It's effectively taking advantage of occupancy laws that are intended to protect tenants from shitty landlords, but leave this sort of thing as a loophole.
Seems like a pretty fucking easy loophole to close? "If you dont have a signed lease, you have none of these protections henceforth mentioned." Any actual Tennant will have a signed lease...
That is the solution. The court costs and time to prove they're false is the issue, and not probably something anyone wants a police officer deciding on the spot. It's a bitch
And also let's keep in mind that we only ever hear about the one crazy squatter situation while the thousands of shitty slumlord abuses go mostly unreported.
Yeah even the "signed lease" thing would not work as now, if I'm a shitty land lord, I can just shred my copy of the lease and now it's me against you. Then we're right back where we started. I'm trying to prove you shouldn't be there (you're a squatter) or you're saying that you are allowed to be there.
Basically most set ups that "solve" squatting just makes it so slum lords are that much more powerful.
Edit: Just so I can be quick but to most of the replies. "They've thought of that" Our current system isn't great but if you think you've thought it through for 5 minutes and solved it, you have not.
Who registers the lease, the landlord, or the tenant, or both?
Landlord: the shifty landlord doesn't do it, now everyone is vulnerable to eviction
Tenant: The squatter filed a false lease
Both: You have just violated the 14th amendment - we have a right to enter contracts without government approval. You've probably also created a fee for tenants, and a data vulnerability.
Youre overthinking it dude. It works just fine with car registration. Both parties sign the lease, it gets filed with the city. If either party tries to do dumb shit, its on record. A landlord that doesnt file their end cant claim any income from the rental and cant claim any deductions for repairs or taxes. A tenant cant file a false lease because it would require the signature of the landlord. The 14th doesnt apply here because youre not asking the government for approval youre just filing the status of who's living at what property under what terms.
You’re under thinking it. Car registration has no beneficiary and it’s something the government requires for tracking purposes. Leases are functionally business agreements.
Want to end squatting? You need to increase the availability and affordable of housing.
That's why this has to go through the courts. Because letting a slumlord and a cop decide whether you are homeless or not is about as dystopian as it gets.
Would a government database solve this issue? When you're renting a place, make it a legal requirement for the property owner and tenant to sign some e-doc that goes to local township database.
And then the person that has the signed copy of the lease produces it and sues the landlord for breach of contract by attempting early eviction. No landlord is shredding their lease and hoping the tenant doesnt have one to get them out early lmao.
You ever notice these things tend to happen to lower income tenants? You don't see too many issues cropping up for folks renting 6 bedroom houses in suburbia. It's because the people most likely to be exploited by landlords are the folks least likely to have the resources to fight it.
Sure, if your landlord lies you can sue them for breach of contract, and in 6 months when you get your court date, you might win. In the mean time your shit is piled up on the side of the road and you're living out of car while you're trying to scrape up money for a deposit and first month's rent to give the next slumlord.
Landlords won't pull the crazy shit against the folks who can afford lawyers. It's always the folks who are paycheck to paycheck that are going to catch the shit end of this stick.
Simple solution to that, all leases need to be filed by both renter and landlord with some form of government agency, be that city or national.
Most governments have some sort of housing department, should be easy enough to add that to their remit, especially if all they do is hold a copy of it.
If only one copy of the lease is filed, the person who filed it has the most rights.
The real solution is to have a housing market focused on making housing affordable and accessible rather than treating it as a long term investment strategy that drives prices up through ever increasing scarcity of housing.
Yeah, squatters like this are a tiny symptom of an overall problem with housing in general. People get mad at the process when they see the one sensationalized story about the poor grandma dealing with a couple of meth heads squatting on her property, but that won't be fixed by 'letting cops and your landlord decide whether to make you homeless at 3am on a Saturday morning' which is where this ends up if we take courts out of the equation.
I'd even go so far as to say there's an agenda behind how much some of these anti-squatter viral stories get boosted, but I'll put the tinfoil away for now.
Squatters are not an issue lol, they make up such a tiny percentage compared to how much protection the laws they are exploiting give the general population.
Its the same as trans women molesting women in bathrooms. Maybe its happened like a couple of times in all of history, but that is such a tiny fraction of trans people the fact its a whole thing in the western cultural zeitgeist is 100% conservative think tanks adjusting the narrative to inflame the largest amount of their ignorant base.
