I'm working with a simplified model - visualize a row of 10 houses, each on a square plot. There's a street running along the row of houses, and a street at each end.

Now, the land slides 1/2 plot to the right. To simplify this model, the slide happens overnight.

This means that each house slides right 1/2 plot. All of the cars slide 1/2 plot to the right. The yards and all the flowers slide 1/2 plot to the right.

And the road slides 1/2 plot to the right.

So this means that one of these residents now owns 1/2 plot of public roadway. Are they allowed to toll drivers for using their roadway?

The city (or county or state) now owns 1/2 plot of yard (and 1/2 of a house), which isn't quite as useful to them as the 1/2 plot of roadway they had before the shift.

Whichever governmental body that has authority could theoretically solve this by shifting all property lines to the right by 1/2 plot. This would line up the spots on the Earth's spherical surface (the land estate) with the objects held there by gravity and other forces (buildings and possessions).

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Of course, the complicating force here is Human Boredom; since these changes happen over decades instead of a night, most people are not content to have the problem solved logically, as most people see problems as tools they can use as a reason to talk to other people.

Yeah, that case would be simple. But I'm thinking more about the plots that had half of their land move a couple feet, while the other half remains stationary.

    Before:                  After:
     --------o--------        --------o--------
    |        o        |      |        o        |
    | Hatfld o  McCoy |      | Hatfld o  McCoy |
    |        o        |         |        o        |
    |        o        |         |        o        |
     --------o--------           --------o--------

    (the o's are the block wall)

Do the McCoys now own half that wall? What if their house was in the top half of the property, and their driveway was along the western edge of the bottom half? Keeping old property shapes would allow them to re-pour a new driveway to line up with the garage, but first they have to demolish the the Hatfields' stupid wall.

BTW, this is gold:

> ...most people see problems as tools they can use as a reason to talk to other people.

I hope my choice of plot labels signals my agreement

But what happens if due to sliding, one house moves over 1/2 plot but after compression, the next property over moves over 1/4. Now a mathematical and spacial change based purely off of property lines is going to misrepresent the actual change, while an adjustment based off of sliding objects may strip someone of 1/4 a plot of land. It's not a simple "just move the plot" solution unfortunately.

Thanks for clarifying some of the details that complicate my simple model.

I feel like Eminent Domain might be one recourse - simply pay the land owner for the land that was lost. Though the land prices in California are so high as to make this prohibitively expensive.

Another solution could be to take that 1/2 plot of land the city got, and give 1/4 of that to the squeezed landowner. But that solution wouldn't scale well - I foresee a nightmare scenario where hundreds of people are trying to sell their fractional ownership of a sandlot, except for one disgruntled group member.

I think the answer to this scenario is simpler. Tell them, "Sorry, God just screwed you out of 1/4 of your land. Man that must suck. At least your property taxes will be reduced!"

Yes, but which god? Ishtar? Most of them aren't that fickle.

In the US, eminent domain is only allowed if the government pays a fair price for the land. What is a fair price for a partial plot that no longer exists?

Giving 1/4 of a plot of a different property probably isn't fair either. Different plots of the same size will often have different values, and having a bunch of tiny plots all over the place versus one normal-sized plot is not very useful.

This is why "Case law" is the dominant legal tradition. Human judgment is consulted.