SEATTLE -- There's spite and then there's SPITE. And, depending on the story you believe, there's a home in Montlake -- a small one at that -- that was likely built with the capital 'S' in mind. 
 
 
 
 To neighbors the 830-square-foot house on the corner of 24th Avenue East and East Boston in Montlake is an icon; but what the home, known as the Montlake Spite House, lacks in size it more than makes up for in story, myth and legend. 
 
 
 
 The house, which is currently up for sale, was originally built in 1925. The listing agent describes it best when she says the original owner took full advantage of the pie-shaped property by creating a pie-shaped home; the back of the home is just 4.5 feet wide and the front is only 15 feet. But aside from its unique shape and size, what sets this home apart from its neighbors is how it allegedly came to be. 
 
 
 
 "I can't imagine why else someone would build a house like that if it wasn't out of spite," says Lisa Horton, the owner of the home. 
 
 
 
 Some neighbors tell the tale of a husband, a wife and a divorce settlement. Allegedly a judge awarded the husband the house and the wife the front yard; so out of spite up went the tiny home, by the wife, on top of her front yard. But that's not true, according to The Stranger. A story published several years ago by the newspaper supports a different tale, one which is very familiar to Horton. 
 
 
 
 "I always heard it was a land dispute," Horton says. 
 
 
 
 The story alleges the home went up after the next-door neighbor, who wanted to buy the pie-shaped corner lot, made a low-ball offer to the property owner. The property owner was so mad at the offer he built the house to get back at his neighbor, who eventually ended up moving. 
 
 
 
 Horton, who has owned the home since 2000, says with all its quirks - like having to stand off to the side to make enough room to open the oven door - the local legend must be true. 
 
 
 
 "Of course I buy into it," she says. 
 
 
 
 Eugene Smith, a retired professor at the University of Washington, lived in Montlake for 40 years. Fascinated by local history, in 2004 Smith wrote a book about Montlake's history, devoting one of the chapters to what he calls the eclectic collection of houses seen throughout the neighborhood. 
 
 
 
 "(The Montlake Spite House) was certainly the oddest of all the bungalows," Smith says. "It was the smallest, most peculiar shape." 
 
 
 
 Smith says he was intrigued by the asymmetry of the spite house and came up with his own version of its creation. 
 
 
 
 "What I concluded, since I wasn't able to track down any particular feuds or hate, was that someone came up with a design to fit the lot and built it so it didn't interfere with anyone's view," Smith says. 
 
 
 
 It turns out Montlake's Spite House doesn't stand alone. A handful of stories have been published from across the country featuring similar cases where a home has been built, added-on to or painted to deliberately irritate and annoy others - in many cases a neighbor or city entity. 
 
 
 
 The Montlake Spite House is currently listed for sale at $397,500 and is touted as the "perfect condo alternativein one of Seattle's best neighborhoods." 
 
 
 
 The home, currently unoccupied, previously sold for $239,500 in 2000, according to Redfin. ||||| It looks like such a sweet home. But once you know the history of this pie slice-shaped dwelling, you'll see why it's nicknamed the Seattle Spite House and you'll learn there are laws to prevent you from intentionally building to block views, light or access that your neighbor enjoys. 
 
 Washington State spite law 7.40.030: Malicious erection of structure may be enjoined. An injunction may be granted to restrain the malicious erection, by any owner or lessee of land, of any structure intended to spite, injure or annoy an adjoining proprietor. And where any owner or lessee of land has maliciously erected such a structure with such intent, a mandatory injunction will lie to compel its abatement and removal. 
 
 In legalese - forgive me - an act like that is called a "malicious erection." 
 
 Still, there are so many examples of cranky citizen's constructions to irritate adjacent landowners that Wikipedia has an entry for both a spite house and the less-expensive revenge, a spite fence. 
 
 Warring neighbors have painted exterior walls garish colors, posted unsightly signs and tried other ways to pique the people nearby. But it's expensive, and now illegal, to block with a vengeance. 
 
 The tiny Seattle spite house at 2022 24th Ave. E, which is now listed for sale at $519,900, was built in 1925. Stories of its origin vary, but all focus on serious payback. 
 
 The most popular rumor centers on a wacky divorce case in which a judge awarded the house to the husband and a sliver of the property - the 3,090-square-foot front yard - to the wife. 
 
 Some say out of spite, she squeezed a pie slice-shaped structure onto her odd corner lot, which dictated that one end only be 55 inches wide. In this mini mudroom, you can stretch out your arms and touch opposite walls. 
 
 The footprint widens a little in the cramped kitchen, but not enough to stand in front of the oven and open the oven door. The living room in the center of the triangle house offers more elbow room. Finally, at the end, the master suite is a luxurious 15 feet wide. 
 
 Hallways? Forget it. But there is a daylight basement/garage conversion. Buried beneath the main floor is a bedroom and bath that benefit from carriage doors that open to the outdoors. The center of the subterranean space is a cozy seating room. At the almost pointed, narrow end is an elevated platform with a mattress. Tiny house dwellers would feel right at home here. 
 
 At 860 square feet, the listing price breaks down to $605 a square foot, about three times the median in Portland. 
 
 That's pricey. So is the idea of constructing a wall or something larger to retaliate. Building codes and expenses squelch many planned spite houses. Instead, may we suggest calling a neighborhood mediator? 
 
 - Janet Eastman 
 
 jeastman@oregonian.com 
 
 503-799-8739 
 
 @janeteastman ||||| You might think that a little wedge-shaped house built explicitly to aggravate someone would be a tough sell. 
 
 Not in Seattle. Listed at $397,500, the home was just snapped up over the weekend, the real estate agent told Yahoo Homes, after spending only a couple of weeks on the market. "We had quite the interest!" she told us. (A local news story published Tuesday and picked up internationally might have helped the quick sale.) 
 
 Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow. 
 
 Locals call it the Montlake Spite House. Legend has it that the home, on a mere sliver of a lot, was built by: 
 
 • A woman who won only a bit of yard in a divorce settlement, while her ex got the rest of the property, including the (normal-shaped) house they'd shared. Or ... 
 
 • A landowner who was furious when the neighbor who owned the adjacent (normal-sized) lot made him a lowball offer on the sliver. Or ... 
 