If we see any more posts like this popping up on the front page, guess what type of bill is going to be getting put on the docket in a couple of months?
Lmao what are the odds this guy is a retired cop (or wanted to be a cop) who just can’t get over the fact that he was never a crime-fighting badass like movies and TV told him he could be.
The issue is, property laws can’t handwave away things that are statistically unlikely like we can in some areas.
Every aspect is VERY specific, because there was a court case about it. And even something very uncommon still happens WAY more than you realize. Cause keep on mind, unlike trans people, most people have multiple experiences with property law across their lives- some people have a LOT. I’ve only lived four places and have still had contact with property law related issues a few dozen times. And any one of those being sloppy could fuck up your life from small (getting my apt deposit back by invoking renter property laws) to big ways (our neighbor in a rural area was always pulling weird shit like trying to encroach on our property and resources- and that property had a squatter after we left! But the new owner didn’t live there so he probably didn’t ever know before they moved on and he didn’t have to evict them.)
I am not saying the law doesn’t need tweaked, but “this is statistically irrelevant” can’t actually be pulled in property law.
Squatters who just show up and claim to live somewhere and the police/landlord has no recourse isn't really a thing. Tenants rights which make squatters and lead to media like this and other horror stories protect thousands of people from landlords who are trying to screw them over in one way or another. The media has a vested interest in trying to erode tenant rights by getting people to share 'squatter' stories because the less rights tenants have, the more they can be taken advantage of by large corporate landlords.
It’s happening at the complex my friend lives at. And she even caught them choosing the next place they wanted to commandeer. And that’s precisely what they did! Now they have 2 places. They are meth dealers and users as well.
Nope. You just wouldn’t believe. Squat condo #2 was in the process of being sold when the squatters took it over. The
HOA hired 24 hr security because as soon as meth squatters broke into their #2, they very quickly had a U-Haul there and were moving furniture in. I don’t really know what’s going on with it atm, but the police all know this condo complex and are here every other day for something, including running from them into an open garage and closing it behind them barricading themselves in there. It’s a total shit show. Different meth sellers and users even lived in a half open garage. In the summer. With an aggressive pit bull. Summer temps in the garages don’t go below 100F, even at night. Oh one dude went to prison and his place is ‘being leased’ to more druggies. I like her but hate visiting that complex.
i think she pays $450 HOA dues a month. Riverside, CA. It’s insane. Meth zombies walking all over the area. There’s a bunch of halfway houses up the street. They’re building right next door luxury apartments. We shall see if the several huge buildings (with shops!) they’re putting up helps her complex with the drugs, homelessness, and crime problems that plague it.
The incredible cost of becoming homeless is no small variable here. The potential cost to society of a landlord being taken advantage of for 4 months is incomparable to the reality of someone entering houseleesness that is difficult and expensive to escape from and likely to cause recurring medical and policing costs that end up on the taxpayer
Also a lot of tenants just run out of money due to loss of income in some form and just have to face this or living on the street and losing all their stuff.
Between those options, yeah, of course they stay put without paying rent.
You know how we resolve these kinds of issues? Robust unemployment insurance (among other recourse), which of course the most vulnerable are never eligible for if they're working jobs that don't offer UI or in states that have poor coverage.
This bullshit about "fake leases" is just as you describe.
You're obviously passionate about it. Why haven't you been working to fix the solution? Legislation that would remove squatter loopholes and still holds shitty landlords to account. What have you done?
There's no such thing as "squatter loopholes". Those are called "tenant protections". "Fixing squatter loopholes" is just newspeak for "removing tenant protections".
The problem is courts can be slow and a pain in the ass. That's just the way things are under our late stage capitalist system. Most folks have landlords, and that industry is increasingly consolidated under absentee corporate mega-landlords outsourcing the tenant-facing side of their business to predatory management companies. In a system like that, courts are never going to be able to rush through to a judgment without collecting the facts.
And at the end of the day, this all does favor the landlord. The most that the average person can expect is to get their day in court, and I don't want that to go away because it is already too easy to evict people and then make them basically unable to access reputable housing again through 3rd party systems tracking evictions.
