The man who lives in a nice brick house in the suburbs of Dallas says that he isn’t a squatter: he’s paying rent for the house. Who is he paying it to? That part is not so clear, and it’s not entirely clear who even owns the house. The neighbors, however, are tired of the mystery tenant’s approach to yardwork, poor maintenance of the house, and constantly barking dogs.

“We can’t sleep, and my daughter has to listen to music at night to drown out the dogs,” a neighbor across the street told CBS DFW.

Maybe the late-night barking would be easier to tolerate if the property weren’t also terrible to look at. The neighbors say that the house has dead bushes, trash that isn’t picked up, holes in the roof, and a fence that collapses periodically. Believing that the man occupying the house is a squatter, the town turned off his access to the water system when they found that he had tapped into it illicitly.

The tenant’s behavior is only one of the problems in this situation. Local authorities actually don’t know who owns the house. The man living there claims that he is paying rent, but that he gives the rent to a friend, and his friend gives the money to an agency. Where the money would go from there isn’t clear.

“At this point, it appears the house is in some sort of mortgage limbo or ownership limbo. Several people are involved here,” a local police detective explained to the local CBS station, which is not terribly helpful.

Two couples disagree about who owns the property, and neither wants to accept responsibility for its problems and code violations. The town decided instead to direct their code violation notices to the man living there, and require him to make the necessary repairs to the roof and fence, and arrange for trash collection.

Rowlett Residents Complain Of Neighbor Nightmare [CBS DFW]

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