 • A traveler who, while visiting Germany, gave permission for someone to build on the lot -- with the provision that enough land be left for a second house. When the traveler returned, he discovered that the new house took a lot more space than he'd expected, so, “out of spite, he [the landowner] built that funny little pie-shaped home" as an obstacle, the current homeowner told KPLU-FM's Martha Kang. “I also heard that back when it was first built, the side that was facing the neighbor had been painted black.” 
 
 The house at 2022 24th Avenue East has 830 square feet, and it's just 55 inches wide at its narrowest point. The house is shaped like a right triangle with its sharpest point slightly blunted -- that's the 55-inch-wide edge, where a mudroom and exit door lead into the yard. The longest side of the triangle (the hypotenuse) faces the street, with the entrance placed roughly at its center. 
 
 Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow. 
 
 Lisa Horton, the current homeowner, told KPLU that the shape of the house was never much of an impediment, except when she was cooking: The kitchen is toward the narrow end of the house, so you can't stand in front of the oven when you open it; you have to stand to the side. ||||| The House That Spite Builds On Malicious Erection, Everlasting Fights, and Fire's Power 
 
 Aaron Young’s ‘Tumbleweed,’ 2009. Courtesy the artists and Lawrimore Project 
 
 Spite is a step beyond anger. It happens when anger has hardened, you've polished it shiny, and you've fallen in love with it. Now in dangerous territory, you nevertheless can't stop, and you decide it needs a monument. What you do next is inescapably, pigheadedly wrong—and also epically right. You build a spite house. 
 
 There is a spite house at 2022 24th Avenue East in Montlake. It is pink stucco on the outside and only four-and-a-half feet wide at one end. Legend has it that a wife put it up after a judge awarded her husband their house and her just the front yard in the divorce. But that's not true. It went up in 1925; the next-door neighbor who wanted the sliver of land it sits on made the landowner such a low offer that he responded by building the little house right up in the neighbor's face. The spiter won: The neighbor moved. 
 
 The neighbor should have fought harder, because the law, dreadful downer that it is, was on his side. "Malicious erection" (I know) statutes in many states, including Washington, specifically prohibit spite houses, giving neighbors the right to an injunction or a teardown if the foundation is, say, poured in the dead of night (it has happened). The existence of such laws is a testament to the unstoppable drive to build spite houses, and most of the laws were implemented late in the 19th century, including Washington's. Older East Coast states had more time to litter the land with their spite. Skinny, weirdly shaped, charming, divided-in-half houses for spurned wives, rivalrous brothers, and affronted landowners "uncover our creepy and creeping psychologies of ownership," Will Owen writes in a new limited-edition chapbook called Spite House. They set out in the open the foul "swell of psychic things that exist despite never being meant to be placed alongside each other." They are fights that last forever. 
 
 Given the depthless cheer and facade of rationality that pervades American public life, there is something deeply calming about spite houses. They are homicidally sincere, wanton, and unwise. As in the case of Edith Macefield's Ballard house—which in 2007 she refused to sell for a cool million to developers, who had to build around her until she died, inspiring a rash of tattoos depicting her house with the word "STEADFAST" (after her death it was sold, but not to the original developers)—these houses are volcanoes of meaning, like heroes or great works of art. They're a terrific—maybe a little too terrific—premise for an art show. The show is spending this month at Lawrimore Project, curated by Yoko Ott and Jessica Powers. (The Spite House chapbook is part of Spite House the show.) It is both a fascination and a disappointment, maybe inevitably. Little of the art on display has the bilious, committed power of an actual spite house (and much of it seems peculiarly impersonally motivated) or the ability to compete with an odd and unexpected intervention: nature's own fury. 
 
 What happened is that precisely on the eve of the show's opening, a house caught on fire in the side courtyard of the gallery. The house was a work of art called There Goes the Neighborhood by the performance trio SuttonBeresCuller, and the only thing convincing about their claim that this wasn't a performance was the fact that they seemed genuinely glum—and that the facade of the gallery itself was broadly singed, its windows blasted out, its insulation melted into a crawling still-life. Boxes full of an entire earlier exhibition, held inches away in storage inside, were nearly decimated. "At first we thought, maybe? Maybe an artist broke in and did this? But arson is not painting a corner black or something. Arson is going too far," curator Powers said later. (The police suspect somebody homeless stole into the open house—maybe not for the first time? It has sat there for months—and accidentally set it on fire.) The remaining visual spectacle is incredibly beautiful (meant both ways, as in very beautiful and beautiful in particular because it is not quite believable). 
 
 Now, an act of god and poverty does not provide grounds for fair criticism, but in this case it embodies a level of intensity that is as difficult to achieve in art as it is in life. Spite House is a smart show that succeeds best when it displays less good judgment. As much as I dislike New York artist Aaron Young's cocky, Viacom-scaled, I-make-paintings-with-motorcycles-in-an-arena bullshit, his tumble­weed made of a crumpled-up chain-link fence plated in 24-karat gold—and his intact 24-karat fence obscuring a video by Vancouver's Andrew Dadson—hit exactly the right snarling but formalized tone. Spite houses, after all, are not instantaneous ejaculations: They take formal planning. 
 
 When Dadson goes creeping across the roofs of his neighbors' houses in his slightly slowed-down 2005 video, it's a perfect encapsulation of what seethes and seeps through every neighborhood, so invisible and yet so visible. From inside these houses, you might hear his faint steps or you might not—but outside, Dadson is plain as day. The photographs of sections of his neighbors' lawns that he's guerrilla-spray-painted black feel easier, less unlikely, less haunting (though the image of a white picket fence in blackface is a satisfying symbol). I love his white roses set in a vase of black ink: They absorb the ink like a disease, the petals taking on black spots, then the dots join, and eventually the rot becomes mournfully complete. It's not spiteful; it's gothic and melancholy. 
 
 Not all the spite is as literal or as contained as Dadson's boundary-stompings. The artworks in the show (as in any group show) spite each other, as with Young's partial blockage of the view of Dadson's video; or they spite you, the viewer. Miami artist Bert Rodriguez's thick white wall—an ongoing and rather heartwarming project wherein he builds white walls with his father, who cannot understand why his son must be an artist, in various locations—is here turned mean. It is the precise width of the gallery's extrawide double door, so the show rebuffs you with a big white nothing. Sutton­BeresCuller spited the viewer by blocking the entrance to the white-cube gallery, which people seem to miss entirely, rendering the spite rather ineffectual. 
 