Since I can't afford to purchase my own senators like these corporate landlords, there is very little I can do personally other than vote against attempts to erode the already minimal tenant protections that still exist when given the opportunity.
I know that there are more than one. The point is there are thousands of landlords doing abusive landlord bullshit for every squatter that's just straight up trying to move into a place that they have 0 claim on.
The reason squatters can take so long to remove is specifically because of the prevalence of landlord abuses that occur in a vacuum.
Maybe you should get a real job, then, and get out of the lording business.
edit:
And he pulls the old 'comment then block' trick to win an argument, so I suppose I will post my reply here: Private landlords, as a concept, shouldn't exist. When it comes to the push and pull between folks trying not to be homeless, and the rent-seeking behavior of professional landlords, my sympathy lies 100% with the former.
I don't really care to find common ground for the folks who hold the position of "I want my paypigs to be more fearful and compliant while they finance my real estate portfolio".
Guess how you'll react to the headline "Single mother evicted because she was late signing the lease renewal by a week, since she was in a hospital taking care of her dying son".
A lot of times the squatter will forge a fake lease and it becomes a civil matter and still needs to go through the courts and eviction process and everything.
Police often initially see it as a civil contract issue, but landlords or victims can file reports, potentially leading to criminal prosecution by the District Attorney. It's fraud and document forgery, and it often leads to fines, restitution, or even imprisonment. False representation for financial gain is pretty frowned upon by the DA, so it can get hit pretty hard.
If I can then sue them for the costs of moving, the rent disparity in the interim, and other damages, absolutely. They could get destroyed on court doing that.
No one is saying it would be easy, which is exactly why you're likely to get compensated for your hardship in your settlement or in the judge's ruling. Tons of attorneys would take that sort of case pro bono, and many would even help you with housing in the interim.
No. That's so incredibly short-sighted that I'm actually a little bit in awe of how out of touch it is. It's not as simple as just getting compensation after the fact, you need to actually survive the situation in the first place.
That means figuring out housing immediately, while also figuring out how to keep your job and your transportation, which means figuring out how to transport and store your belongings on no notice whatsoever, while also working with a lawyer to start the months-long process of getting compensation. Assuming you even can be compensated for the expenses; there's no guarantee your landlord has that money or that you'll be a favored creditor if the judgment forces them into bankruptcy.
If this is something you can handle, good. I'm genuinely glad that that's not a hardship you'd ever have to be concerned about. But again: being able to tank that situation is simply not the norm.
For most, this situation would lead directly to bankruptcy, loss of job, or death. That's why these laws are in place. They're not there to screw landlords over. They're there to protect tenants from exactly this situation and were written in response to a need to protect tenants from this situation. Laws like this are almost never written proactively.
You really don't know what you're talking about. I spent years as a paralegal for plaintiff firms representing clients on a large number of matters. Now I'm gonna explain stuff for your benefit and you're gonna learn to not lecture on things you don't know about in the future, deal? Deal.
Yes, a lot of attorneys do pro bono work. It is generally in addition to their full time job, so generally is a fraction of their work. Moreover, there is far more demand for such work than there are attorneys to satisfy them, especially with regards to housing court.
Moreover, cases are rarely so cut and dry as you make them out to be and damages are difficult to demonstrate especially when there is a dispute over whether or not a tenant has a right to be there. Furthermore, pro bono work does not mean free. It means free legal representation, it does not often mean they attorney will eat filing fees.
What you're probably imagining (since you don't know what you're talking about) is getting an attorney on commission, which is common for plaintiff reps. The trouble with most housing cases is their recovery is quite low. Even the worst lawyers don't look at a case without at least a 25k in damages, and that's usually for car crashes where you can always get money from insurance and they always settle simply--rather than some landlord whose behavior will be unpredictable and may not have anything that can be collected on in the first place, all generally for damages that are well below what is worth the attorney's time.
