How to stop neighbors from seeing into your backyard legally
Municipalities enforce strict wall height limits and unrecorded right-of-way easements that make putting up privacy fences an administrative nightmare. Homeowners spend months fighting permits or dealing with sudden claims about road setbacks, preventing them from making their yards feel like anything other than a fish bowl.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Asking for alternative structure placements or workarounds within town limits
- 2Hiring a real estate attorney to send a formal letter pointing out specific ordinance language
- 3Threatening to get a solicitor or property lawyer involved
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I was initially told that 33 ft from the center of the road could be no more than 3ft tall due to road right of way.”source ↗
“They still state that even though my survey shows no right of way for the private road, there still would be one applied 20 ft from the center edge where a fence could not obstruct.”source ↗
“I had a similar run-in with my town over a fence at one of my rentals, they tried to claim an unrecorded easement that wasnt on any survey.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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