 On your way up to the door, you probably missed Matt Browning's contribution: the Seattle artist painted black the pink sections of the gallery's exterior, spiting the architects, two other Seattle artists: Lead Pencil Studio. Christian Kliegel spited them, too, and the gallery's owner, Scott Lawrimore. Kliegel, of Vancouver, broke into the gallery one night before the show was up. He took a look around and made drawings that were then added as tape marks on the floor for his suggested redesign of their space. 
 
 Eli Hansen and Herman Beans are spiting the human attempt to spite death with neatness (I think). They made a messy, dirty coffin-house with windows and a bookshelf (the inverse of SuttonBeresCuller's paranoically sterile Homesick, not in this show). They thought people would rummage through the blankets (which I recommend), but people haven't. 
 
 What we have here are good artworks not equally served or activated by the theme. They're sort of... spited. In the eternal property war between curators and artists, curators can count this spite house as their own. Which, in a weird way, works. ||||| GLOBE STAFF PHOTO ILLUSTRATION Since 2000, the median lot size of new homes in the Northeast has shrunk by nearly 20 percent. 
 
 IT IS, QUITE POSSIBLY, the nicest driveway on the block: brand-new and framed in chunks of granite. It’s not blacktop, crumbling around the edges, like so many others nearby. Scott Nguyen — the proud new homeowner on Yale Street in Winchester — decided to do something he thought would be classy. He paid extra for stone pavers, spared no expense. The cost of the driveway, he says, was about $35,000 — seven times more than a typical job. 
 
 The problem was, Nguyen already had a driveway on the other side of his house, running all the way down the property line to a two-car garage in the back. With the second driveway, Nguyen had essentially paved over most of his front yard. And the 42-year-old father of three, who operates his own flooring business, just kept making decisions that devoured the grass outside. 
 
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 In the back, in went a large stone patio. On the other side of the house, in went a stone walkway. Meanwhile, the 2,700-square-foot home he’d purchased for $1.1 million in July 2014 got about 2,500 square feet bigger, ballooning out into his yard to make space inside for a TV room, office, larger attic, and additional bedrooms upstairs. By the time he’d finished last month, Nguyen figured he’d spent $800,000 creating a four-level home for his family. But in doing so, he’d dramatically reduced the size of his lawn, leaving space for small patches of greenery, including a 40-by-25-foot box of grass in the back. 
 
 “That’ll be plenty,” Scott Nguyen says as he stands inside his home, soon to be filled with his belongings. Like most families, the Nguyens are busy. “We’re hardly home that much,” says his wife, Quyen. And, anyway, Scott says, “it’s not like it’s completely concrete back there. There’s plenty of lawn, trees, and shrubbery.” 
 
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 Neighbors on Yale Street — a desirable, tree-lined, quintessential New England avenue, with homes approaching values of $2 million — disagree. And last December they made what amounted to a declaration of war. About three dozen of them appealed to the Winchester zoning board to rule Nguyen’s second driveway a “parking lot” and, as such, illegal. In emotional testimony that lasted for 45 minutes, they attacked Nguyen from every angle. Legally, they argued, this was no driveway. “If you showed that picture to a thousand people,” neighbor Paul Galvani testified, “every single one of them would say that’s a parking lot.” 
 
 They called it “unimaginable,” “appalling,” and “a blight on the neighborhood.” “I hope you’ve taken the time to drive by it,” neighbor Michelle McCarthy told the board. Yale Street, she explained, looks almost like a park. “With beautiful houses set back. And then, when you come to this property, it’s all paved.” 
 
 Some neighbors focused on safety. What if a child got hit by one of Scott Nguyen’s cars — or commercial trucks from his flooring business — backing out of his second driveway? And they fretted, too, about money. “If we’re going to allow this,” next-door neighbor Sven Andersen complained, “it’s definitely changing the values of all the property in this town.” 
 
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 But mostly they worried about the lawn — or the lack of it — and what that said about them and the character of the neighborhood they call home. “If you let it get eaten away by little pieces,” one woman testified, “then we’re not living in our beautiful Winchester anymore.” 
 
 Months earlier, shortly after buying the home, Nguyen had mingled with these very same neighbors at the Yale Street block party, shaking hands, making introductions, and sharing food. The Nguyens, who like to entertain, had prepared about 100 Vietnamese spring rolls for the affair. There were smiles all around. But now it was beyond awkward for everyone. “I’m actually sad,” one driveway opponent said at the December hearing. “Very sad,” agreed another. 
 
 But not as sad, perhaps, as Scott Nguyen, by the time the hearing came to a close. He had put in the second driveway to make it easier for his wife and live-in father-in-law to park their cars. Now the zoning board had declared the driveway a parking lot — and an ugly one at that. The paved yard “adversely affects the neighborhood’s streetscape,” the board determined and called for its removal. 
 
 Nguyen promptly sued the board in Middlesex Superior Court, asking a judge to nullify the decision. After all, he got the OK from two different Winchester departments — the building commissioner and an official in public works — before going forward with his double-driveway plan. Even the town planner, Brian Szekely, saw no way to stop it. “I fully believe the paving of the front yard should not occur,” he said in a memo last fall. But in recommending that the zoning board deny the neighbors’ claims, Szekely added, “there is little that can be done to prevent the pavers from being installed.” 
 
 “It’s well within my rights,” Nguyen, now awaiting a court decision expected later this year, tells me. “I got permission to do this. The bylaws of the town say I can do this. So who are these neighbors to come into my own personal, private activities and say I can’t do this?” 
 
 It’s just one driveway. Just one yard. In the end, the folks on Yale Street have picked a fight over about 600 square feet of rather expensive stone pavers. But it’s also about far more than just that. In the era of the great American shrinking yard — where little Capes are getting torn down in affluent Boston suburbs and giant fortresses are going up in their place, where lawn is being plowed over for patios, and backyards are being consumed by master-bedroom additions — every blade of grass is suddenly more important or more expendable, and, either way, cause for a fight. Savvy developers sacrifice the outdoor green space people once treasured, forsaking yards to make room for modern amenities like mother-in-law suites, media rooms, and three-car garages, and buyers line up to outbid one another for the finished product. No yard? No problem. And the neighbors watch, stunned and angry. That yard next door? Those trees? That grass? It feels like theirs, for keeps. 
 
