A Festival Parked 60 Cars on Homeowner’s Lawn and Charged $10 Each, Then Refused to Pay for the Damage
When you become a homeowner, you learn to expect the unexpected. For one new homeowner on Reddit, that meant finding out that their yard doubles as a parking lot for a nearby fall festival.
Redditor OutsiderMotif posted about their recent experience in the r/Legal subreddit, asking for advice after coming home to discover that their yard had been turned into a pay-to-park lot. “I bought a small house with an adjoining half-acre grassy lot in February. The lot is part of the same parcel as my house, and I have a survey from the purchase showing the boundaries,” the Indiana homeowner explained in their post.
“There’s an annual fall festival about two blocks away. I was out of town last Saturday when my neighbor texted me a picture of about 60 cars parked on my grass,” the post continued. The OP said they originally assumed that people were just helping themselves, but they quickly learned that the festival was charging them $10 to use the land.
Unfortunately, the festivalgoers did some damage to the property, and when the homeowner contacted the festival organizers, they didn’t quite get the response they were hoping for. With another weekend of the festival to go, the OP is now asking for help when it comes to finding out what their legal rights are regarding the festival and how they can stop people from parking there.
The Previous Owner Allegedly Gave the Organization Permission to Park
A local festival has been charging people $10 to park on my property. The organizers say they had permission from the previous owner.
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u/OutsiderMotif in
legal
Once the OP got home, they said that they reached out to the organizers to find out what was going on. “The woman I spoke with said they’ve used that lot for overflow parking for years and the previous owner always allowed it. Apparently nobody bothered to check that the property had been sold,” they wrote.
Since the OP had never agreed to the arrangement, they asked that the festival stop using the space. The OP said they also requested to have the damage done by the cars fixed, which is where things got a little dicey.
“There are deep tire ruts across the lawn, trash everywhere, and somebody drove over a drainage pipe near the driveway,” the OP explained. “She apologized for the ‘communication mix-up’ but said the festival is a nonprofit fundraiser and they’ve already allocated the parking revenue to community programs.”
Redditors Said Being a Nonprofit Didn’t Exempt Them From Liability
While the OP was concerned about getting the grass repaired and the drainage pipe fixed, they were also worried about whether the festival organizers would continue to use the land based on the previous agreement, especially with another weekend of celebrations coming up.
One person responded with seemingly solid advice for the OP, telling them that a “handshake agreement” didn’t give the festival organizers rights to the property after the previous owner was gone. “A license to use someone’s land is entirely personal, and the second you bought that house in February, any old permission expired,” they wrote.
The OP has yet to post an update about how things went, so hopefully some of the advice in the Reddit thread has been useful. But if not, they may have a solid reason to call the police. According to Prked, parking on someone’s property without permission could be considered trespassing in some instances.
How that’s handled depends on where the property owner lives. In some places, their best bet will be to call the non-emergency line to see if an officer can come out and help. In other places, they may need to have a tow truck come out to remove the vehicles instead, so it’s best to do some research before deciding what to do if someone finds themselves in a similar situation.
