos | Hacker News Reader

I'd never thought about this before. How do property rights apply to enclaves? If I own all the land encircling another piece of land, what prevents me from barring access to the encircled piece of land? Are there laws forbidding this?

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Typically the interior property will have a cross access easement, a legal document that gives them access across the encircling piece of land. This is also pretty common in commercial developments where you have to cross a parcel to get to an outlot in a development.

Interestingly, that's part of the issue in OP right? The existing private access road was grandfathered, so he could close it. But if Khosla made any changes requiring e.g. new permitting, providing access would have ended up as part of that. The difference being public vs private land, and you could theoretically come up the beach (not fully encircled).

My grandparents' house had a small lane beside it which was a right-of-way or easement (not sure the terminology used here). It was for horse drawn coal wagons so they could reach the building behind my grandparents house. The rear house was facing a main street but there wasn't any driveway or way for the coal wagon to reach the rear of the house.

Then of course coal for home heating became obsolete but for the next 70 years the right-of-way existed. The home behind my grandparents had a driveway and a parking lot added to it. A fence was put up probably 75 years ago, turned posts, very old fence.

The home changed hands many times I even lived in it as a baby when the rear house was divided into apartments.

Now lawyers own the rear house and guess what they want? Yes they are demanding the 75 year-old fence be torn down. And they want to use the right-of-way for vehicles. Only the right-of-way is four maybe at most barely five feet wide bordered by my grandparents old home and the fence of the house beside it.

There it is the use of close to 80 year old disused narrow coal path now demanded by the latest owners of another property.

“Easement by necessity” is one major way it is dealt with.

https://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/necessity-and-p...

If someone owns the encircled piece of land they can sue to force the owner of the surrounding land to allow access to the property. Usually they will be granted an easement to allow them to do so.

If you're interested, it's commonly referred to as landlocked property.

This is actually really common in Western States where billionaires like Ted Turner buy up massive chunks of land surrounding public Access land and then put up fences to keep people out.

Of course it's illegal and they're required to provide an easement but laws don't apply the same to billionaires

This does happen, and it gets messy (to the point of murders).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/21/public-l...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/wilks-brothers-frackin...

Go to one of the popular land-for-sale websites and look up "landlocked" or "no easement" - you can get the land for almost nothing (for good reason).

I don't know about the US, but where I live the encircling land will have to open a road for the locked ones.

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