January 1, 2025 at 11:21 pm

Annoying Tenants Made Their Kid’s Safety Management’s Responsibility, But Their Request Backfired And Left Them Fenced Out Of Their Shortcut

by Benjamin Cottrell

Owning property comes with its fair share of headaches, especially when tenants push their luck.

When their most annoying tenants demanded management build a fence to keep their children safe, the property owner happily (and maliciously) complied and built it – just not where they anticipated.

Read on for the full story!

Okay, we’ll put a gate up, just not where you expected.

Over the early 2000s, we parcelled up and sold a bunch of our old farmland for property development, creating a little cul-de-sac.

The cul-de-sac was at the bottom of a steep hill, and parallel to it, there was a main road that went down to a beach at the very bottom of the hill.

Between the cul-de-sac and the main road was a set of apartments we rented out, their gardens, and the beach shortcut.

They describe this shortcut.

The beach shortcut was an old gate, about the width of a person, a sort of back entrance to the property from the days of yore.

This allowed people coming up from the beach on foot access without having to go all the way to the top of the steep hill to the main entrance.

We left this area undeveloped and retained ownership of it, creating a small green belt and shortcut to the residents of the cul-de-sac and the apartments. This belt was about 20 feet wide and 60 feet long.

Soon other families started using this area as a play space.

The kids from one of the families in the cul-de-sac started using it as a play area. They’d play ball games there, which sometimes resulted in balls getting kicked out onto the road and down the hill.

But they weren’t a favorite of management.

This family was overall a pain.

They lived right at the very bottom of the cul-de-sac and were terrible at paying maintenance fees late and complaining about the other residents.

Anyway, we kind of let this slide until the family asked if we could put a gate on the entrance to stop the kids from going out on the road after their ball.

But this request turned into quite a headache for management.

Now, this request presented a few problems.

Mainly, the kids would likely just jump over the wall and get out there anyway. We suggested that maybe they could tell their kids not to play on our property, but the family refused, stating that it was up to us to make it safe for their kids.

The thing is, this is a fair point — if the kids fell or injured themselves in the area, then we’d probably be liable. So we kind of had to comply, but not only that—we had to make sure the kids were not in danger on our property at all.

So management decided to comply with the request – but not in the way the family expected.

We actually had to go a step further than they anticipated. We had to fence the kids out of our property entirely.

So yeah, we fenced off the entire green belt from the cul-de-sac. A huge 8-foot wooden structure with a door with a key code on it.

We informed them that the door was to separate our private property from the public area and the code was only given to the apartment residents (and cul-de-sac residents we liked better than that family).

Now, the family can’t even access the play space at all.

So, not only were their kids prevented from playing there entirely, but the family no longer had access to the shortcut and had to climb the steep hill out to the main gate when going to and from the beach.

In fact, this extended trip arguably made it more dangerous for the kids, as now they had to spend longer on the road and pass a pretty busy T-junction during these trips.

The moral of the story is that if you have a neighbor that turns a blind eye to you using a part of their property, don’t make it hard to keep turning that blind eye.

These tenants definitely should have stopped while they were ahead.

What did Reddit think?

This parents seem fairly comfortable with offloading responsibility.