I guess what is bonkers or could use some (historical?) explanation is why real property is given an allowance to be taken through use by others, when the ownership of the land is recorded (though probably unmarked physically). To some, extending that logic might say, I have a right to take this bike because it's just sitting in front of a house unused.
Is it to help turnover unused land through the generations and ensure it doesn't sit idle without active use by a rich person? What's the purpose of such an allowance in the law?
I'm guessing it comes from some old British reason.
AFAIU, title recordation is a relatively recent thing. And the logic of adverse possession, which I think is a vestige of early statutes of limitations (retained out of principle or ad hoc, I dunno), mirrors the logic of later equitable remedies. Fundamentally, adverse possession doesn't magically transfer title, but because the court refuses to grant the ejectment request of the prior possessor who sat on his rights, the person in possession thus has better title than anyone else in the world in terms of what can be claimed in court.
More generally that reflects the logic of traditional property law under the Common Law--ownership is about having better rights to possession than anyone else in a relative sense, not about some singular, abstract title. Emphasis on formal properly titles is how you distinguish continental Civil Law from Common Law, or from many of the rules that controlled prior to the emergence of the Common Law.[1] Once courts of Equity came about you could then ask the court to quiet title, which can be used to change any formal title registrations and prevent future litigation, though technically that would have been (and often remains) unnecessary to legally deed such property. And adverse possession has been so well established for so long that most jurisdictions have kept it enshrined in statute. Though like the Rule Against Perpetuities, many jurisdictions have eviscerated it.
[1] There are actually strong arguments that formal title requirements are a barrier to the development of more egalitarian economies. Formal titles seem an obvious and easy solution when you're in the elite, or in the context of an already well-developed political and economic environment. But formalisms often make it too easy for the rich and sophisticated to screw over the poor--you take their money, you give them possession, then at some later date (maybe even a later generation) it's all taken away because nobody ever got the valid imprimatur of some bureaucrat. You would think such a simple rule would benefit the poor, but that's not how it plays out it practice. Some economists argue these effects remain consequential in many Latin American and other jurisdictions, particularly ex-colonies of continental powers like France and Spain. In the domains of property and contract law, China has quite deliberately incorporated many Anglo-American principles and rules in its legal reforms precisely because formalisms can create hidden costs far greater than what they seem to save. And I think traditional Chinese property law, at least, also leaned in a similar direction, which is why the phenomenon of so-called nail houses existed in the first place--because the courts recognized (albeit haphazardly) certain possessory entitlements that didn't arise from any formal title, which in communist China were few and far between.
Although in a sense this has ceased to matter anyway because any prudent property owner puts up fences around a property to avoid this possibility. At least where this issue is known.
I can see it going both ways. In some poor countries, the protection of the title is the greatest help to the disadvantaged -- to know that no one just by strength of goons or money can take that away. And then in other countries, the poor get to (once in a while) benefit from sitting on land that went unused and eventually having it become theirs.
In the US, everything is so paperworked and documented, that it simply seems strange that this possibility exists.
At least, that's the argument in "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. AFAIU, in the intervening years many countries paid heed to his argument and instituted at least minor land reforms, for example making it possible to register transfers where prior records are defective or absent. But unless such reforms are self-executing (as with adverse possession or more modern statutes of limitation), I doubt such reforms are helpful in normalizing the informal property market.
De Soto also makes the case that so-called squatter's rights were an important factor in the emergence of the American middle class, but that has little to do with adverse possession and more to do with rules set by the Federal government in land grants and when dealing with squatters on Federal land. Common Law adverse possession could never operate against the government without their consent.
In modern America adverse possession usually comes into play in disputes over boundaries. A registered property line may have been two feet to the east, but for whatever reason a neighbor has been using that two-foot section as their own for many years, as probably previous neighbors did. When the error comes to light (e.g. maybe the registered title owner wants to build an extension to his house and hires a surveyor), adverse possession is used to settle ownership with the neighbor who has been adversely possessing the strip of land. That's a far cleaner solution than, e.g., an easement, which would just add unnecessary complexity to both neighbors' titles and invite future litigation by subsequent purchasers.
