Dear Prudence,
We live in a crowded West Coast city, with a sizable backyard but sandwiched on both sides by banks of townhouses that go pretty much to the property line. The townhouses on one side of us have taken to putting their garbage and recycling bins on our property for pick-up days because there is nowhere to put the bins on their property that wouldn’t block one of their parking spots. They did not ask us for permission before doing this.
(For clarity there are four townhouses, but we’ve only interacted with one set of residents. Also, we’re talking three bins in total, placed on our grass just off of the back alley. This stretch of grass leads to a parking slab that we use on occasion but rarely—usually we street park in the front of the house.)
I’m torn about what to do—they are good neighbors, and we’ve never had a problem with them. The act of placing the bins on our property has only inconvenienced us once—maybe six months ago there was no street parking on a garbage pick-up day, so we parked in the back and had to move the bins—but the principle rubs me the wrong way a bit. The townhouses were built after we moved in, and I will say that we were dismayed during the building process about a massive, primary growth tree that was felled and at the lack of off-street parking, so maybe we’re unfairly displacing grumpiness about the developers onto the residents.
Anyway, should we throw some good into the universe and let this very minor incursion onto our property slide? Or is there something to my hunch that allowing a neighbor to use our property weekly in perpetuity might have consequences I haven’t yet thought of?