In June 2012, a woman bought a vacant Houston lot at the Harris County tax auction and began paying its taxes. Her husband mowed it. The man whose lifelong home stood beside the lot had, by his account, kept it cut for decades. One day, while the husband was mowing, he called the police, who “advised them to sort out their differences in court,” the appeals court’s opinion says.
Six years earlier, the man had recorded a $20,000 lien against the lot’s previous owner for its “upkeep, cleaning, cutting and maintenance,” writing that he would like to file a lien and “Squatters Rights.” Asked at trial why, he answered: “I wanted the property.”
In December 2024 he sued, saying he had held the lot continuously since 1973 and it was now his. A Harris County judge ruled for the woman, and the ruling held on appeal.
What each side claimed
The man testified that the lot was next to his childhood and lifelong home. He described decades of upkeep and produced records of 14 payments, from 1980 to 2015, to someone to clean the lot. Photographs showed he sometimes parked cars or trucks on part of it…