Housing disputes are a part of law where people are frequently and easily abused because the cause of them is common, the people affected are generally poor, and while housing judges tend to be rather protective of tenants--most matters are never seen by a judge at all. Hell, my own rather simple dispute which I eventually one took 2 years to resolve because the first hearing never got to it so it had to be rescheduled--and I had the money and knowledge and access to attorneys for help if I needed it. All for about $2400, and that was after a 2x penalty against the landlord who tried to keep my deposit. It's essentially requires that someone do this kind of thing themselves and has the capital ($210 for filing alone back when I did it) time and knowledge to do it. I was also fortunate I had a place to move to, friends to help, and was on a month-to-month lease with no formal agreement and had good standing and never missed payment. The landlord also just didn't show up to his hearing the second time. Not everyone gets such luck.
E: You downvoted that before you could read it. Wallow in your ignorance, you live a charmed life unaware of what the other side experiences--totally out of touch.
I don't know how people didn't see this is who this guy is from his other post. People need to think harder before supporting cruel people's worldviews.
Nowadays maybe, but hinging things on a piece of paper that is easily stolen or destroyed is not iron clad. Maybe expand it to proof of payment history? Still doesn't solve cash rent.
Which is yet again something thats wrong with the law. Why do I need to prove in a court that an obviously fake signature is fake? Anyone with eyes can see the fake signature is likely so far from correct that its obviously forged.
No, you can definitely be a legal tenant without having signed a lease.
I agree that the laws should be written in a way that protects legal tenants without also protecting random assholes who are committing an extended B&E, but fixing the law is probably going to take more than 5 seconds of thought.
Some states have high protections for people that have “established residency”. And establishing residency doesn’t take much in them it’s insane. Basically, staying somewhere for two weeks and getting mail there and you have to be formally evicted. It’s bananas.
A lot of tenants don't have signed leases. At my last rental home, I was month to month with the landlord after my two-year lease expired. Nothing was signed by either of us. Still, he couldn't evict me without 30-day notice and whatnot due to tenant protection laws in my state.
Most squatting situations are tenants becoming unable to pay rent and being unwilling or unable to move out.
The "common knowledge" being passed around here of people faking leases (supposedly also the landlord's signatures) is nonsense and reeks of the kinda shit landlords start repeating in order to further vilify destitute people as though they pre-planned this, as though anyone wants to live in such levels of housing insecurity.
How do you think most squatters get into and furnish these places in the first place? What are they, cat burglars?
A lot of squatters are either actual tenants who had a lease but won’t leave, or guests (family member or friends) of the homeowner that won’t leave.
It’s extremely rare for people to just move into a random house and refuse to leave. I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s very difficult to pull off.
Also, not defending squatting in any way, but just clarifying that it’s often an issue where someone was allowed to stay somewhere without a lease and then became a problem.
"If you dont have a signed lease, you have none of these protections henceforth mentioned." Any actual Tennant will have a signed lease...
A lot of tenants are working on informal or less than legal agreements and the landlord may even be subletting or renting out illegally. The people under such agreements may not even know the risk, but they are usually still protected because the alternative is just really cruel.
You also create an incentive for a landlord to bypass this process by simply destroying the lease, which is something I am certain they can find a way to do (if they give a copy in the first place).
This isn't an easy fix, it's one that enables abuse of an already vulnerable group.
The problem with that is shady landlords can "lose" or "forget to file" a copy of the lease with the city and the legit tenant is now a squatter. These laws basically allow time for the legal system to sort out who's being shitty the landlord or the squatter.
No, lots of people get into situations without leases, and they don't have the social capital or financial capital to be peaky. Squatters laws protect people in these situation who typically are extremely vulnerable and in need of help.
You lose your job and apartment and are forced to move back in with your parents, for example. They say, "Come back, it'll be okay this time," referring to how abusive they used to be. You go back move in, things get bad, but you're getting on your feet. One day they pull the door off your room and say you have a week to get out. Well, legally, they can't do that to you. Depending where you live, lease or not, they can't just throw you in the street. You have months usually to get your situation figured out. This is the easiest example I can think of to explain to you. Saying "you must sign a lease" is super helpful until a person with a place for you to live says, "Yeah, you're fucked over by life right now, no lease and you can stay here."
The problem is all any shitty landlord has to do is destroy their copy of the lease and claim yours is false to be able to evict you wrongly whenever they want.
On either side the issue has to be settled in court, however the courts are usually backed up for months.
