>>211451293 (OP)
In US property law there's a concept called "adverse possession" which some people critically call daylight robbery. The idea is that if you behave as if land is yours for a long enough time by doing things such as taking care of the land or occupying it, and the actual property owner does nothing about it then eventually you acquire title to it. It's a holdover from an earlier era when the government wanted land to be settled and there weren't as good records about where property lines ended, so was more inclined to support the people actually working land than absentee landlords who had the title on paper but were so distant from it that they didn't even realize someone else was farming on their land for years. It was also a way of settling boundary disputes between landowners, with the person who had been working the land being entitled to it, even if it was questionable whether it had been legally theirs originally.
But in the modern day, if someone just starts mowing your lawn without asking you or you giving them permission, and they keep doing it for years, eventually they can claim ownership of it.
