Adverse possession becomes a lot more of an obvious outcome when one stops thinking about urban areas and well put together homes, and instead starts thinking about abandoned areas and properties with unknown owners. At the end of the day, towns want to collect property taxes and would rather have someone improving a property and paying taxes on it than a slowly degrading property that has clearly been forgotten about, considering the owner didn't notice the adverse tenant for decades. Or maybe nobody could manage to contact the owner for decades. Or maybe the named owner for a plot of land was lost to time. What is the other option, leave it untouched for decades and centuries because at some point in the past someone had their name on it?
This seems like a problem that's automatically solved by land tax. If the property is abandoned, the tax goes unpaid and the state auctions the property off to cover the unpaid tax. Voila, new owner of record.
That works to the extent that a polity is willing and able to seize, care for, and sell off parcels. At scale, this is not guaranteed to be as easy as it sounds. Case in point: Detroit.