On a similar note, I've read that clearing land to graze cattle in the Brazilian jungle primarily is for laying claims to plots of land purchased formally and informally, rather than for meat production. The presence of cattle is a de facto, and to an increasing extent de jure, proprietary claim on a piece of land. In a sense it behaves very much like adverse possession--the presence of cattle prevents someone else from using the land, given that fscking with someone's cattle can be a shooting offense (like in the American Old West). Some have argued that if there were more convenient ways to secure a claim on land, there would be less pressure to clear cut the jungle. Though, absent concrete evidence that alternatives would lead to less clear cutting, that sounds more like a libertarian talking point designed to appeal to liberals.
Are you in real estate law?
Here are some interesting articles I just dredged up if you're more curious. I learned something new from the second paper; that the association of adverse possession with so-called squatters' rights might be peculiarly American, stemming from turn of the century land rushes where news about adverse possession wins by prospectors spread like wildfire. (AFAIU, the actual history was far more complex. Large land trusts were violating their Federal land grant terms, and "squatters" were often well placed to be granted a new title by the government. The politics of railroad land grants also add twists because at that point everybody, including Congress, was pissed with the railroads, so rules were tweaked to favor squatters. I suspect bone fide adverse possession cases may have been fewer than popularly imagined.)
* Henry W. Ballantine, Title by Adverse Possession, December 1918, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1327641.pdf. From the introduction: "[T]he great purpose is automatically to quiet all titles which are openly and consistently asserted, to provide proof of meritorious titles, and to correct errors in conveyancing".
* Itzchak Tzachi Raz, Use It or Lose It: Adverse Possession and Economic Development, June 2018, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/iraz/files/Raz_UILI.pdf. From the abstract: "A reduction in the security of land right is also associated with an increase of investment in farms and improved access to capital markets, as well as with an increase in the share of owner-cultivated farms and mid-size farms. These findings suggest that the effect of property rights on economic development is not monotonic, and that property rights may be over secure." Of course, I wouldn't describe adverse possession as lessening the security of title. In many cases it strengthens title, incentivizing the development of land in your possession without fear of losing your investment. Such fear might exist even if you were the rightful title holder all along. Your chain of title might disappear into the fog of time, as Ballantine describes, and who knows what surprises lie there. Title warrants and title insurance can't compensate for time, sweat, and other reliance interests. (Civil Law jurisdictions' answer was to require title registration--no transfer is good unless and until sealed and formally recored by the government--but as I said that simply raises the stakes and often favors the wealthy, particularly the aristocracy with titles handed down from colonial or medieval times. Adverse possession is a self-correcting mechanism that works even when everything else breaks down--e.g. title archives are burned or forged. Title registration is the type of solution a programmer would come up with, unfamiliar with the thousands of potential failure modes.)
I tend to believe that land is just different from things like manufactured goods. There's a fixed amount of land (modulo landfill and such), and we all have to live on it. People disagree as to how land should be used, and people believe they should get a say in how other people's land is used because land is a common good.
Land isn't fungible; some people would prefer waterfront property, while others would prefer to live in the woods, but at the same time most people would prefer to live such that they're not too far away from other people, and from things like grocery stores. While there are certainly some people who do want to live remotely, that's not that common. Each plot of land is different, and one person controlling one plot of land means everyone else is deprived of that particular plot.
So we basically say: "ok, you can own this land, but you have to use it in certain community-approved ways, and you have to actually use it; if you don't, we're going to take it away or require you to sell it to someone who will" (ok, the latter half of that is vanishingly rare). Or maybe "if someone else starts using it and you can't be arsed to notice, we're just gonna let them keep using it". And maybe that's not all that unreasonable, despite what I've said about this type of law being bonkers?
But a bicycle is just a bicycle, and the supply of them is effectively infinite. If I'm not using mine, there's no bicycle limit such that my "waste" would cause someone else to not be able to use a bicycle. They can simply go to a store and buy one, an identical one, even, if they want.
The same doesn't hold true for land: me owning and doing something (or not doing something) with a particular plot of land means that no one else can do something with that specific plot of land. If it's undesirable, or in the middle of nowhere where near-identical land is abundant, perhaps it doesn't matter. But if it's in a highly-desirable place where space is limited, it might matter.
(And thus we have the philosophical basis for housing crises.)
I agree that this sort of law is bonkers, but understand that no one has a "right" to own land[0]. That's a privilege conferred by legal frameworks, and only works because we all more or less agree to abide by them and live in civil society.
[0] The US Constitution does not grant this right, and in fact the Framers were well aware of the divide between those who did and did not own land at the time, and considered landowners to be more deserving of participation in government.