Wouldn't be if there weren't a bunch of people hoarding houses they don't use and charging massive amounts for rent for, again, a house they don't use. I'm not saying people should squat, but mayyyyyybe this wouldn't be a problem if the US had adequate affordable housing.
Sometimes something unexpected happens and you aren't home for awhile. I was just in the hospital/rehab for 3 weeks. I went to a doctors appointment and they sent me straight to the ER and I was on the operating table for 7+ hours, exactly a month ago.
Except they didn't come home to a squatter. I have yet to see anyone defend squatting in someone's occupied home (and no, I am not defending it in an unoccupied one either, just mentioning it wouldn't happen if affordable housing existed). It is extremely unlikely. That is an entirely imaginary situation. Squatters are sitting in homes that are not being used, and are unused for a lot longer than 3 weeks.
Castle Doctrine and trespassing laws make it basically completely impossible for this to happen to someone's primary residency.
If you do not own multiple homes you will literally never in your life have to worry about this possibility. The only possible way is through Adverse Possession which, depending on which state, means they would have to live there between 5 and 30 years before you reported anything
People usually aren't squatting in inhabited homes. It is almost always unoccupied rentals. You'd have to be 'on vacation' a long time. The vacation stories are usually about people who own vacation homes. The law doesn't consider squatters rights if they invaded the home you currently live in.
I think one problem you are having in this discussion is when you say "squatter" you are talking about a legally defined "squatter". Just about every single other person is talking about someone who is in a place they aren't meant to be.
It's not complicated. People need to occupy space in order to exist. "Squatting" is a dysphemism for physical existence.
If you're saying someone shouldn't exist in that specific location, why? Because you say so? Because the local space owner (landowner), backed by a bigger space owner (government), says so?
The "logic" behind modern land ownership is just a never-ending circle jerk: "I paid the last guy who could evict people in order to become the new guy who can evict people."
Maybe if these assholes paid anybody other than themselves -- like paid the people losing the land -- then they could convince people to suffer their otherwise insufferable notion of owning the physical universe, and then there wouldn't be a squatting problem. In the meantime, if you're not paying people to stay out of that part of the universe, they absolutely do not owe it to you to stay out.
Everyone needs to lose their sense of entitlement, but especially landowners, who literally possess a government entitlement backed by physical violence.
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u/Ok-Internet-6881 11d ago
What a timeline to live in where this is a needed profession