What To Do About My Neighbor’s Dying Tree

If your neighbor’s tree is sick or dying or otherwise looks like it’s about to fall on your house… you can’t cut it down. That’s right, even if it’s teetering on the brink of disaster and it looks like a puff of air could bring that tree down onto your home, you can do nothing about it. While it seems unfair, the motivations for the law are just because it’s meant to deter someone from making that claim in order to cut down a tree.

What you should do is get your city government involved. Call your city’s attorney’s office to see what your recourse is but generally they will step in and either force your neighbor to deal with the tree or deal with it themselves, billing the owner for the services.

Incidentally, the ordinance that forces your neighbor to deal with that situation is one that prohibits the maintenance of a dangerous condition on private property. So, if your neighbor has anything dangerous on their property, whether they’ve installed their own 5,000 gallon drum of natural gas or it’s just a sad tree in its last moments upright; you can report any dangerous situation and force them to deal with it if reasoning fails.