REPORT FROM THE LAND COMMISSION OF 1886-87.
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many cases the line of the lease boundary runs through the centre of a house, in many others across the house, sometimes obliquely, in others at right angles, and the titles are often most complicated in regard to different portious of the same house, the Remaining Portion owners of the original lots find it so difficult as to render the recovery of the due proportion of Crown Rent so impracticable, that they ultimately prefer to pay the whole Crown Rent without any attempt at recovery, and thus the owner of one portion of a lot has become burdened with the Crown Rent apportionable upon another portion of the same lot. In other cases where there is no Remaining Portion owner, or where, as in many instances, the Remaining Portion is left as part of a roadway or passage way (some of the lots, as Inland Lot No. 8 comprising as many as 5 separate private streets) over which the owner of each house has a right of way, the Remaining Portion owner, by death, or absence, ceases to pay the rent of the lot, the Remaining Portion is an unsaleable property, and the Crown Rent ceases to be paid, a section holder to prevent forfeiture has to pay the whole Crown Rent without power of recovery from the owners of the other portions of the lot, as it is impossible to fix the due proportion of the Crown Rent recover- able from the other owners.
At the present time there are 5 lots, representing an annual rental of $1,233, which were re entered upon by the Government in October, 1885, for non-payment of Crown Rent, upon which 137 houses in the most central part of the city are standing, owned by 45 different people. This question still remains unsettled, although most of the section owners are willing to pay more than their due proportion of Crown Rent to get new leases, but all are unwilling, principally because they believe themselves to be unable, to collect proportions from other owners, particularly as no house on the borders of the lots stands within its lease boundary. In all these cases the Remaining Portion owners, who have been kept on the Rent Roll, have not a vestige of interest remaining in the lots, the original leaseholders being dead, without representatives or known estate, and the intermediate assignees, when there were Remaining Portions, having disposed of all their interest, without leaving any Remaining Portion owner.
It is true that each portion of a lot is liable to the whole of the Crown Rent, but in dealing with a number of people it is impossible to make one pay for the whole without creating, under all the circumstances of the case, an intolerable hardship upon some, to the profit of others, which should not be allowed.
The Commissioners have annexed to this their Report several tracings produced before them by the Deputy Land Officer, shewing specimens of the manner in which various lots have been divided and sub-divided, and of other complexities which the commissioners think it would be desirable to remove.
In connection with this subject the Commissioners have also appended to their Report a Petition to the Legislative Council, signed by all the Solicitors in the Colony and supported by several of the leading inhabitants, transmitting a Bill for dealing with this question, dated January, 1885. It is therein alleged that a very large number of Titles to land in the Colony have fallen into a most complicated and entangled condition, and to such an extent that there are comparatively very few titles in the Colony which the Court could force upon an unwilling purchaser.
These complications, they say, have arisen from a number of causes, viz., the exigencies of street building; the ignorance, until within recent years, which prevailed in the system of granting leases and making assignments to families and even partnership firms in an assumed unincorporate title which cannot be recognised by the Courts, and to which no legal Estate could pass; the difficulty, amounting in many cases to the impossibility, of finding in whose custody the deeds are, because no Remaining Portion of the lot has been kept, the whole lot in those cases having been divided into sections and subsections without a Remaining Portion; the number of owners who take or send their title deeds, relating to the title of others as well as to their own, out of the Colony to the mainland, to India, to
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