Avoid the traffic... take the Ferry to Martha's Vineyard.
Avoid the traffic... take the Ferry to Martha's Vineyard.
Good fences may make good neighbors, but there's nothing like a lawsuit to iron out a dispute with the folks next door. Branches overhanging into your yard? Call your lawyer. Treetops obscuring that million-dollar view? Tell the zoning board. Boundary line laid a foot on the wrong side? Sue.
While there are no reliable national figures on neighbor-to-neighbor legal disputes, lawyers and town officials see an increase in complaints that can poison relationships and tarnish life in a dream home, not to mention consume thousands and thousands of dollars in legal bills.
"We've seen an increasing number of these disputes as the property values rise," says Ronald H. Rappaport, a lawyer on the Massachusetts summer getaway Martha's Vineyard. "People have a major investment to protect." And may be quicker to sue, he adds. "In the old days you knew all your neighbors, and now you don't."
Homeowners are willing to go to the mat to protect or improve property values, most commonly over issues involving access, boundary lines or views. The more money homeowners have, the more disputatious they become. "There are major lawsuits in upper-middle-class suburban areas over six inches of driveway or two inches of tennis court," says a lawyer currently involved in one such dispute. "It gets in the drinking water or something. People go nuts over things you wouldn't even notice."
Trees and gardens are common areas of neighbor tiffs. And who better (or worse) to tangle weeds with than Martha Stewart? The gardening guru created quite a splash in East Hampton, N.Y., last year when she bought, for about $3 million, an un-Martha-like Bauhaus-style home designed by the late architect Gordon Bunschaft. But she may have turned over one spadeful of dirt too many.
Her neighbor, prominent New York City developer Harry Macklowe, claims Ms. Stewart cleared away a 75-by-100-foot dense growth of bushes and trees standing as much as 30 feet high to get a better water view, without receiving permission from the village. Mr. Macklowe claims Ms. Stewart's handiwork ruined his privacy -- and that some of it occurred on his property. "She didn't clip a couple of day lilies and a neighbor got upset," says Michael G. Walsh, Mr. Macklowe's lawyer.
The developer's arboreal rebuttal: planting a row of "native trees." Horrors! cried the taste arbiter. "He has dug holes and planted shrubs right over the delicate roots of pepperidge trees and covered over the delicate ground covers which I so carefully was trying to uncover," Ms.
(See SUE, Page D2)
Stewart wrote village officials. Her unkindest cut: Mr. Macklowe "is doing his best to suburbanize the area with inappropriate dark greenery and soil berms on his land as well as my own land." Mr. Macklowe has sued Ms. Stewart in state court. Until a judge resolves the legal warfare, pruning has come to a halt.
In the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, Madonna was sued by her neighbors who said her trees blocked their view. (A court ordered the pop singer to keep them trimmed.) In a gated community in suburban Atlanta, baseball pitcher John Smoltz is battling over a neighbor's towering new garage that Mr. Smoltz and his wife claim casts shadows on his pool.
One unifying characteristic of unneighborly cases of money vs. money: "You can't get these people to talk to each other," says Leonard Ackerman, Ms. Stewart's lawyer.
To be sure, not all neighbor disputes involve the famous, though familiar names do attract attention when attached to court documents or zoning appeals. With the less well-to-do, homeowners tend to be no less zealous, but the sting -- financial and emotional -- can hurt a bit more.
Take a case on Martha's Vineyard that has dragged on through two lawsuits and four years. In the early 1990s, Jonathan and Linda Haar built a summer home in the hamlet of Chilmark. Roger and Dawn Greeley planned to build a house on their neighboring lot and wanted to carve roads through the Haars' property to access the construction site. In the fall of 1993, the Haars offered to trade the roads for the right to remove a few of the Greeleys trees to improve their ocean vista.
Then the fight began. The Haars say the Greeleys built their access roads despite failure to reach an agreement, knocking down trees and removing boulders along the way. They sued to block use of the roads. (And won. Damages are pending.) Later, the Haars say they received permission from the Greeleys to tag a dozen scrub oak trees to clear for their view. In April 1994, the trees came down. A month later, the Greeleys sued, claiming the Haars chopped down 27 mature trees with no permission. (The case could come to trial in the fall.)
Many lawyers agree that neighbor cases -- the Greeley-Haar case included -- usually can be resolved without having to resort to court. "A cordial discussion over a glass of wine in the back yard would alleviate a lot of it," says Jeffrey Bragman, an East Hampton lawyer. If that fails, there are an estimated 650 community-based dispute-resolution centers run by court systems around the country that use mediators to settle squabbles.
But in many instances, people just won't compromise, perhaps because of concerns over property value but just as likely because property is such a personal issue. It takes a toll. Legal bills can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars in high-end disputes. And the emotional bills can be even greater. The Haars, for one, lament that the wrangling has tarnished not only their view but their feelings about an island retreat they built with their own hands. "It's been a difficult four years," says Linda Haar. "We just want it to go away."
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