What are these Campbell Construction Company workers doing? Just building a fence down aways on Barron Ln. from their Missouri City office — in order to block the driveway belonging to their neighbor, Cesar Larias. Owner Jeff Campbell ordered the fence built after Larias refused to pay a $50 monthly fee to access his own garage.
Ten years ago, Campbell bought several parcels — one of which apparently includes Larias’s driveway and most of his front yard — from a tax auction. How’d they come up for sale? Channel 2 reporter Stephen Dean explains:
Court documents reviewed by Local 2 Investigates show that the original landowner who developed the entire neighborhood had divided off several of the strips of land in question, hoping to sell them separately someday if the government expanded Hillcroft Street down through the subdivision. That expansion never happened.
The original landowner died and Fort Bend County ended up selling the parcels of subdivided land at an auction on the courthouse steps because no one was paying taxes on those parcels anymore.
Until Campbell asked him and several neighbors to start paying a fee to access their own properties, Larias had no idea that his driveway and front yard did not belong to his family’s homestead. Alas, such appears to be the case.
Asked if he has considered selling the land back to the homeowners, Campbell said, “Yeah, but the amount they want to give for it, I don’t want to sell it for that. You see the situation that I’m in?”
Campbell insisted he’s not trying to gouge the neighbors or force them from their homes, although he admitted he may want to expand his nearby construction business.
“Well, my decision was to have them pay something to use it,” said Campbell. “I’ve been really above and beyond fair about it. I’m not trying to hurt these people.”
He admitted that it may appear heavy-handed for him to have placed a Dumpster across the driveway when the Larios family stopped paying for access.
Wait! How’d you reporter dudes find out about the Dumpster?
Comment of the Day: After the Ashby Highrise
“. . . My take on it is that this building MIGHT NOT be too bad, once the teeth-on-edge construction period is finished. (And I seem to be the only person who thinks the construction hassles should even matter to anyone. Big crane delivery and setup on Bissonnet, anyone?) But since there seems to be no legal way to stop this one, you can be sure that there will be some serious efforts to put rules in place to prevent any more. My own tongue-in-cheek explanation for why the neighborhood was so taken by surprise is that no-one ever thought for a minute that it made any kind of sense to build a high-rise on Bissonnet, for goodness sake.” [marmer, commenting on City to Ashby Highrise: Yes You Can!]