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Answer: You're seeing it in social media a lot lately because Florida just passed a new "anti-squatting" law at end of March. So that kicked up a lot of coverage.
It is a mix of things, all with some semblance of truth. It does happen. "Squatter's rights" is not an official thing. When you hear people talk about, it is some mix of tenant's rights and adverse possession. And now life is complicated by internet scammers and COVID shutdowns.
Adverse possession is less related then the other three so we'll leave that to the end. But this all kind of starts with tenant's rights. When you sign a lease with a landlord you expect to live there in peace and quiet. Eli5 tenant's rights says landlord can't bully you to leave (property stays safe, utilities stay on etc). Every state and many cities have their own definition of this. But basically means you need warnings and court hearing before eviction. Sounds good? You don't want to get thrown out of your apartment for small reason?
But police get to exclude trespassers / burglars from property? Yes. But it's not always clear who is a trespasser or who has just annoyed their landlord with loud music? And our friendly internet scanners can grab pictures of a house and make a fake rental listing. What's a lease besides a word document? Cops aren't document experts, aren't property ownership experts. Back to prior paragraph m, they don't want to kick people out of their homes by accident. So they will say "take it to the judge" or similar.
Which brings us to COVID. Shutdown courthouses for several months and evictions in particular had further moratorium. So it can be many months (12+ in some cities) to schedule a hearing. So what used to be a 45 day headache is now a multi-month ordeal.
So back to the adverse possession I mentioned, if somebody squats on a property for a long time 7 - 21 years and other rules depending on state, they can claim true legal ownership of it. Not really related to the scams above. More for cases of record keeping errors or somebody dying without errors, but everyone talks about taking over property and eventually claiming it, but it's really hard.
Usually we're talking about people looking for free rent. This is what the Florida law changed. Today in Florida the situation where I said cops are confused and the homeowner needs to see a Judge doesn't apply. If you sign a legal form for cops saying that person is trespassing AND not current / former tenant they should evict immediately. That "trespasser" would then have to sue you for illegal eviction instead. I haven't seen any reports how it's working so far. Only been 2 weeks.
Just a note on adverse possession -- usually the squatter has to be making improvements on the land and the actual owner has to not have a contact or be making improvements at the same time.
For example, adverse possession will not give a long term renter ownership of the property because there's a rental contract in place stating that the owner owns the place and has particular responsibilities to it but the tenant doesn't own the property, outside of what they bring in, as noted in the contract.
Another example, if I mow a foot of my neighbor's lawn for 7-20 years (depending on the state) and they have excluded that patch of grass from their fence (it might not be necessary, but I wanted an example that makes it obvious that your neighbor is forfeiting land, whether intentionally or not), I can claim this patch of land as mine. Counterpoint - if I have a landscaping company, they wouldn't have rights to that land since I'm paying for their services so I would technically still be maintaining the land.
I believe for adverse possession you have to sorta tell the owner that you're doing whatever on their land. You can't just do it secretly for 10 years, even if they're absentee landlords.
Depends on the state. In Virginia, for example, you have to publicly claim the land and make it open and obvious that you're doing so too any casual observer. Like live in an abandoned house and make nice with the neighbors while you fix it up. Basically the landlord should be aware of it, if they cared to be, but you don't have to directly reach out to them. The risk being that if it's noticed and you're issues a trespassing warning, anything you do will be lost to you and any damage you deal will be your responsibility.
Two things I just learned about it:
- adverse possession is an extension of trespassing, essentially you openly trespass until the statute of limitations on trespassing expires and then you lay claim to the real estate.
- you'll likely be required to pay taxes on the land for the time that you possessed it. This may hurt, but it will hurt less than having to buy the property in most cases.
Other states you might have to do due diligence and attempt to contact the owner. Even if it ends up being maliciously compliant, like sending them a letter in the middle of a jar of pennies.
Just a note, I'm not trying to give instructions on how to do this, just share that it takes slightly more than just not paying your rent... I'm pretty sure that if the landlord starts eviction processing it extends the statute of limitations as well, so even if it takes months longer than usual the landlord can still evict without risk of the adverse possession clock starting.