 “This is a battle between people all the time,” says John A. Wile, the Winchester building commissioner. “They don’t like what the other person has got — and blah, blah, blah. I turn off the switch at four o’clock, the light switch. I don’t listen to complaints anymore after that.” 
 
 Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe Scott Nguyen’s “driveway” is a source of conflict in his Winchester neighborhood. 
 
 THE YARD — ONCE THE BIRTHRIGHT of suburban American families with two kids, a dog, and a station wagon — is more endangered than ever. According to US Census data, the size of new American homes has been climbing steadily for the past 15 years — up about 21 percent, to more than 2,500 square feet of indoor living space. At the same time, the size of the outdoor space has been decreasing, especially since the Great Recession. The typical lot of a new home sold in this country is about 400 square feet smaller today than it was just five years ago. The same trend is playing out here in the Northeast, according to the Census figures. In the past five years, the size of new homes in this region is up about 10 percent, while the size of lots is down nearly 20 percent. 
 
 “Builders are increasingly trying to put more house on roughly the same amount of lot,” says Aaron Terrazas, a senior economist with Zillow, the real estate website. One reason, he says, might be the rising cost of undeveloped land, which is especially rare and expensive in Greater Boston. In order for developers to make their investment worthwhile, they need to maximize their financial return. “You can either sell more homes on that lot or you can build high-end luxury homes,” Terrazas says. “I think builders are pursuing both strategies.” 
 
 In our suburbs, it’s the latter that’s changing the landscape, often quite literally. From Bedford to Newton, Wellesley to Lexington, developers are scooping up tired old Capes, Dutch Colonials, and Gambrels built in the 1930s or 1950s for smaller people in a smaller time. They’re then leveling the 2,000-square-foot homes and replacing them with giant structures that can be at least three times as big as the original. The result is friction, privacy complaints, drainage problems, architectural beefs — who wants the mega-mansion next door? — and an often overlooked issue: persistently smaller yards. “Any time you get a teardown you get a shrinking yard because you’ve got a much bigger house than the original,” says Glenn Garber, who recently retired as Bedford planning director. “It’s the looming effect. Architects and planners call it bulk and massing.” 
 
 Neighbors often call it something else: annoying. On one street in Needham, where a 5,000-square-foot house recently replaced a small ranch, residents had questions from the start. “Are they putting a two-family up? What is that?’’ one neighbor recalls thinking. “The joke was Is that a Ramada Inn?” But there was nothing they could do to stop it from blocking out the light, the view. “It wasn’t the most beautiful vista before,” says the neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to offend the new owner. “But the old house sat more toward the left of the property. So we used to look out on the grass and then on the street beyond. Now,” she says, “we look at a wall.” 
 
 For decades now, teardown battles have ripped neighborhoods apart, forcing communities to pass new regulations to control growth. But the latest raft of bylaws is focused on a new angle: preserving green space. Last November, Bedford required that most future teardowns receive a special permit. One goal, the town declared, was “preventing overcrowding of land.” This spring, Concord established acceptable home-to-lot ratios in order to control projects deemed “out of scale.” And Winchester, reacting in part to the controversy over the Nguyens’ home, passed new bylaws of its own. The first requires site plan reviews when a new home proposal reaches a certain size. The second requires that residential lots have at least 35 percent green space — and no more than 35 percent hardscape like driveways and patios. In the suburbs, town governments are trying to save the yard. 
 
 On a recent morning, developer David Bernstein sits behind the wheel of his pickup truck, taking me on what shapes up to be a teardown tour of Bedford. “This one right here was mine,” he says as we cruise the tree-lined streets. “We built that last fall . . . . That one was a teardown . . . . The house was obsolete, built in the 1950s. Just tired.” As we drive, he can’t help but notice future teardown possibilities all around him. “That’s probably a candidate,” he says, making a mental note of one sagging ranch that he expects could come up for sale soon. “It’s not too far away.” 
 
 His company, Bernstein Development, focuses on buying and razing old homes, hauling away the debris of the past, and building the home of the future: typically around 4,500 square feet, with gourmet kitchens, walk-in closets, master baths the size of bedrooms, and sprawling patios with fire pits and hard-wired gas lines ready for that barbecue. “The market tells us what to build,” he says. “What do people like? Don’t like? And what the market is telling me is they want more house. They’re looking for more square footage. They don’t care as much about the yard.” 
 
 One possible reason: We’re increasingly becoming indoor creatures. Writing in the American Journal of Play in recent years, Boston College professor Peter Gray argued that over the past half century “opportunities to play outdoors, especially with other children, have continually declined.” At times, that’s because parents, worried about predators and other dangers, have restricted it. Other times, children are overscheduled, too busy for free play or consumed doing other things. According to a 2013 study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, the average child age 5 to 8 spent two hours and 16 minutes a day in front of some sort of screen. And such changes make yards less valuable. Suzanne Koller, a real estate broker in Bedford, says most people would much rather have a three-car garage, a home gym, or be able to walk to Whole Foods than have space to play Wiffle ball outside with their kids. 
 
 “A lot of people, they both work,” Koller says. “They don’t have the time or the energy or the money to upkeep the yard,” she says. “So it’s kind of like the American dream has changed.” 
 
 “When I was a kid,” she adds, “people wanted to move to a cul-de-sac. And your dad would get a riding lawnmower. That was what it was all about. Now you pay somebody to take care of your yard, you want a smaller yard, and you want to be closer to town.” 
 
 Brendan Leyne and Rob Shannon — co-owners of Leyne & Shannon building contractors — are banking on this shift. In February 2015, the developers set their sights on buying a small 1951 ranch on a 17,860-square-foot corner lot nestled amid a thicket of trees on Hayes Avenue in Lexington. It was, in Leyne’s estimation, “a perfectly good house — it was definitely livable.” But with an asking price of $895,000, this was a deal ready-made for developers. And in they came. “Inevitably, it’s us and five other builders bidding on these properties,” Leyne says. “It’s becoming a feeding frenzy. And the end result is, it pushes the price up.” 
 
 Within five days, the listing agent for the ranch had multiple offers — and a winning bid from Leyne & Shannon of $1.158 million, 30 percent above the asking price. About six months later, the developers leveled it and began making plans for a statement house: 8,200 square feet of pure suburban luxury. 
 
