{alltv} So True? So False? Could Ann Curry Really Lose Her $2.9 Million Pad to a Squatter?!

 

This is not the kind of hosting Ann Curry had in mind.

Matt Lauer's second in command on Today recently received the presumably disturbing news that a homeless man had been living for a year in a $2.9 million Manhattan brownstone that Curry and her husband purchased way back in 2003 but never moved into after their renovation plans hit a wall.

The guy who took up residence there obviously finds the place perfectly hospitable, building codes (and ownership) be damned! But all Curry has to do is call the cops and out he goes, right? There's no way this fellow can actually lay claim to the house...right?

Get a grip on your co-op boards, folks, because the latter is...

So true, in theory!

"The reason I lived there was because [authorities] chased me out of Central Park," the man told the New York Post. "I'll go back if someone says, 'Here's the key. Maintain the building.'"

If only the guy, who refused to give his name when the Post caught up with him outside the building after a neighbor called the cops on him on Saturday, had been able to keep his address on the down-low for another nine years, the place possibly could have ended up being rightfully his.

There's a real estate maneuver called "adverse possession," a method of acquiring the legal title to a piece of land in opposition to the rights of the true owner through continuous, open occupancy of the property for a prescribed period of time.

Usually this means that your neighbor could end up owning your driveway if you don't use it, but hey...

"He would basically need to set up shop in that beautiful home for 10 consecutive years and hope that Ms. Curry and her husband never wake up and never do anything about it and in 10 continuous years lapsed, it's his," Lucas Ferrara, an attorney and adjunct associate professor of real estate at NYU, tells E! News.

"Now she means 3 million dollars to him," Ferrara says. "If I were representing Ms. Curry, I would advise her to immediately go to court and get some sort of order in stopping him from returning to the space or restrict access to the space."

Per the law, landowners have to be careful not to neglect their rights (and the limitations of those rights), or they could lose ownership of the land in question.

"I find this is the most suburban street on the Upper West Side, and yet we have what looks like a foreclosed property next door," one of Curry's neighbors fumed to the Post.

According to NBC News, Curry is in Africa covering the humanitarian crisis and can't be reached for comment.

But maybe she and her husband, who currently reside in Gramercy Park, should start looking into those renovations again.

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