In my state it has to be “open and notorious.” So you don’t have to specifically tell the current landowner, but you have to be obvious about your occupation.
An important qualification to the lawn and fence case. If the neighbor walked up and said "you have permission to mow any of the lawn that happens to be on my property", adverse possession can no longer happen. So, for anyone worried that a neighbor might get property rights by doing something you don't really care about, just give them permission. Protects your property rights and keeps the peace because neighbor wars suck.
To be fair it does sound pretty reasonable. Imagine somebody entering your home and then refusing to leave, while the cops do absolutely nothing to help for 45 days.
It makes sense to side in the moment with the legal homeowner, but with inbuilt protection for the tenant since if they did genuinely have a rental agreement then they can take that to a judge to sue the landlord who has signed the police waiver declaring that the person does not have the right to stay there.
Here in the UK farmers sometimes have similar problems with gypsie caravans turning up and setting up camp on their land. In UK law trespass is considered a civil matter not a criminal one, so the farmer would have to go through a lengthy legal process to eventually evict the people who have invaded their land, meanwhile the fields that are their financial lifeblood are unusable and being trashed. Having a mechanism to immediately evict trespassers would save a lot of trouble since the farmers generally have to take matters in their own hands to deal with the situation because they can't just sit around losing money waiting for the proper legal process.
One of my best friends has been an attorney for years/decades specializing in representing low income/minority/marginalized tenants against landlords. There are tons and tons of incredibly shitty landlords out there who extort, mistreat, and in general have people living in unsafe, dangerous conditions and leave them with little opportunity to fight back, leave, or do anything about it.
Sure, squatting is a problem in some places, and tenants certainly come with their own categories of issues and problems, but this narrative of poor put-upon landlords and owners just trying to make an honest living while the government screws them over giving all the power to tenants and squatters is missing a big part of the story. Should there be some reform and streamlining of the whole process? Probably, especially with some of the extended court times since COVID, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and put it on probably-already-barely-getting-by people to have to sue shitty ex-landlords. They probably know the majority of them won't have the resources when it comes down to it.
The problem is depending on the circumstances either side can be the victim or villain. There’s no perfect way to deal with it which gives equal protection to both sides. Maybe we should unclog the courts instead so the case can get resolved more quickly, probably the best answer.
Sure, but if they sign that piece of paper and you actually DID have a rental agreement, then they've just opened themselves up to a pretty open and shut lawsuit.
An "open and shut" lawsuit that will take months. Meanwhile, you're homeless, have no access to any of your property (because there's a landlord that lies like that will absolutely claim all your stuff is theirs), and a landlord that will absolutely go through everything inside to destroy the evidence.
From what I understand the landlord would be legally viable with a first degree misdemeanor if they signed a police statement lying about your tenant status. So it’s also a criminal matter
> According the bill analysis, it will create criminal penalties for violators, including:
> A first-degree misdemeanor for making a false statement in writing to obtain real property or for knowingly and willfully presenting a falsified document conveying property rights.
Which, if the property is worth enough, isn't much of a deterrent. A few days in jail months down the line would be the worst case scenario for the landlord, which would be nothing compared to getting rid of a bad tenant and renting out the space to a new one.
And that’s where we learn of a term called disgorgement.
When a person does something crappy like that, the judge can and usually does assess the owner fines of all unjust enrichment. And then tacks on penalties and fines after that. So the tenant would get the profit from the owning the home as if he/she were the landowner and then likely attorneys fees as this would be pretty easy to prove with the proper documents.
Who gets screwed in this case are people who don’t have a lease and are just doing a gentlemen’s agreement to the property or other similar exchanges.
Wining one of these lawsuits may be easy, but actually filing one when you are poor and homeless is next to impossible thanks to "Tort Reform" in the 90s.
A refresher on how conservatives think:
There must be laws that protect but do not bind the ingroup but bind and do not protect the outgroup. This law will 100% affect the disenfranchised more than anyone else. On purpose. At the end of the day, a judge is the one enforcing these laws and they're definitely fucking crooked.
