Neighbors are important. We have loved our home (above), our neighborhood, and our neighbors since buying this home in 1998. 24 years in a home is a good amount of time and our investment in our home and our neighbors has been important. Our immediate neighbor to the East, Ruth Jackson was a wonderful human being who lived in her home for many decades, raising a family and being a part of the community. We used to shovel her driveway for her in winter and we’d make cookies and treats for each other at holidays. We’d help out with her daughter, and when her grandson and his family moved in to help, we helped them routinely as well. They were wonderful neighbors. Unfortunately, Ruth died a couple years ago and the home was bought by some company called Holy Flip LLC, who hired a series of contractors to renovate the home who did such shoddy work that the home had multiple stop work orders placed upon it by the city. There was garbage and toilets left out in front of the yard for weeks on end, and accusations of drug dealing with some questionable signage left by one of the contractors who did not get paid. Eventually the house was completed after a few fits and starts and the side of the home almost collapsing from a roof truss that was inappropriately cut by one of the contractors. In 2020 it was sold to new owners Darren Wayne Leverenz and Lauryn Leverenz who moved in from Florida with their daughters.
The two properties at 1458 E. Kensington, and 1466 E. Kensington in Salt Lake City have a shared driveway that has been in place since the homes were built sometime in 1907. Prior owners of these homes have had no apparent problems with this shared driveway for over 100 years. However, my very first interaction with Darren was him swaggering up and telling me that they were going to increase the average value of homes in the neighborhood… It was a weird statement, but whatever. Very soon after that, we started having problems with them parking so that we were unable to get into our automobiles. They would park so close to our cars that we could not open our car doors to get in. The only way to get in when they did this was to crawl through the back hatch, and over the seats.
I asked them a few times if there was any way we could stagger our cars for ease of access to the car doors and to get things like trashcans and bicycles in and out. This was apparently not acceptable to them and they started parking even closer to our cars, preventing us from moving in or out of the driveway very easily and making it impossible to move garbage cans or bicycles in or out of the driveway. We’d have to keep an eye out for when they left so that we could move garbage cans in and out.
Eventually they straight up told us that we were not allowed to park in our own driveway and that there was some “shared easement” which was being blocked by our vehicles. This was nonsense. There never was an easement and we were left trying to figure out if they were trying to run a con or if they had access to some historical information that we were unaware of. So we proceeded to start digging into the deeds and history of the property.
Then coming home one day, Darren had parked his car perpendicularly across the driveway and my spouse H was up on his porch apparently asking him to move so that she could get her car out. He had trapped my wife in the driveway and was standing there with his red solo cup swaggering about, telling us that he owned the driveway and that they had a survey proving it. I asked him to provide the survey and he told me it would cost me $5000 to see it. I said that is ridiculous, to which he increased the price to $6000. It was bonkers and I told him that. I also told him that if there was a survey, it would be filed with the county and I was going to go look it up for free, but in the meantime to move his car or I’d have it towed. It was at that moment when he literally squares up to me on his porch like he is going to physically fight me. I looked over his shoulder at his wife and asked her if she was going to step in, because this was not going to end the way her husband thinks it’s going to end. At that point H pulls me away and says we are going before anything got started. I left by telling him that if he did not move his car then we’d call the police and have his car towed. We walked into the house and H was absolutely gobsmacked saying that she negotiates international contracts with people around the world and she’s never seen someone so bizarrely confrontational and unreasonable. I agreed fully.
The next day Darren was out in the driveway taping off the portion of the driveway that he felt was his that went right up the middle of our vehicles. He informed me that we’d be allowed to park maybe a motorcycle on our property, but not a car and to “get used to it because that was our new reality”. I ignored him.
A couple of days later we get the following certified letter in the mail threatening legal action if we did not vacate our cars from our own driveway.
I mean, despite the completely corny font, they managed to misspell my name and H’s name. People who do not do their homework are generally not to be taken seriously, but this was crazy… So I met with them and recorded everything on video from a driveway security camera (I’ll spare you that content and far more, and myself the bandwidth charges) and tried to explain that the properties were flag properties where the property line intersected at right angles at the back of the driveway. He told me that they wanted to build a fence down the middle of the driveway which would have been bonkers as it would have blocked access to both sides of the driveway. I pointed out that if he wanted to do that, we could do the same and our fence line would be right in the middle of his access to his garage. We also reminded him that we replaced the entire driveway, both sides with the previous owner, but he seemed to think that he understood property surveys better as he knocked down our fence into our vegetable garden area in the backyard separating our two properties, telling us that he was just going to keep moving forward to force us to vacate the driveway, and that he was “training us”.
A couple of days later in November, Darren was busy drilling holes in our driveway, presumably for his ridiculous fence down the middle of the driveways. At this point, we had enough, scheduled our own survey, and retained a lawyer experienced in property law, and hired a private investigator. I gotta tell you that discovery is a hell of a process where you learn an incredible amount about people, their histories and proclivities, prior loans they’ve taken out including government loans, permits that they have or have not filed, financial agreements, prior lawsuits, activity on the Internet, and more. Suffice it to say that we were most uncomfortable with what we found, and more uncomfortable yet when our neighbor across the street told us that Darren threatened to shoot her dog.
Now, dear reader: I could have gone an entire lifetime without suing someone as I just don’t want that kind of drama in our lives, but this was existential and had serious implications for our home’s value and our ability to function as we had for the past 24 years. We obtained aerial/satellite imagery of our properties going back to 2006, talked with the city, county, past surveyors, neighbors, prior neighbors of theirs, tenants, employees, etc…etc…etc… obtaining as much information as possible prior to wading into this. We also found out that Darren was planning on buying a “middle class RV” which is why he wanted us out of our own driveway. When we served them with a summons, I heard Lauryn complaining to someone that “they are suing us!!!”. I thought, “well… what did you expect was going to happen?”. My guess is that they are used to bullying people around, and did not expect that we’d actually respond to their reprehensible behavior by suing them.
This was our complaint, and I am pleased to note that we have now settled that lawsuit with the following settlement, taking a remarkably generous approach to our neighbors with the settlement, but ensuring that we can continue to use our driveway like we’ve always used it and all prior owners back to when the houses were constructed back in 1907, binding the agreements to the property so that any future owners of our home will not have to deal with nonsense like this. We believe in leaving things better than when we arrived and this bit of legal action will help prevent abuses in the future.
Living next to people like this is going to be a challenge, but we are taking the perspective that we will not interact with them at all, and if anything needs to be addressed, we will simply involve the lawyers. Yes, it means yet more money out of pocket, but there is no interaction with unreasonable people like this that will be worth anything else.
My sincere thanks to our lawyer Stephen Horvat at Anderson & Karrenberg for being professional and immensely competent in property law while dealing with incredibly difficult personalities.