 “This is supposed to be the wow factor,” Leyne tells me, stepping into the foyer of the home, still under construction, with a soaring 19-foot ceiling. The dining room, to the right, is framed in mahogany. The cost for that in labor and materials: $28,500. The kitchen up ahead features custom inset cabinets. Cost: $60,000. There’s a bar in the basement ($14,000) and a wine cellar nearby ($25,000) capable of storing 660 bottles. They decided to go big on the garage, too. “We’re not going to take any chances with a three-car garage,” Leyne says. “It’s kind of like 11 — our garage goes to 11. We have four cars.” 
 
 We make our way around the house — four stories in all — and then step back outside. There’s still a yard; the two developers made sure to preserve some old trees out front and a nice, flat swath of grass there, too. But the new house has roughly twice the footprint of the old one, and, if you feel the impact, it’s out back, where the yard in places is only about 18 feet wide. “It’s more of pass-through,” Leyne concedes. 
 
 But neither developer worries about that. They’ve created a nice patio and planted a row of 15 mature arborvitaes ($13,500) to offer some privacy from the neighbors. They figure the previous owners hadn’t used the backyard very often. And now, even with the patio and the trees, they don’t expect that to change. 
 
 “Backyards are kind of like Jacuzzis in the master bath,” Shannon says. “Everybody wants a Jacuzzi in the master bath. But they may use it once a year. When push comes to shove, people don’t even use the backyard.” 
 
 Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe Brendan Leyne (left) and Rob Shannon of Leyne & Shannon building contractors are developing this property in Lexington. 
 
 FROM THEIR HOME ON YALE STREET, Scott and Quyen Nguyen peer through the windows at their own backyard. They’re making plans. It’s June, and they haven’t yet moved in their furniture and other belongings. Contractors are still at work outside. And the backyard is just dirt — grass seed is supposed to come soon. But as one daughter watches cartoons on a television already mounted in the living room, the couple are beginning to imagine their new lives inside the house with the “parking lot” outside. “This is incredible,” Quyen says. “We’re happy.” 
 
 Both of them escaped Vietnam as children, more than 30 years ago, fleeing with their families on boats, bound for the unknown. The fact that they made it to this country, went to college in Boston — Scott at Northeastern, Quyen at Boston University — graduated, and worked hard enough to be able to buy a million-dollar home in Winchester still, at times, seems unimaginable to them. “It is,” Scott says with a smile, “our American dream.” 
 
 But then his smile fades, washed away by more recent memories — of the zoning board meeting, and the comments people made, and the anger he feels up and down Yale Street and beyond. Maybe it will get better with time — after the judge rules, whatever the decision. Maybe one day he’ll get along with his neighbors, like he did not too long ago. Yet it’s hard to imagine now. “I don’t feel the same,” he says. “I may need to replicate this somewhere else, where there’s more land and more privacy.” 
 
 Until that time comes, if it does, the neighbors are watching. Jane Murray lives on the next street over, directly behind the Nguyens. The 67-year-old has been there since 1976, raised three children in her home, and used to love sitting out back on her screened-in porch looking at the old house that was there — “It was a charming Craftsman-style home” — and the large tree that used to stand in the backyard. “A year ago, October, I came home from a holiday and they were cutting the tree down,” she says. “I cried for three days. And then — you couldn’t tell what they were doing at first — they started taking the old house apart.” 
 
 Now what Murray notices most is the glaring security light — “It goes off about every 20 seconds” — and the workers who are always there. And she knows that no matter how the court rules on the Nguyens’ parking area, she won’t win. “It doesn’t save what I’ve lost,” she says. 
 
 But every once in a while Murray is reminded why she moved to Winchester in the first place: the chickadees fluttering by her bird feeders, the rabbits in the grass, and, not so long ago, a fox passing through her backyard. It was a young fox, an adolescent, Murray believes, appearing one morning in broad daylight. She spied it through the kitchen window and followed it as it scampered down her driveway, skipped through her front yard, then hustled along Oxford Street, a fox on the move. “I thought it was wonderful,” she says. She couldn’t help but feel excited. There was still room for something wild in Winchester. 
 
 Keith O’Brien is a former staff writer at the Boston Globe, the author of “Outside Shot,” and the owner of a decent-sized yard. He can be reached on Twitter @keithob. Send comments to magazine@globe.com. 
 
 BY THE NUMBERS 
 
 > 21.3% — Percentage increase in the size of new American homes since 2000 
 
 > 4.8% — Percentage decrease in the lot size of new American homes since 2000 
 
 > 12.1% — Percentage increase in the size of new homes built in the Northeast since 2000 
 
 > 19.9% — Percentage decrease in the lot size of new homes built in the Northeast since 2000 
 
 Source: US Census Bureau 
 
 MORE REAL ESTATE READS: 
 
 ■ Tips to make the most of your little city backyard 
 
 ■ Can there be a teardown that everybody agrees on? 
 
 ■ 10 Boston-area communities where the home market is soaring ||||| Features 
 
 “Oh, hey! How ya’ doin’?” Raleigh Ornelas hollers, leaning out the window of his spotless white pickup truck. He’s recognized the man across the street, a developer standing in front of a Tuscan-style mansion under construction. “Where have you been hiding at? I call you, you don’t call me.” 
 
 Ornelas is an informal broker in Arcadia, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains. He’s been keeping an eye out for the builder, an Asian man with a slight comb-over who goes by Mark. Ornelas has found two older homeowners who’ve finally agreed to sell their properties, and he knows that Mark, like all developers here, needs land on which to build mansions for an influx of rich clients from mainland China. 
 
 Ornelas rattles off addresses on a nearby street. “Three-eleven, that guy, he’s wack,” he says, shaking his head. “He wants 2.8.” He means million dollars. “And then 354, they want $2 million.” 
 
 The lot is 17,000 square feet. “Seventeen for 2 mil?” Mark asks, incredulous. 
 
 “I know,” Ornelas says. “They’re going crazy.” 
 
 A year ago the property would have gone for $1.3 million, but Arcadia is booming. Residents have become used to postcards offering immediate, all-cash deals for their property and watching as 8,000-square-foot homes go up next door to their modest split levels. For buyers from mainland China, Arcadia offers excellent schools, large lots with lenient building codes, and a place to park their money beyond the reach of the Chinese government. 
 
 The city, population 57,600, projects that about 150 older homes—53 percent more than normal—will be torn down this year and replaced with mansions. The deals happen fast and are rarely listed publicly. Often, the first indication that a megahouse is coming next door is when the lawn turns brown. That means the neighbor has stopped watering and green construction netting is about to go up. 
 