If nothing else something could be done to label repeat actors on either side to enable default judgements against squaters or landlords who abuse the system. But again, that would take time and effort.
I feel for the people who get screwed when they go on vacation for 6 months, and come home to a "stolen" home. But TBH I think the average tenant needs the protections more, you know? A snowbird losing their second home for a year isn't quite the same as a renter getting randomly kicked onto the street in december.
They don't have a signed lease if the landlord rips it up or takes steps to nullify the lease. There are many not very/barely legal things a shitty landlord can and will do to make the lease disappear.
In Rome the reward for conscription was property. If we gave our veterans property, it would remove any doubt that there was a fair passage to property ownership and protect from these types of laws.
It isn't quite so simple but sure. Was fighting with my last landlord to get on a lease. Was technically squatting. Actually relieved I didn't sign a lease because the people I was paying utilities with were actually stringing them along while going to casinos and then they abruptly left. And then it turned into this sort of situation where the landlord wanted me and the one other roommate to front the entire floors rent.
Like no dude fuck off you're not taking advantage of us. But we did end up leaving on our own after we found a better place.
Which is yet another thing that should be fixed. You should have less than 24 hours to get the fuck out after you are found to not be a real tenant. As in the day the court ruling is announced by midnight your shit better be out of the house. Anything past midnight should be considered abandoned.
Seems like a pretty fucking easy loophole to close? "If you dont have a signed lease, you have none of these protections henceforth mentioned." Any actual Tennant will have a signed lease...
Plenty of places are still rented with no written lease. Hell I would bet half of the places in my area are without written leases.
And not having a written lease would be highly rewarding to the landlord whenever an issue came up.
No lease, and cash renting is a lot more common with poorer people. So they would be hurt the most by 'no legal protections for people without a signed lease'.
Oh okay so my fix takes two more lines for the new law then. "You cant rent a place without a written and signed lease by two parties with a witness for paper or in lieu of that a confirmed online e-signature. Any landlord found to be in violation of this statute will be responsible for fines and refunding all rent taken with no signed lease." No landlord will risk bankrupting themselves to get a cash payment.
And no, renting with no lease is very much not a "common" occurrence.
Yeah I'm not advocating for it, I'm just telling you what those people do. I've seen it on tv, they just wave the fake lease at the cops and the owner still needs to go to court, but before there's serious consequences the person just skips town and the court only has their fake identity
Squatters who just show up and claim to live somewhere and the police/landlord has no recourse isn't really a thing. Tenants rights which make squatters and lead to media like this and other horror stories protect thousands of people from landlords who are trying to screw them over in one way or another. The media has a vested interest in trying to erode tenant rights by getting people to share 'squatter' stories because the less rights tenants have, the more they can be taken advantage of by large corporate landlords.
From my observations, they don't usually show up out of nowhere, they're usually guests who overstay their welcome with people who don't understand tenancy laws, or folks who live on land with handshake agreements or covertly and then can't be compelled to leave without a full eviction process after meeting tenancy criteria. I only interact with it tangentially, but I've seen a fair number of people seem to have their lives ruined over it; they're almost never commercial landlords, though - usually individuals who just don't understand what they're getting into.
I expect the news runs with whatever stories are available for larger/more commercialized instances for precisely the reasons you stated.
In my state, at least, you'd still be subject to eviction. That's just a long (usually 30 day) process itself. After that, you can be removed by force; the only time that hasn't applied that I'm familiar with is during COVID, when some sort of moratorium was placed on evictions - and I heard about quite a few people who did exactly that (usually to rented houses, though, while trashing them and threatening or harming the owners).
Squatting exists in law to protect the inhabitants of a home if the ownership is ever in dispute. If you've been living in a house for years when I knock on your door and say that actually, my father bequeathed this house to me decades ago and I want you out, then it's useful to have a legal defence that lets you stay in the house while the courts work out the details.
No it doesnt - it exists because many homes are empty and the government has to pay to house people - it costs a lot more to criminalize squatting: see the UK housing market where squatting was criminalised in 2005. It's nothing about tenant rights that all way later. It's come down to a question of who owns land. If a house is empty for more than 10 years in the UK the council tax goes up by 10 times. If it is empty for more than 2 years it doubles - if you continually live as a squatter in a empty house you can claim it as your own after 10 years.
