Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: property encroachment

You haven't acquired ownership by adverse possession. Payment of the property taxes is required.

The other possible kind of right that you might have acquired is a prescriptive easement. However, courts are loath to acknowledge or award prescriptive rights in urban settings where the main result of the alleged easement would be to give one neighbor exclusive use of a somewhat bigger yard than the deed says he should have. If the easement claimed were non-exclusive and served a useful purpose, such as for a buried water pipe or for shared use of an access driveway, the story could be different, but current judicial thinking is that Neighbor A cannot acquire an easement in the land of Neighbor B by claiming an exclusive prescriptive use for a garden, bigger lawn, fruit trees, playing croquet or that kind of thing.

Maybe you can make a deal with the neighbor where he pays 100% of the cost of putting a nice new fence on the true property line in exchange for your relinquishing any claim to an easement, which is probably going to be the result if you went to court anyway, minus the free fence.

Re: property encroachment

How do you know he has been paying taxes on the disputed property?

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