I walked to the granite shelf, the shelf where my grandfather had taught my father to fish and my father had taught me and I had taught my daughter. A freshly poured concrete boat launch now partially blocked it from the water. I stood there for a while. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I took out my phone and took a photograph.
I let them build because in property law there is a concept called damages. And damages multiply with every nail they drive. By early 2023, 12 cabins were complete and two were under active construction. Diane had pre-sold memberships to all 14 units at $78,000 each. That is $19 million in membership revenue collected and spent.
Projected annual rental income from the completed units was sitting at $280,000. On paper, Crestwood Shores was a success. A neighborhood real estate play that had gone exactly according to plan. The construction loan was $2.1 million secured against the community lakefront property. The regional bank holding that note had conducted its own due diligence before issuing it.
What they had not done, what nobody on that transaction had done, was pull the original 1963 deed and read every page of it. The easement was not on their radar. They had no idea it existed. Here is why that matters. When a lender finances construction on land that is encumbered by a valid recorded easement restricting that specific use, the lender’s security interest is legally subordinate to the easement. That is not a technicality.
That is the structure of property law. In plain language, it means this. If the development is found to violate the easement, the bank’s collateral, the cabins, the boat launches, the paved road, all of it loses the majority of its appraised value. The loan can be called. The lender becomes a creditor chasing an asset the courts have already compromised.
I had researched this thoroughly. I had a folder. Closing day for the final two memberships was scheduled for March 14th, 2023. A young couple and a retired contractor each paying $78,000. The HOA plan to apply those proceeds directly against the construction loan balance. I circled March 14th on my wall calendar.
My daughter noticed it and asked what the marking was for. I smiled. A meeting. By late 2021, Diane had been watching me for months. Or rather, she had been watching for a reaction from me and not getting one. No letters, no phone calls, no attorney correspondence, no appearance at board meetings to raise objections. No complaints filed with the county, nothing.
A year and a half of construction on my shoreline, and the man whose shoreline it actually was had not made a single sound. In a person with better instincts, that silence might have triggered caution. A quiet neighbor in a property dispute is not always an uninformed one. Sometimes quiet means they are waiting. Sometimes quiet means they already know something you don’t.
Diane did not have those instincts. What she had was a developer’s reflex. When the other side isn’t pushing back, you push forward. She read my silence as ignorance. And then she decided to convert that ignorance into paperwork. The first letter arrived in November of 2021. Formal HOA stationery, attorney signature at the bottom.
It asserted that a strip of my shoreline property, the narrow band running directly along the eastern bank of the cove, had been incorporated into the Crestwood Shores common area through adverse use. Adverse use. She was claiming squatters rights on land my grandfather had purchased outright in 1962 and my family had maintained continuously for six decades.
