Hawaii home mistakenly built on Bay Area woman's land to be torn down
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
Funny enough, Mountain View is right down the road from there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_View,_Hawaii
Way better farmers market, too.
IMHO, it falls under the category of "boat programming" (https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/14486/174092). That is, it is only thanks to the "Bay Area woman" that it grabbed some attention of the Bay Area-affiliated crowd (if it was a "Budapest woman", it would be treated, factfully, as local news).
In particular, it falls short of the HN guidelines of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
> “Mr. Lawrence testified he built the home on Lot 114 instead of Lot 115 because he counted out the lots using the telephone poles,” the court order read. “But he built the home on the wrong side of the telephone pole.”
Edit: changed dollar value, thanks Ballas for correcting me
The county granted a flawed permit. The builder built on the wrong site. The new buyer skipped a formal survey.
There's a web of lawsuits that have to play out in courts to seek insurance or pass through of damages.
(Unless lot 115 is completely different to 114, but doesn't sound that way)
I don't feel there is a shred of responsibility for the offended party to try and make reasonable accommodations for another party acting so unreasonable.
Did you see the photo? It’s a small house that definitely did not cost “millions” to build. The $5 million is in the lot, which they were trying to take from her via courts.
The value of the lot comes from the location and the view, which are not easily replaceable in a place like Hawaii, even from one adjacent lot to the next. I bet the house could be destroyed with negligible change of the value of the property, if any at all. So nobody is destroying “millions of dollars of value” in this situation.
Regardless, can you imagine the implications if a developer could just build on whatever lot they wanted and then the owner had to be forced to accept some other land in exchange? If that was true, I guarantee a lot of other developers would start “accidentally” building on nicer lots too.
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-home-built-on-w...
> The mistake was only realized toward the end of the sale of the property in the summer of 2023, when the title company was trying to close escrow on the home that had been listed for just under $5 million.
Whatever the real value, the parent comment claiming “millions of dollars of value” being destroyed is wrong.
“I believe in the sacredness and the sanctity of the land,” Reynolds said. “The coordinates aligned with my zodiac sign. And you could hear the ocean.”
Yes, this is clearly a $500k house, not $5M. The article just goofed. Maybe the SFGate writers have trouble comprehending 6-digit house prices...
Given her plans for the land however, I can see why she wouldn't be interested in that.
Basically there are 2 reasonable solutions as I see it, the one described above, and the one that actually happened per the article.
The developer suing her for being "unjustly enriched" is just pure madness. Had they not done that, they might've gotten away without having to pay for the demolition at least, if the landowner didn't object too harshly to a "free house" deal.
Which totally should've been the landowners call of course.
But she already expressed her plans to build something else on the land. Keeping the house would have saddled her with the additional cost of demolishing it and hailing away the debris, which is nontrivial.
So instead, the demolition and debris removal are being handled, which is effectively the same outcome but without her paying the costs.
If she doesn't want it, the developer should indeed be forced to pay for it's removal, as has happened.
But my understanding is that she wasn't given the option to just keep the house for free, had she wanted it. Given her plans, i don't really expect the outcome would've been any different, tho one does wonder if the offer of a free house wouldn't have been tempting, had she been given it?
Suing her for unjust enrichment just kinda forced her hand to demand the building removed, which is why I'll go on record saying the developer here is likely insane, or else stupid enough as makes no difference
Can you imagine if this had worked? If someone could screw up so badly as to build an entire house on land they had no authorization to build on, and sue the owner of that land? Who didn't even know it was happening until it was over?
I can think of a long line of people the builder might have a case against here, but suing someone with the argument, "I unjustly enriched you. Give me money," is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in awhile.
Just imagine the precedent.
Ironically, in the mail, we have protections for that. By law, you may keep unsolicited merchandise and are under no obligation to pay for it.
Thus: I consider the contractor to be a private courier that delivered a building upon my land. I didn't solicit this merchandise (house), and I'm not paying for it.
If you're living at a place (or spend a lot of time there) you'd have seen the workers working at your place. Catching them mid job and letting them know right away wouldn't result in unjust enrichment. Letting someone build a whole house on your property while you knew about it would be unjust enrichment.
Say your neighbor pays to redo their backyard. Install a big outdoor kitchen, install a fancy pool with a water slide, etc.
They mix up which yard is which. You see them come into your yard and start digging. You think "maybe I should stop them..." but don't. Instead, you let them build out a $100,000 backyard setup in your yard over the next week.
You could have stopped them. You were there. The construction workers saw you were home and saw you leave and come back several times during the week. There's no doubt you were aware of the unpaid construction work being done. Instead, you waited until all the work was completed.
In this case there's practically little way this owner, who lived over 2,000mi away from the property, would have reasonably known this construction was happening. This is why that case was thrown out.
Dine and Dash doesn’t involve a formal written contract, but the implication of sitting down in a restaurant is clear.
One of my neighbors let a family member build a house on their property without explicitly gifting them the land and you can see the inherent conflict involved when the land owner knows and approves what’s going on.
Had he been a programmer he would know to count from 0 :)
If you build on the wrong plot, the only person to blame is yourself.
From what I could see, the builders most likely kicked the boundary peg out of the ground and just put it back willy nilly.
As a consequence, I did advise my son to have nothing to do with the property and we did inform the real estate agent of the problem. This would put legal responsibility on the estate agent if it was sold without the boundary line being corrected.
Due diligence is necessary if you are doing this kind of thing.
from
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/06/26/hawaii-island-judge...
I think that is a shame and Reynold will get justice in the next trail. To me, the land should be restored to what it was before the work began.
The builder didn't help himself by suing everyone before trying to work it out.