 Damon Casarez for Bloomberg BusinessweekOrnelas matches sellers with developers. Deals happen fast; many aren’t listed publicly 
 
 This flood of money, arriving from China despite strict currency controls, has helped the city build a $20 million high school performing arts center and the local Mercedes dealership expand. “Thank God for them coming over here,” says Peggy Fong Chen, a broker in Arcadia for many years. “They saved our recession.” The new residents are from China’s rising millionaire class—entrepreneurs who’ve made fortunes building railroads in Tibet, converting bioenergy in Beijing, and developing real estate in Chongqing. One co-owner of a $6.5 million house is a 19-year-old college student, the daughter of the chief executive of a company the state controls. 
 
 Arcadia is a concentrated version of what’s happening across the U.S. The Hurun Report, a magazine in Shanghai about China’s wealthy elite, estimates that almost two-thirds of the country’s millionaires have already emigrated or plan to do so. They’re scooping up homes from Seattle to New York, buying luxury goods on Fifth Avenue, and paying full freight to send their kids to U.S. colleges. Chinese nationals hold roughly $660 billion in personal wealth offshore, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the National Association of Realtors says $22 billion of that was spent in the past year acquiring U.S. homes. Arcadia has become a hotbed of the buying binge in the past several years, and long-standing residents are torn—giddy at the rising property values but worried about how they’re transforming their town. And they’re increasingly nervous about what would happen to the local economy if the deluge of Chinese cash were to end. 
 
 Back on the street corner, Ornelas and Mark agree to meet for coffee to discuss other deals. Before he drives away, Ornelas asks if the developer wants to speak with a reporter. Mark declines, saying he tries to keep a low profile. “See?” Ornelas says as he pulls away, leaning toward the passenger seat and raising his eyebrows. “Everything’s hush-hush here in Arcadia.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 For almost a century after its founding in 1903, Arcadia was white and conservative. In the late 1930s more than 90 percent of the city’s property owners signed agreements, circulated by the Chamber of Commerce, to sell only to white buyers. Its Santa Anita racetrack held about 19,000 Japanese Americans as they were relocated to internment camps during World War II. In the early 1980s an influx of immigrants from Taiwan arrived, drawn in large part to the great public schools. A second wave came from Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The city’s Asian population grew from 4 percent in 1980 to 59 percent in 2010. There were tensions at first—a letter in a local newspaper praised a proposed ban on non-English storefronts, writing, “Please leave your Asian signs in the old country and get Americanized.” Over time, the new residents got involved in civic life, joining the Rotary Club, entering local government, and opening businesses such as Din Tai Fung Dumpling House, a Taiwanese restaurant tucked in the corner of a strip mall. 
 
 Arcadia has no real downtown, only low-rise commercial stretches lined with real estate offices and boba tea shops; Din Tai Fung is the closest thing there is to a central hub. Hostesses with walkie-talkies manage the hourlong wait of people clamoring for plump soup dumplings and pork buns. It was here, a decade ago, that Ornelas broke into Chinese real estate. Leaving lunch one day, he spotted a Ferrari parked outside. “Boy, that’s a beautiful car,” he said. The owner was Chinese and asked Ornelas if he wanted to take it for a drive. Ornelas squeezed in and took a quick spin. As he returned, a white man walked by and made a racial slur about the owner. 
 
 “I said, ‘Leave the guy alone,’ ” Ornelas recalls. The talk escalated into a fistfight, which ended badly for the heckler. Ornelas is a Vietnam veteran who spent years bare-knuckle boxing for cash while working as a longshoreman. “The Chinese guy goes, ‘I’m a stranger. Why did you stick up for me?’ I said, ‘We’re all equal in this world, man.’ ” After that, Ornelas says, “I just met people from him, and then I got into different developers.” 
 
 “Obviously if your house isn’t feng shui-friendly, it’s like we’re not even going to have a conversation” 
 
 Ornelas matches them up with sellers. He swings by garage sales to chat up owners, and as he drives Arcadia’s streets, he looks for signs a homeowner may need money. On a blistering hot day in July, he goes scouting through the city’s foothills. “The roof is popping in that one there,” he says, pointing to an older ranch house. “This one, they put a new roof on, but the house is in bad shape.” Ornelas stops at a corner lot, where a property is under construction. “Look at how big that house is,” he says. “Ooof. Gigantic.” 
 
 As Ornelas tells it, last year the real estate website Zillow (Z) had estimated the property’s value at $1.2 million when he, on behalf of a developer, offered the owner $1.5 million. The owner’s brother, who worked in law enforcement, called Ornelas to ask if he was laundering money. “I told him, ‘That’s what the house is worth to me,’ you know? And he kind of investigated to see if it was dirty money. Everything was on the uppity-up, so he sold it to us.” Where Ornelas’s tales can be checked against public records, they stand up—Zillow did make the lower estimate, the house did sell for $1.5 million, and the owner’s brother is a sergeant with the county sheriff’s department. (The lawman didn’t respond to a request for comment.) 
 
 Next, Ornelas drives over to one in a string of construction sites in the city’s Upper Rancho neighborhood, where large lots line curving streets shaded by gracious oak trees. At the site, buzz saws blare, and stacks of plywood lie on a concrete foundation. Richard Smith, the sun-tanned owner of a construction company working on seven homes in Arcadia, walks over to talk shop. Smith is building the 11,000-square-foot home for a developer who expects to sell it, he says, for $8 million to $9 million. Smith grew up in Arcadia, and his company has only Asian clients. They have certain preferences. “Obviously, if your house isn’t feng shui-friendly, it’s like we’re not even going to have a conversation,” he says. That means minding the number of stairs, the directions rooms face, and how materials line up. “And understanding the value of water, that’s probably one of my key strengths,” he says. “If you go to any successful businessman in China, or even here, they generally will have a picture of water behind their desk.” He whips out his phone and swipes to photos of a project with a waterfall cascading off the top of a gazebo and into a backyard pool. 
 
