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    Default Shared Driveway Dispute

    My question involves real estate located in the State of: Michigan

    Hi Friends. I really hope you can provide some of the great advice I've seen on other threads. We moved into our house around 5 years ago. It's in a part of town that is relatively expensive and has high property taxes that fund great schools, etc. Around the same time we moved in our neighbor's adult son moved back in with his elderly parents, bringing his ~6-year-old son with him, to take advantage of the great schools and also, I suspect, free childcare his mom provides, etc. Let's call him B. So, we share a single lane driveway that leads to the rear of the houses, where they have a two-car garage and we have a carport under a deck. We each also have one parking space. But it's tight back there. We have a litany of complaints. I will try to list them and stay on track. The parents next door are very nice people. The son is a mechanic, aggressive, selfish and causes problems all the time. He drives a large pick-up truck, and used to park it wherever he wanted, often in our space, sometimes in the middle of the driveway. Over the years, we've complained enough, and threatened to get the truck towed enough that now he drives it onto the single parking space on his side, but then past that and up onto what used to be their yard.

    That's okay with me. He also has a 1000cc motorbike, and he likes to rev it right under my 2-year-old's window. My 2-year-old is terrified of the bike and it wakes him up in the middle of the night. B often comes and goes and keeps pretty erratic hours. He'll come home at 7pm in his truck, leave at 7:30pm on his bike, come back in 15 minutes, leave again at 8pm, come home at 10pm, leave at midnight in his truck, come home at 3am, then leave at 7am on his bike for work. Let's a lot of coming and going and noise. But I know I can't stop someone from leaving his house. A couple of years ago, we had a conversation and he agreed to start his bike at the end of the driveway and then, when he was coming home, cut the engine there too and coast up with driveway. It was great. A gamechanger. He won't do that anymore. Because the driveway is so tight, my back window looks out onto his parking space. He often (every day) goes outside to smoke weed in his truck, since his parents probably don't like him doing it in the house. Often, random people will drive up the driveway, B will get something from his truck and give it to the person, and the person will leave. I've watched people walk up the driveway at midnight. Other times, in the middle of the day, someone will wait around in our driveway, 4 or 5 feet from my back door, smoking weed from a pipe. Maybe he's dealing weed. I don't know. I have three kids: 7yrs; 5yrs; and 2yrs. So, I don't really like that. Also, since he's a mechanic, he occasionally has friends drive up and park in the driveway and work on their cars. When he does this, we can still get out.

    But last summer, he had a junky car parked in the driveway, jacked up in the air, for more than a week, and I had to always keep my kids from it. They just want to play in the yard and on the driveway but I live in fear of things like falling cars, or B returning, since he drives up the driveway at about 50mph. A couple of weeks ago, at 4pm my 7yr-old and my 2yr-old were in the driveway when B returned home on his bike and now he's totally freaked out by the bike and talks about it all the time. Anytime he hears anything, he starts shouting about it. B was friendly with us when we first moved in. Not anymore. Last night, a friend of his came over around 9pm, on a noisy little scooter, so my wife and I are holding our breath, hoping the sound doesn't wake the kids. It didn't. They disappeared for a bit into the neighbor's little shed, I'm assuming to smoke weed, and then came out, turned on the bike and revved it for a full minute to diagnose some mechanical issue with it. At 9:30pm. The kid woke up screaming. I went outside and asked him, pretty politely, if we could talk about things, and he stands there saying to his friend, "I don't hear anything. Do you hear anything?" We share the driveway, right down the middle.

    I can't stop him coming and going. But his actions are causing us so much stress. We talk with his parents all the time about it, and they say they'll talk with him. But nothing changes. We're honestly pretty scared of him because he seems unstable and comes him high, and gets fired from jobs, and gets into fights. And I've tried to talk with him anyway, and he pretends I'm actually not there. We want to keep our kids safe; we want to make sure there's no selling of drugs in the driveway; we don't want the nice driveway to look like a mechanic's yard. I didn't really want to involve the police since that won't do much for our relationship. I called the police a couple of times in the past 2 years: once when he was fixing a car at 1am, and once when he hit our babysitter's car with his truck.

    Please help. What should I do? What would you do?

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