Persons who squatted on land in the Pigeon Peas shantytown may have a hard time fighting the government’s building ban to sell and do business in the area.

According to Coldwell Banker Lightbourn Realty President and former South Abaco Member of Parliament Mike Lightbourn no one owns Pigeon Peas.

“Pigeon Peas is on a parcel of land granted in Nathan Key a couple of hundred years ago and he didn’t leave any direct line of decent for as who owned it on his death. As a result, over the years, Key tract, which includes as far as I know most of Pigeon Peas if not all of it, that tract of land is what we call generation property. There’s no one owner,” Lightbourn explained.   

Abaco resident farmer Ricky Albury told a local daily last Friday that he wanted to sell his five-and-a-half-acre property in Pigeon Peas.

Albury claimed that he attempted to remove people living on his property, but was told by government representatives that he could not do anything until the government found accommodations for those residents.

Lightbourn noted that court action or government decision has prevented the removal of people living on the land.   

“Every now and then, there’s a spurt of activity at the court trying to bring the matter to a conclusion and there has been a recent spurt of activities.” Lightbourn said. 

“There are many advice claims. In other words, people who occupied this land for many years, what happens, by the way, when a quieting petition is filed time stops running as far as adverse possession is concerned.

“So anyone who was on the Key tract in 1965, if they’ve been on it for 10 years, let’s say, their adverse time of possession stopped running. So even if its 50 odd years later, they still only got the 10 years that they can count towards the occupation of the property.”  

Lightbourn claimed that he heard of solutions to provide cheap housing on the island in the early 2000s.

“That was the idea, to relocate to a new community. People could build and have all utilities and be less dangerous for as disease is concerned,” he said.

“It sits there and nothing has happened. At some point, we have to do something, but money is a problem.”