New Jersey Appellate Court Dismisses Nuisance Claim Brought By Beach-House Owners Who Bought Next To A Public Beach During The Offseason And Soon Became Overwhelmed By Summer Crowds
July 10, 2023
By: Carl L. Engel
On July 7, 2023, the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey, in the case Nugent v. Grant, affirmed the dismissal of a couples’ nuisance claim arising from the public use of a parking lot and walkway next to their house. In support of its decision, the court found that that the couple’s grievances, such as headlights in the lot after it was supposed to be closed for the night, were largely the result of their having assumed a self-imposed burden to police the neighboring property, and were not caused by the unreasonable use of the parking lot there. This case illustrates the risk of buying vacation property during the offseason and without assessing the impact of crowds and traffic when the tourists return.
Timothy and Melanie Nugent live next door to The Inn at Salem Country Club (“The Inn”), which is a bed-and-breakfast and banquet hall owned by James and Yvonne Grant. The Nugents and The Inn occupy adjacent properties along the Delaware River next to Oakwood Beach, which is a public beach in Elsinboro, New Jersey. Several tracts of The Inn’s property include deed restrictions imposed by the State of New Jersey that require the owners to grant public access to those open spaces. On the premises of The Inn is a publicly accessible parking lot with an unapproved walkway that connects it to Oakwood Beach.
When the municipal planning board approved the Grants’ site plan for The Inn in 2011, the walkway did not exist. It was created in 2014, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a fifty-foot berm at Oakwood Beach to reduce future storm damage. The Nugents purchased their house in “late 2015,” but complained that “everything changed a couple months later when they began experiencing problems with the public’s use of the defendants’ parking lot and walkway.”
In 2019, the Nugents filed a lawsuit alleging that The Inn’s use of the parking lot and walkway constituted a nuisance and was not permitted without approval by the planning board. They complained that, as a result of the unpermitted use of the property, they were “forced to endure significant amounts of foot traffic and motor vehicle traffic only feet away from their home.” After a trial, the court dismissed the Nugents’ nuisance claim and issued a partial injunction to restrict The Inn from “advertising use of the walkway.” In support of its decision, the trial court opined that the Nugents had taken on a burden to police the parking lot which had been self-created, and that it was not their job to do so. The Nugents appealed the trial court’s decision.
On July 7, 2023, the Appellate Division entered an opinion in which it affirmed the trial court. The Appellate Division observed that “the essence of a private nuisance is an unreasonable interference with the use and enjoyment of land.” Accordingly, when evaluating whether there exists a private nuisance, a trial court must weigh “the conflicting interests of the property owners” and “the reasonableness of the defendant’s mode of use of his or her land.” Further, the plaintiff must establish two elements: (i) “injury to the health or comfort of ordinary people to an unreasonable extent,” and (ii) “unreasonableness under all the circumstances, particularly after balancing the needs of the defendant to the needs of the plaintiff.” Disturbances to residential living may satisfy the first element if, “based on proximity, magnitude, frequency, and time of day, they cause some residents more than mere annoyance, temporary physical pain, and more than usual anxiety and fright.”
The Appellate Division then found that the Nugents had failed to establish that the alleged disturbances from the use of the parking lot and walkway were substantial enough to constitute a nuisance. In support of its decision, the court observed that there was a 100-foot wooded buffer between the parking lot and the Nugents’ property “sufficient to alleviate disturbances from the use of the parking lot and walkway.” The court also noted that the Grants could not prohibit parking on the tracts where public access had been granted by deed. Accordingly, it saw no error in the trial court’s decision to dismiss the Nugents’ nuisance claim and to issue a partial injunction against advertising the walkway.
More than anything, this case illustrates the risk of buying a beach property without observing the area during tourist season. Had the Nugents visited during the previous summer, they likely would not have been surprised to see a parking lot next to a public beach become crowded. A person simply cannot move next to a public parking lot and then argue that it is “unreasonable” for cars or people to use it, and the Nugents are no exception.