Neighbouring construction project problems- what do I do?

Hello! As the title says, we’re having issues with the construction that has been going on next door.

Tl;dr, they’ve been building 2 large 2 story “ADUs” on our neighbouring property, and after a lot of inconvenience (parking in front of our driveway nearly daily, flooding our yard for a week during a heavy rainstorm & damaging one of our trees, tearing out the shared fence and temporarily using a portion of our property along the shared side throughout the construction period) they now want us to pay for a portion of the fence.

So for backstory, we bought a house in San Diego at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns in 2020. We barely scraped by to get it, but we were lucky enough to do so. A few months after moving in, the tenants renting the house next door to us let us know they were moving out because the trust that owns the property was starting construction on the half-lot between our two homes. The trust failed to notify them until after they re-signed their lease, effectively breaking that contract.

Since late 2020/early 2021, the construction has been ongoing. The construction company tore down the shared fence (an old chain link covered in thick ivy and honeysuckle), and put up a temporary barrier between our properties, citing that the trust legally owned a few inches of our property line, on our side- they’ve been essentially “borrowing” an extra foot and change of space from us down the entire property line so they could erect the scaffolding. We cannot use our side path to get in and out of the backyard on that side (and have not been able to for 2 years); it was the main walkway between the front and back of our property.

During this time, the construction people have consistently parked in front of my driveway (I work from home, and they park things there during the half-hour drive to and from my kid’s school, so it’s a pain in the ass to get them to move so I can park again, as they also take up all the nearby street parking), dropped trash and scraps in my yard (thankfully not too much), and due to negligence on their part, caused our entire backyard to flood about 6in deep for a week during a heavy rainstorm; no gutters were installed, no berm or sandbags put up against their temporary fence, and the removal of the previous fence caused a grade that slopes down into our yard. The concurrent construction means there’s less ground for the storm water to seep into, so it flowed directly down to us. The flooding combined with the wind caused the lemon tree that is on our property to fall. It’s not a small tree, either. Our dog couldn’t even use the yard, because there was nowhere dry.

After I brought all of this up to them in an email, the construction company basically said “That sucks, but it’s not our fault” politely, and then eventually installed rain gutters.

Now they are trying to get us to pay for a portion of the fence that will be going back into place- after all this crap, lack of privacy, flooding, and encroachment on our property, I don’t believe we should have to. What can we do here to ensure we don’t get further screwed over?

We’re planning on selling and moving next year after we finish some work on this place.

submitted by /u/WhatARuffian
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/115bdh4/neighbouring_construction_project_problems_what/