 Photograph by Damon Casarez for Bloomberg BusinessweekA teardown that sold for $2.75 million in July 2013 
 
 Smith says many of the newest buyers in Arcadia don’t speak English. “They’ve just come here,” he says. “They’re on that EB—what’s it called?” He means the EB-5 visas that the U.S. grants to foreigners who plow at least $500,000 into American development projects. Congress created the program in 1990 to spur investment, and demand for the visas has grown recently. This year, for the first time, the government gave away the annual allocation of 10,000 visas before the year was over, with Chinese nationals snapping up 85 percent. Brokers in the area say it’s the most common way buyers are coming to town. “Once they obtain residency, they want to bring their family over and get the United States education,” says real estate agent Ricky Seow. “They can start a new life in California.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 Taillights whiz by as 19-year-old Cheng Qianrong heads east along the freeway that runs from Los Angeles International Airport toward Arcadia, in a video she posts in June to her 22,000 Instagram followers. Later that night she stands in a marble kitchen, points a gold iPhone at a mirror, and, with a hip to the side, snaps a picture of her reflection, writing, “I’m finally home.” 
 
 Loading 。。 View on Instagram 
 
 A sophomore studying business at the University of Oregon, Cheng, who goes by Heli in the U.S., is a minor social media celebrity in China. In selfies, her long, straight hair and wide-eyed gaze make her look younger than she is. Her followers express awe for her style and gush at photos of her enjoying a smoothie; posing with stuffed animals; and smiling with a birthday cake made to look like a stack of Tiffany boxes. 
 
 In late 2013, Cheng and her mother, Wang Jun, bought a 9,000-square-foot house with a pool and spa in Arcadia for $6.5 million. According to an L.A. property filing, Wang’s husband is Cheng Qingtao. He’s CEO of China Huayang Economic & Trade Group, one of the first state-owned companies set up by the central government, which still owns a majority stake. Heli’s two-story chateau-style home is only a few miles from one owned by her aunt, who’s married to Cheng’s older brother, Cheng Qingbo. Qingbo was the first private owner of railroads in China and, by 2013, was the country’s 257th-richest person, worth an estimated $1.06 billion, Hurun says. In June, Shanghai police arrested Qingbo for allegedly duping people into investments, including a project that, China Business News says, didn’t exist. 
 
 For most Arcadians, it would be hard to know if Heli owned the house next door. A member of one homeowners association estimates that about 20 percent of the new purchases sit empty, and for those who don’t speak Mandarin, language barriers have made it hard to share more than a wave with neighbors. For many sales, public records provide no way to understand who the new owners are. A recorded deed may show just an English transliteration of a buyer’s name, with no signature. Some public documents provide small clues: a second address in a luxury condo near Tiananmen Square; a seal if a document has been notarized at the U.S. Embassy in Guangzhou; a husband who relinquishes rights to the land to his wife; or a signature in Chinese characters. 
 
 Chinese nationals hold $660 billion in personal wealth offshore; they spent $22 billion on U.S. homes in the past year 
 
 Some of those clues match up with public documents in China. A mile north of the Chengs, Fu Youhong and Zhang Jian, a couple who founded a pharmaceutical distributor in China before starting a business converting agricultural waste into energy, bought a $3.5 million home advertised as a “spectacular brand-new French Normandy Estate.” Pesticide manufacturer Huifeng International USA got into the boom early, in 2012, and for $3.4 million bought a house with a grand circular staircase and Swedish sauna. The company says the property is used as an office for its trading business and not as a personal home. And a $3.2 million property in one of Arcadia’s rare gated communities was sold to a woman from Guangzhou named Zeng Fang, who runs a network of immigration sites, one of which, baby-usa.net, tells Chinese mothers they can deliver babies at Arcadia Methodist Hospital. 
 
 A few miles south, another new house, this one with Tuscan styling and Moorish window treatments, sold last year to a woman named Jin Liping. Her husband, Du Jianming, is the owner of one of China’s largest private builders of steel structures. His company has built bridges in Shanghai and connecting railways on the Tibetan Plateau. His wife bought the 8,000-square-foot house in Arcadia for $4.8 million in September 2013, around the same time the couple faced financial pressures at home. They lost three lawsuits in China related to unpaid loans, but their home in California looks in peak condition, with little red ribbons tied around the topiary by the front door. 
 
 A goldenrod-yellow house on South 6th Avenue belongs to Tao Weisheng and Du Xiaojuan, who develop homes and run hotels in Chongqing. Tao is known in China for collecting calligraphy and paintings—and for reportedly paying bribes to bureaucrats. According to state-run media, in 2004, Tao and a business partner paid a local official’s gambling debt at a Macau casino. The official had given them a land certificate they needed for a loan. In 2010 the court found the official guilty of taking a bribe and gave him a suspended death sentence. The prosecutor didn’t charge Tao and his partner. The homeowners or their representatives declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests. 
 
 Lately, groups of Chinese investors have pooled their money to buy Arcadian homes, which often aren’t occupied. More than 400 residents showed up at a community meeting with the police department this spring, in part concerned about a spate of burglaries targeting empty mansions. When there are leaks or other problems with a property, even the city struggles to identify who’s responsible. “Who do we contact? Where do we contact them?” says Jim Kasama, the community development administrator for the city’s building department. “Sometimes it’s not that easy.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 Arcadia is on track to bring in record revenue this year. In the fiscal year ended in June, fees from building permits and development reached $7.9 million, a 72 percent increase from the previous year. Its quiet streets are busy with gardeners blowing leaves and laborers laying roofs. This summer, the high school updated its gym and cafeteria. For a generation of older homeowners, the boom has created one hell of a nest egg. The Great Recession hit many retirees hard, but now they’ve sold and moved to cheaper places a few miles away. As Smith, the contractor, says, “They still live close, but they’ve got 2 million bucks in their bank account.” 
 
 With so many homes vacant and language barriers prevalent, distrust is building. There are strange rumors—local officials on the take; bridal studios as fronts for massage parlors—and stranger truths. Just steps from the Arcadia police station, a local TV news reporter uncovered a hotel being used for birth tourism. A member of one homeowners association says a developer told the local board at various meetings that three separate homes he was building were all for his own family. When the board called him on it, he said his wife couldn’t decide which one she wanted. 
 
 “The growth we’re experiencing isn’t typical,” Kasama says. “It’s not like we have new subdivisions. It’s the houses that are growing.” The city’s homeowners associations can do only so much—three years ago, the city changed a regulation that limits their ability to cap the size of houses. 
 