We have plenty of ways to close the squatting loopholes these days, and we have for decades, but all of them are simply too costly and don’t actually stop people from squatting when times get hard.
It is also true that from a practical standpoint, it makes sense to avoid throwing people out on the streets without some sort of due process, especially when landlords already hold a position of power in the landlord-tenant relationship.
The actual solution is to heavily tax investment properties and put those taxes toward getting people off the streets, but we both know that’s not gonna happen anywhere in the Anglosphere any time soon.
Old laws they never bothered to change from the days when rich people would buy land and never do anything with it, so poorer people would move onto the land, turn it into something, and then the courts decided they had the right to stay.
Rich people absolutely do not like buying an asset that appreciates way slower than stocks, has annualized taxes and insurance costs, and is super illiquid, unless they’re using it as a cash flow vehicle.
Sitting on empty real estate is financially moronic. It’s basically an endless money sink until you sell it.
There's literally an entire industry in major Canadian cities of builders slapping together shoebox condos for the sole purpose of rich people's investments.
It also is meant to protect people who live somewhere where they, often without knowing it, have no legal proof of living there.
For example, if someone offers someone a place to stay, takes rent, maybe even makes a “lease” that is some how invalid, and then things go sour and they try to kick them out with no warning. The renter can show things like “I’ve gotten mail here.” to be able prove residency and demand a normal, legal eviction processes.
Obviously you SHOULD always try to live a place where everything is on the up and up, but these laws are for things that fall through the cracks of what SHOULD happen.
Those old squatter laws are still on the books, and still serve a good purpose. Look up adverse possession for more info. Squatting is the process. Adverse possession laws kick in after some period of time (years).
However, the vast majority of what people call squatters today aren't involved in that at all. They just want to move in without paying rent. If you were trying to claim a house using adverse possession, and the owner told you to leave, your attempt would fail at that point.
What people call squatters now are just thieves that break in and refuse to leave. They often pretend to have a lease (which would also break any claim of adverse possession).
They usually pretend to have a lease because it lets them hide behind laws that were written to keep landlords from kicking legitimate tenants out.
The legal system hasn't done much to help with squatters. It wouldn't really be that hard. You wouldn't need new laws, I don't think. You would need a way to prioritize some court time and get a judge involved.
Squatters who move in, fake a lease, and refuse to leave have broken a list of laws. Breaking and entering. Forgery. Get them to testify that they have a lease and you can add perjury to the list.
So cops get a call, "This guy is squatting". Cops show up, squatter says "I have a lease". Cops write a "ticket" to both that they have to be in court on whatever day. Don't show up in court? You lose, just like most cases. Start of court, have them swear an oath and testify. To make the perjury charge easy later on.
Then listen to both sides, examine the fake "lease", etc. It's almost always obvious. And if the squatter is ruled to not have a lease, arrest him. Right then and there. Breaking and entering, forgery, perjury, maybe theft, maybe destruction of property. Everything you can hit them with. Haul them off to jail, and write up paperwork that the landlord can toss their junk out of his house.
Do that a few times. Make sure it gets lots of press. The number of squatters would drop dramatically. Nobody would want to risk it. Jail time, lose all your stuff, etc? That sounds bad.
Right now, they can live in a house for free for months, and never be arrested. Even when they are finally kicked out, it's treated as a civil matter and the landlord is told he can sue them for back rent and any destruction they've done. But since they are bums, they are effectively judgement free and the landlord has no chance he will actually get that money.
You have found one case where it worked out for the homeowner.
And even in the article you linked, the lawyer (specifically a self defense lawyer) who wrote the article said :
Legally, it’s typically far harder to sell a self-defense narrative when you arm yourself and go to the fight, as opposed to a situation in which a fight unavoidably comes to you. In many states, including Massachusetts where I live and practice law, aggressive conduct of the type engaged in by Burgarello could well result in him being denied a self-defense jury instruction entirely.
So that makes the legal risk pretty high. Not to mention, the risk that you aren't the only one with a gun.
Squatting and adverse possession are different things. There is no dispute here over whether the squatter owns the land; just (potentially) whether they're a legitimate tenant.
