From today's Los Angeles times article about cities' legal bills:
"The latest of those involves a house owned by resident Andrea Joannou. In 2005, Joannou bought a dilapidated home on a hillside south of scenic Palos Verdes Drive South, across the road from the gated Portuguese Bend community where she lives.
Despite its shoddy condition, the hillside house had a "to die for" 180-degree view of the Pacific Ocean, and Joannou said she hoped to fix it up and use it as a vacation home or let a relative live there.
But she soon found she couldn't fix it. Although Joannou bought the house, because of the landslide, the property belongs to Rancho Palos Verdes, or so the city says. The city said that over the course of decades, the slow-moving Portuguese Bend Landslide moved the house off its original lot onto land owned by the city's redevelopment agency, a fact that Joannou said she was unaware of when she bought the house.
The city says the house belongs on a lot across the street from its current location, where it was before the landslide began in 1956. That lot is behind someone else's house and has no ocean view.
The dispute has threatened a long-standing gentleman's agreement among neighbors in the Portuguese Bend community, who had operated on the assumption that their property lines move with the landslide instead of remaining in their pre-slide locations — a belief that the city does not always share.
Joannou — joined by a real estate company that had bought the similarly situated house next door — sued the city and everyone else with a possible interest in the land in an attempt to get the neighborhood's property lines redrawn in the houses' current locations. She lost, but has appealed the decision."
My wife's family is from Palos Verdes, and we visit several times a year. That section of PV Drive South moves around a lot.
One of the things we "flatlanders" never have to worry about. I would think there would be all sorts of legal precedents for this dilemma in California which would make short order of a law suit.
WOW.....talk about government gone awry!
This of course has to be settled in a court of law and hopefully knowledgable lawyers will/can present a good case.
Keith
If that is true, then the city does no own the property the street is on.
I wonder if the lending company (if there was a loan) and the title company have any culpability on this. Also, was a survey done at all (I wonder)? Or does the City just 'declare' where the property. I wonder if there is a plat drawn showing the property lines in relation to the building. Do they have gps coordinates on where the corners once were? Is this is a slow and imperceptable movement, could it be considered that the corners did move as the land moved? Like a river or lakefront property?
I guess I wonder a lot.;-)
Ya know what this sounds like?
A coordinate believer who can replace any and all property boundaries from coordinates!
Just what I was thinking. GPS coordinates? Find the local monuments and bring them in. You don't need any Coords.
> Find the local monuments and bring them in. You don't need any Coords.
It seems to me that this isn't a measurement question, but a legal one: how much topsoil has to move before title moves with it? 1 foot? 10 feet? 100 feet? More?
The Portuguese Bend landslide is about 135 feet thick. Are the lots moving, or are the houses moving across the lots? It appears that at least one court believes the latter.
Let Us Get The Questions Straight
If you own the house when it is on your lot, would you not still own it when it was off your lot?
Since the adjacent downgrade owner has done nothing to give you support, would he not be estopped from claiming your property?
When the house is on your lot it is real property. Once it leaves your lot does it become personal property?
If it is agreed you still own the house (as real or personal property) could you not then pass title to others?
I believe you have license to use and repair the house whereever it is, but cannot knock it down to the foundation and rebuild it.
"The wise man builds his house upon the rock." Is this now P&R?
Paul in PA
If it's going to appeal, I hope they publish. It will be good to get some case law in this area (the effect of land movement on boundaries).
The little I've been able to find, it seems to be viewed similarly as a riparian boundary, with the main question being whether it was slow and imperceptible or sudden and significant.
I don't think it's a hold the mons vs a hold the coords matter either. It will be more a definition of what slow and imperceptible is defined as being as it pertains to land movement.
Let Us Get The Questions Straight
Like this rock. 😀
I really don't see the difference if it is slow or fast.
It is not a water boundary problem and should not be treated the same.
If the monuments move slow and it takes 50 years to get where they are now, what is the difference if in fact they move over night. The house is still sitting on the land within the monuments.
I don't see it any different than expert measuring when some, like in Texas, he wants to sledge hammer it over for a finger length distance.
The monuments are undisturbed!
The alternative is that one would have to dig up the monuments and move them to the previous geographic coordinate position.
I don't think so.
Keith
> The monuments are undisturbed!
Only if you consider their positions relative to nearby improvements. It's very easy to make the case that the monuments are highly disturbed, having demonstrably moved dozens or even hundreds of feet from their original positions.
I don't think this matter is going to turn on questions of how fast or suddenly the land moved. The ultimate court may even choose not to resolve the matter of where the lots are, but instead to recognize the unique circumstances and direct a solution that addresses the equitable interests of all concerned.
I repeat, the monuments are not disturbed and one can easily determine that by looking at them.
Now if one puts a GPS gadget on them, as opposed to a calculated position in the past; they have moved, no doubt.
Is the house still in proximity to the corner monuments that control the boundaries? I think so.
It is not the same as riparian concepts, as the house did not move away from the monuments; whereas the riparian land moved away from the house and the monuments.