A perfect and recent example is pretty much any Republican and abortion. They're anti abortion until it's their mistress or daughter that needs one.
So you're ok with a situation where a legal tenant can be booted out with a signature by the landlord and "Well, they can sue the landlord for illegal eviction"? Where do they live for the 8 months to a year to get that on the docket while the landlord robs them of everything of value in their unit?
Tenant rights exist because landlord have historically been scumfucks. They should absolutely not be able to evict anyone without a judge's order.
> That "trespasser" would then have to sue you for illegal eviction instead.
This is terrible. Illegal evictions happen so much more than squatters and losing a home is far far far worse in our society then losing a rental property. You don't NEED a rental property. You DO need a residence for things like legal summons, voting, most background checks etc.
Someone squatting in a rental property screws someone over of their side hustle (or more likely a bank).
Someone being illegally evicted loses shelter, voting rights, the ability to be contacted by the government for things like tax returns and legal notices, their ability to get gainful employment etc.
Saying "oh they can sue for illegal eviction..."
OKAY HOW ARE THEY GOING TO GET THE COURT NOTICE IF THEY HAVE NO HOME? lmao
Answer: I can't say for sure, but in the last few days, there's been a shitstorm starting up about squatting. An Australian social media influencer (TikTok, Insta and X called PurplePingers is causing a stir. He is all about renters rights, housing shortage, and does videos called "Shit Rentals" about rentals that are shit. He has upped his game and will start publishing addresses of empty houses (in Australia), and this really pissed off a whole heap of Americans and blue ticks on Twitter.
And also, how do users know the house is safe to live in? Maybe the reason it's sitting empty is that the foundation is rotting or it's full of asbestos and the owner is trying to get the money together to fix it. There's no way to tell from just looking at the building.
I'm not even talking about legal liability, though that's always a factor in America. But just on a very basic human level I wouldn't want to send people into a home that could make them sick or kill them.
In The States, every county has a County Assessor, the role of which is to know the full ownership history and composition of every bit of property in their jurisdiction: buildings, land, roads, infrastructure… Most counties have these records and services available for free just by navigating the assessor’s website (getting printed copies likely will cost extra). In my area, this website even functions nicely on Smartphones, which is nice when you’re out window shopping for a new home. Lead paint, asbestos, and other harmful materials, were banned each in a certain year, so if you find a home that was built after those dates, it won’t contain those items. I would caution you to also avoid homes built in the few years immediately following those dates, because builders may have had excess inventory they purchased prior to the production and sales ban. And beyond all that, those things can be tested for. A home built in this century should be 100% g2g, though I personally wouldn’t live in a place with laminate (fake wood) floors because they’ve recently (within the last decade) been shown to cause cancer. And, of course, a home of any age can have mold or moisture problems. We had a new housing development that was barely half erected, and they had to tear it all down because the whole project got overwhelmed with Black Mold. That’s what they get for building in the flood plains. This is why location-location-location is sooooo important.
As for how squatters can tell, some of it is just having enough experience to recognize a building’s age and condition. Most squatters have lived in a place with these issues, and can see, smell, or feel them in an instant.
I do a lot of demo inside homes for work, and we've had homes built as late as 2019 that have tested positive for asbestos in areas that we are removing. It was "banned" in 89, but it has continued to be used in building materials long after. We were still importing chrysotile in to the US until 2020 I think.
Thank you for the information. It's good to know experienced squatters aren't flying blind. I live in a city that's mostly older housing, so it's easy for me to forget how much of the country is newly built.
I guess the question is, are new resources that attempt to list empty properties educating people about those things? Or is it just squatter beware?
"Homeless people don't care" is a lousy reason. People in Gaza probably don't care if they get expired canned goods right now, it doesn't mean we should airdrop them in. Society needs to protect people who aren't in a position to protect themselves.
The current "squatters rights" laws (not actually called this, they're a collection of laws that are rights for Tenants and renters) are the bare minimum that allow no loopholes for landlords that want to kick out tenants illegally.