 Neighborhood disputes are getting intense. Dong Chang, a local dermatologist who told the Rotary Club that he left Taiwan in the early 1970s with “two bags of rice and a frying pan,” is suing the developer building a mansion next door for cutting down an old oak tree on his property. He’s seeking about $280,000, saying the harm was “intentional, fraudulent, oppressive, malicious, and despicably done.” 
 
 Courtesy City of ArcadiaA red sign reading “Cannon against dogs” hangs from one of two replica cannons a developer installed pointing to his neighbor across the street 
 
 Then there’s the cannon incident. That battle went down on West Las Flores Avenue, on a block with a mix of older homes and newer construction, including a house owned by David Tran, the Huy Fong sriracha magnate. A family moved into a new home in 2008 and flanked the front walkway with two waist-high lion statues, the “fu dogs” that guard imperial Chinese palaces. A few years later, a developer named Ricky Tang began building his own home across the street. Tang didn’t care for the lions, but their owners refused to remove them. In January 2011, according to city records, Tang mounted two replica cannons on top of a construction trailer in the front of his lot, aiming back at the lions. A red sign reading “Cannon against dogs” in Chinese hung from each cannon. “The neighbor across the street took offense,” Kasama says. “He felt they looked threatening.” Soon a city-owned Prius pulled up, lights flashing, with an official entreating Tang to take down the weaponry. He acquiesced after a month of haggling. Tang didn’t respond to a request for comment. 
 
 Mary Garzio, a widow who’s Tang’s neighbor, calls him “a very nice man.” She says he’s been wooing her to sell her 73-year-old house for $3 million in cash. He brings over fruit and says she can live rent-free until she gets settled elsewhere. “He says, ‘You’re a good neighbor, Mary. I don’t want you to leave, but I want your home.’ ” 
 
 
 
 
 
 Arcadia’s Chinese buyers may have made their wealth in different ways, but they face a common problem: getting their cash to America. China controls the flow of its currency, restricting residents from converting more than $50,000 in yuan into foreign denominations each year. At that pace it would take half a lifetime for a couple to buy a $4 million home. 
 
 Jeff Needham, a senior vice president at HSBC (HSBC), says it’s most common for buyers to transfer money from personal or business accounts they already have in Hong Kong, which doesn’t impose caps. “In most of our buyer situations, they have funds outside China already that they have accumulated over years,” he says, adding that the bank verifies the source of the funds. 
 
 It’s trickier for those without accounts in Hong Kong. Chen Ping, a local broker, says there’s a common workaround. “We call it ‘head-count wiring,’ ” she says. Buyers line up other people—friends, family, or, if need be, paid strangers—to each transfer a share. “I once had a customer who bought a $1.9 million house in Arcadia who said, ‘Not a problem. I have more than enough head counts,’ ” Chen says. Many buyers have legitimate ways to wire the funds, says broker Imy Dulake, but “there is no way we can have this much cash coming in legally.” 
 
 When they can’t get enough money through, property records show many get mortgages to buy the homes, often putting at least 40 percent down. Others buy with all cash and later take out home-equity loans, freeing up funds for other investments in the U.S. without going through the rigmarole of getting money across the Pacific again. Dozens of Chinese homeowners in Arcadia have loans from HSBC and East West Bancorp (EWBC), both of which have branches in China. HSBC’s Needham says the bank gives “premier” clients a discounted rate, and it can underwrite loans in the U.S. based on international credit scores and assets overseas. East West didn’t respond to requests for comment. 
 
 Even as they fret about their town, longtime Arcadians worry about a sudden end to the money. What happens if the U.S. limits visas, the Chinese government clamps down, or the émigrés pick another place to park their cash? “How high we go, we can’t foresee, because we never know the policy changes,” real estate agent Seow says. This summer, after an exposé on China Central Television, the Bank of China ended a government program that quietly let some customers convert an unlimited amount of yuan into dollars and transfer it overseas. And President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign has raised the specter of a larger slowdown. “I was in escrow on a property before this crackdown, and oh my God, they could not get their money out” of China, broker Dulake says. The sale fell through. 
 
 Stig Hedlund lives on the block with the cannons, in a house built in 1937 by his grandfather, a civil engineer who laid out many of the city’s roads when everything was still alfalfa fields. Now Hedlund is wondering if he should leave. He’s received nice offers for his house, like when a broker and a couple drove up his driveway unannounced in a black Mercedes one Sunday morning; the broker knocked on the front door, saying the couple wanted to buy his home. He’d like to wait until his last son graduates from college, but he fears his “five-year plan” will make him miss the boom. When he reads news about recent protests in Hong Kong, he wonders how China’s response will ripple across the mainland. “If a communist government starts putting the kibosh, isn’t it more incentive to get money out of the country?” he asks. Or would a crackdown mean he blows his chance to sell? It’s a question central to Arcadia’s gardeners and construction workers, the car salesmen and the boba tea makers, who all rely on the money surging out of China. For now, Hedlund figures he can wait a little longer. He hears Ornelas just brokered a sale down the street for $2.8 million.
– From the front, a half-million-dollar home on the Re/Max website looks like a quaint Spanish Revival in the heart of Seattle. Head to the side for a different perspective, and you'll see appearances are deceiving. You're looking at what Yahoo says locals call the "Montlake Spite House," an 860-square-foot sliver of a house that's legendary even among tiny houses. The front of the pie-shaped home built in 1925 is just 15 feet wide, while the back comes in at under 5 feet wide, KOMO reported in 2013, the last time the house was up for sale. Eugene Smith, a retired professor at the University of Washington who wrote a book on area history, says the wedge-like residence "was certainly the oddest of all the bungalows" in the area. "It was the smallest, most peculiar shape," he told KOMO. And the story behind its supposedly spiteful construction is just as strange as its shape. Yahoo dug up a few origin tales, including that it may have been built by an enraged landowner to spite a neighbor for a lowball offer on the land, per the Stranger. It also may have been a revenge move by a long-ago owner, said to have given permission for someone to build a home while he was traveling, as long as there was room left for his own house, which … there wasn't, really, Quirksee has reported. But one of the catchiest stories, offered by the Oregonian, claims a divorce judge awarded the original, larger home to the husband, and a tiny portion of land to the wife, who then built this minuscule abode to be up in her ex's face. These days there's a law on the books against such a "malicious erection," which involves building a structure to purposely "spite, injure or annoy" neighbors by blocking their view, access, or light. (A secret of the "tiny house" movement.)