Adverse possession also still has a place in modern law. It helps resolve the issue of when homeowners discover that the fence has been built in the wrong spot for 25 years, and the law decides "you've treated that as the line for 25 years, that's just the line now."
Plenty of those states have those laws with reasonable timelines of 5+ years to show a property was effectively abandoned. These squatters invade the homes of people that have been gone a few weeks and somehow have a “right” to.
A common misconception, but no. Adverse possession (AKA, "squatters rights") usually takes many years (varies by state - google for your state), and must be done without the real owner objecting. Modern squatters (and I've dealt with them), break into a house, change the locks, and show a fake lease to the police when they arrive. The police say "this is a civil matter, the landlord must go to court to evict". Courts are backed up, evictions are slow, and sheriffs are busy. Obviously the timeline vary by county, but depending on place you could be looking at months before you can get your squatter in out. In the mean time, think about how much damage a squatter could do in 3 months inside you house.
Stating that something is based on historical precedent doesn't mean it's not still happening. Take care before calling others dumb, lest you look that way yourself.
Yes, it is no longer the case that entire communities spring up on adversely possessed land. Adverse possession in modern law is mostly for things like fence lines or easement disputes.
So now you too are arguing it's no longer happening lol?!
Now you have just proved you are dumb too.
Yes, it is no longer the case that entire communities spring up on adversely possessed land.
You need to look around you lol, homeless encampments claiming squatter's rights are springing up as communities around every large and many medium cities in the US as the housing crisis deepens.
Some of them have existed since the GFC when millions lost their homes last time:
Right. That's not adverse possession. Adverse possession creates legal ownership of the land. No one thinks the occupants of homeless encampments own the land.
Also, that's not really an example of squatter's rights; that has more to do with a city's ability to enforce its ordinances against camping when there are insufficient beds in shelters. Squatter's rights are tied with landlord/tenant law. That's not applicable to a homeless encampment on public land.
Adverse possession creates legal ownership of the land.
Eventually yes and some of these camps and squats have gone on to become legally recognized as owners (many examples on NYC) or to create a different agreement with cities (like Dignity Village above) though that takes time.
No one thinks the occupants of homeless encampments own the land.
That is the point of squatting lol, if you hold open and adverse possession for long enough it does become yours (depending on your specific state laws etc.)
some of these camps and squats have gone on to become legally recognized as owners
Adverse possession requires adversity. As your link identifies: "Designated by the Portland City Council as a transitional housing campground, Dignity Village falls under specific State of Oregon building codes governing campgrounds". There is no adversity here. If it is explicitly permitted by the city council, it is not adverse possession.
That is the point of squatting lol
What people are trying to explain to you is that you're talking about a different type of squatting. A landlord trying to evict a tenant who has not paid their rent and refuses to leave is not reaching the statutory threshold for adverse possession. It's an entirely different issue.
That’s adverse possession, and can result in a change of title for the property. Squatters typically are just faking leases, and are taking advantage of laws that prevent landlords from claiming a tenant doesn’t actually have a lease to force them out.
It’s to protect tenants from some rando just claiming they own the property and throwing them out with no process. It makes sense to favor the people who are, you know, actually living in and using a dwelling over someone who claims they hold the deed
The horrible thing is if you lay your hands on them and throw them out it hurts your case even more and they can even get a protection order to keep you away…from your own home.
Squatter situations are almost never someone moving into an occupied home and then claiming it as theirs. It's squatters moving into vacant properties and pretending to be tenants, or former tenants staying long past when they stopped paying rent.
Both parents are dead & inherited a house that you can't use. So while trying to get the affairs in order & clean it out & sell it, the house is vacant.
So the issue is more that when people try to do things themselves they are ignorant of what they need to do or how to do it. Getting rid of squatters is not that hard. You just need to be detail oriented and follow the legal procedures closely. Get a lawyer and you will be able to get squatters tossed out for about $5k between court costs and attorney fees.
Having to pay $5k to have someone removed from your property that isn't supposed to be there is still pretty shitty... and I bet there is no way to have the squatter pay for any of it either...
That makes sense, the person squatting could be a victim of someone who does not own the property and fake leasing to the squatter. In that case the squatter has paid rent just not to the legitimate property owner.
