When someone intentionally builds a building or part of a building on land owned by another, the land owner may obtain an injunction ordering removal of the trespassory structure. But when someone innocently builds a structure that encroaches on neighboring property, many courts today applied the undue hardship or relative hardshp doctrine and allow the structure to remain on the ground that land owner is partly at fault for not noticing the incursion and stopping it before substantial expense is undertaken by the innocent builder. In such cases, the court usually orders a forced sale of the land on which the building sits. See, e.g., Somerville v. Jacobs, 170 S.E.2d 805 (W.Va. 1969). However, older cases would order removal rather than a forced sale and the Rhode Island Supreme Court apparently prefers the older approach.

 In Rose Nulman Park Found. ex rel. Nulman v. Four Twenty Corp., 93 A.3d 25 (R.I. 2014), the court ordered a building removed despite great cost when it occupied 13,000 square feet of neighboring property. The court recognized that the owner had relied on the expertise of the engineer who developed the site plan, and that it would cost up to $400,000 to move the house that had cost $619,000 to build. Nonetheless it ordered removal of the structure.