Keith
> I repeat, the monuments are not disturbed
You can repeat that until you're blue in the face, but a monument that has moved hundreds of feet over the course of 50 years -- its movement not just anecdotal but documented by experts -- is disturbed.
>"The monuments are undisturbed!"
Are they? I think that you're making an assumption that everything just kind of moved over while remaining intact. I don't think that's the case here. I think that some of these monuments might be completely sideways, or even upside down under dirt well downhill of land that was pretty close to it when it was first set.
If notes called for a WCMC set at the top edge of a bluff, and you found it half buried and lying somewhat sideways about halfway down the slope, would you use that monument to control the line? Would you use a BT uprooted and moved downslope by a slide to replace an obliterated corner?
If you don't like the comparison to riparian boundaries, let's look at the basic criteria for accepting a monument: If a monument exists undisturbed in its original position, or if you can otherwise acsertain the original position of the original monument, it is controlling. If moved from it's original position, it's not.
I doubt that you would use the location of the post or the BT mentioned above to control the line you were surveying even though they were moved from their original positions by natural land movement.
So what's the criteria? Is it the magnitude of the movement? If it affects only 1 or 2 mons, then you call them disturbed and don't hold them, but if the slide is bigger and takes most of an entire neighborhood, then you do?
I don't think that there is any standard answer here. I think that you need to look at each individual monument of each individual case. You need to look at the nature of the land movement. Part of that nature might be the magnitude of the area affected, but I think it would be more dependent upon the underlying geology that explains why the ground has moved as it has in the past and is predictive of how it may move in the future.
Take a look at these two photos:
Portuguese Bend, 1972
Portuguese Bend, 2010
In the 1972 photo, take a look at the two houses on the seaward side of the main road, staight above the pier and just about right next to the road. Their a little hard to see, but they are two white houses right next to each other.
Take a look at those same houses in the 2010 photo. Both have slid quite a way from the road, with the more easterly one looking as if it has slid close to 100' more than the westerly one.
You can see near vertical breaks in the land that represent where the land has been sliding at separate rates. That is the problem with some of the land movement in CA. It's not all just a little repositioning by earthquakes now and then. Some of it is a liquid-like, or glacier-like movement of land that is not cohesive to the geologic structure underneath it, nor cohesive to the ground it is sliding with. It moves much like what you would observe if you took a tray full of gravel and tipped it. In "ground" like that, the monuments you find might be sufficient to control or they may not. They may be sufficient to control now, but not in a few years as the "ground" sloughs off and the monuments make a slow tumble out of place. In some cases, finding a monument is merely evidence that monuments were once placed, but useless as evidence of the original corner.
In the Winter of 1997, a similar slide took out the better part of a small resort community (Whitehall) along the American River, upstream from Placerville, and uphill along Hwy 50 about 1/2 hour from Placerville. The slide took out 1/4 mile of Hwy 50, a bridge that went from the Hwy across to an area with a couple dozen cabins, and a few cabins as well - all washed downstream in the American River a few yards to a few miles.
Where would the Hwy RW be after the slide? Where would the cabin lot corners be? Would they be with the "land" or "ground" in which the original monuments were set? Or, do they get re-established on the new ground surface according to the nearest undisturbed or relatively undisturbed monuments?
In each of these cases, if there was a cohesive geologic structure which had moved relative to the other nearby geology, using the monuments that travelled with the geologic structure would make a lot of sense. But the problem with the both the Whitehall slide and the Portuguese Bend slide is that there was/is no real geologic structure to the sliding area. Each was/is just a layer of dirt sliding off of an underlying solid structure.
In Whitehall, the slide was quick and perceptible, and a good deal of the ground was subsequently washed away in the river. At Portuguese Bend, the slide is quite perceptible if you compare over the course of a few years, but probably not so much even year to year. But once that dirt slides off the underlying rock and into the ocean, it too will eventually get washed away, just as at Whitehall.
So again, I don't see it as a simple monuments vs coordinates scenario. It's a case of what sort of geology would support holding the mons vs re-establishing positions from nearby control, whether the magnitude of the area affected has a bearing on that decision, and what constitutes slow and imperceptible when it comes to land movement.
No simple answers here.
Good discussion.
I think it's time for the case law to roll out. I have no idea what the California courts will find. But I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of accretion-avulsion theory be proposed and either accepted or shot down.
> I repeat, the monuments are not disturbed and one can easily determine that by looking at them.
>
If the monuments were set to a depth of 125 feet or so, then maybe they would not have been disturbed. Don't you think? You know, we setr BMs here to depths of 140' because of soil and subsidence.
Maybe you never used GPS 'gadgets' but they are going to tell you where you are geographically on the face of the earth to extreme accuracy.
Are the monumnts in agreement with the intent of the original survey?
But like Jim F, I think the courts would seek some sort of equity solution, just like if a serous survey blunder caused the lines to be not where they were intended and $ubsequent improvement$ were made to the lots.