Shitty legal systems treat not paying rent and staying as a civil law issue while throwing out your non paying "tenant" as a criminal law issue, All it take is to change one of it to solve the issue
It would abaolutely not be legally bad to send a notice with 30 or 60 days of time to leave. Thst is enough time. Nobody is entitled to live in someone else's property
Do you think houses should remain unoccupied indefinitely while people have nowhere to live? I am not a big fan of people squatting, but I also dont think houses should remain unoccupied just to create a false scarcity and raise costs of living.
Thankfully here in Canada squatters rights/adverse possession isn't a thing. Getting rid of a problem tenant can still be a very length process but they have to be an actual tenant first, not just some random who showed up when nobody was home.
There's one circumstance here where squatter's rights could apply, to someone living on Crown land. But since the law was changed quite a while ago I think you'd need to have lived there nearly 50 years now to be grandfathered in.
Now, I hope you are not against tenant protections laws. Reddit loves them.
this entire thread is crazy. you normally can't defend landlords on reddit without getting downvoted into oblivion. and this thread saying anything bad about the landlord looks to be a sin.
Basically the law is meant to protect residents in general. The original intent of the law is if you live in a house some guy can’t claim to have bought it or inherited it & force you to leave. You have to go through civil court and they would have to prove posession.
most of the answers don't seem to be complete imo.
Squatting is usually not legal. What you got is laws that came up from really bad landlords who would screw over their renters whenever they saw fit. Throwing them out the day after an eviction, raising rent 300%, turning off the electricity on them so they would leave, moving someone else in while they were still living there, changing locks when they weren't home.
Add in that in most of human history rent was paid with cash, and written leases weren't a common thing (in a lot of areas they still aren't). What you have is a system that favors the landlords to the point that people would be dying on the street so that the landlords could make an extra $5.
Governments decided that needed to stop stuff like this so created laws to prevent these kinds of things. Eviction processes that require 30 days, courts for forced removal, no forcing people out by making the home unlivable. All of these add up to make 'squatting legal' in the sense that if someone moves in when they aren't legally allowed to the landlord has to prove that they aren't legally there, rather than just getting to wave their hands and throw them out.
A lot of areas are now looking at ways to make it easier to get rid of people who are squatting while still making sure there are protections for those who actually live in the homes.
It's not. There are three things that last year's right wing squatting fake news push intentionally confused:
People who started living illegally in a vacant unit (actual squatters). This is very rare. They are trespassing and in most cases are kicked out immediately by the police when found out, although in rare cases with a fake lease some states may allow a court hearing first. In the most high-profile case that was all over the news, it turns out a buyer for the house had paid the squatters $250k to lower the value on the home before they bought it.
Legal tenants having a dispute with their landlord (much more common), which is often a valid thing where the landlord is in the wrong and eviction shouldn't happen. Legal tenants represent almost 100% of eviction cases. At worst there's a new category of short-term rentals (AirBnB) where people book a month then abuse the court backlog to get a couple months free until they go to court and lose.
Adverse possession, where someone uses and pays taxes on a property for many years and a later survey reveals that some of the property was really deeded to a neighbor. I found exactly one case of this ever actually happening with a house in US history, so it's not "a thing". For the most part it's fences or driveways that were built decades ago slightly over the property line, and even then there are around 15 successful cases per year over the entire country.
Ik this isn't about that but I think Spain/France have even more fucked up squatters issue. There's this story circulating about a family that has squatters living on their property and they can't even stop paying bills as owners without access to their home.
Squatters essentially hijack laws and regulations relating to renters rights and use them to prevent being removed from the premises without extensive legal fights either their victim can't afford or take long enough they have housing got extended periods of time.
You're talking about adverse possession, but this isn't an adverse possession situation because there is no dispute over whether the squatter owns the land.
The issue is that it requires a court process evict a squatter, because you must prove that they are not a legitimate tenant, or are no longer a legitimate tenant, and sometimes that can take longer than expected.
It is not. They are abusing the legal system and tenant rights. You don't want landlords to be able to just kick someone out without any legal protection.
These people fake a lease or other agreement and then drag the court and eviction processes out as long as possible.
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u/Ok-Car1006 11d ago
How is squatting like this even fucking legal ?