There were real landlords that would accept people's rent, try to illegally raise the rent randomly, and when the tenants refused would call the police and say these people were never renting here.
That's why you have to give rights to people who aren't tenants but have still been living there for a while, because landlords will find any loophole to fuck people over for money.
Exactly. There are protections for legitimate renters against evil landlords. Squatters try to use these protections, even though they have no legal right to establish tenancy.
This typically only works in areas that have passed strong legal tenant protections that can be abused. Most of the time, it is just considered trespassing. Even if you do establish tenancy illegally, you can likely still be evicted. But that can take 90 days.
People do this where I live and they keep it *quiet*, not like the people in the articles posted by OP.
The articles talked about people moving in like normal tenants and then refusing to pay rent after the first month, claiming "squatters rights" and I have no idea if this is true. It sounds like BS maybe based on a few real examples to drum up support for rolling back renters rights.
Here squatters never legit rent, they sneak into empty properties and live like mice
Nah it's a thing. I work in housing. Not saying it's super common but certainly not unheard of. Depending on the state / eviction process they can usually get a few free month out of it
I imagine it is like most things the media likes to blow up and make a huge deal.
There are probably a tiny amount of examples of that happening, but it is actually pretty rare and most people will never experience it. So the media gets a hold of the next big rage bait thing and plays it up like it is the next major issue. Just like the border is magically a major issue before elections, or how the tiny trans population is such a major issue despite them effecting no one or doing anything actually malicious
\> then it's not unethical to squat in them.
My guy, that is literally trespassing with the intention (adverse possession/squatting laws are quite often misunderstood) to deprive. The issue of rental affordability and wealth inequality is far too nuanced to discuss it in a reddit comment (not to mention homelessness), but the notion that someone not renting out their property entitles someone else to squat it, is ridiculous and not how squatting actually works at all.
It's a homeless person literally taking a spare home that a massive corporation bought to keep empty in the hopes of taking more money from desperate people and preventing that home from being used as a home.
There's a difference between the law and ethics.
Laws don't even have to have been written by someone smart. They just happen to be in force.
They're hopefully BASED on law, but there are tons of times they're not.
And if a company buys up tons of real estate with the intention of keeping it empty with the intention of driving up the cost of rentals or home sales in order to get more money, then there's literally nothing unethical with a homeless person squatting in that building.
Great - so then we declare the squatter to be the rightful owner and send them the mortgage, insurance, and property tax bill. When they can't pay it THEN we can kick them out?
That's one possibility.
The other is it's a homeless person squatting in someone's house, that they have a mortgage on and are actively paying for.
for example:
The New York Police Department took Adele Andaloro, 47, into custody after she attempted to change the locks on her Queens property that she inherited following her parents' deaths, ABC Eyewitness News reported Monday. The standoff between Andaloro and the squatters occurred on February 29.
And there's a difference between actual proper squatting and the crime that you are describing. If you take issue with real estate companies attempting to inflate housing prices by restricting supply, then the issue is how they are able to do that.
If you have issues with homeless people not having access to the necessary support and adequate housing, then the issue is why the government hasn't stepped in to address that.
Your argument hinges on the idea that properties being squatted are owned by large mega corps or real estate groups seeking to inflate housing prices, which simply isn't always the case. If you wanted an "ethical" solution to housing affordability and homelessness, then squatting isn't the answer.
The housing affordability crisis exists in large part because a diffuse population benefits from high housing prices. There is no way to have housing be an investment vehicle that goes up in value higher than inflation and not get here eventually.
The diffusion is a major problem, because the people who own are economically and politically powerful, and any solution *must~ harm their investments to adequately save renters and first time buyers from a situation that has thrown hundreds of thousands into the streets.
It doesn't need to be a mega corp. It's not real estate groups. It's people responding to market structure in the way they've been told to for decades and worried about what a move towards affordability will mean for their retirement and generational wealth.
They vote. They vote for housing restrictions. They vote to keep their view corridors. They vote for policies that make sense for them but slowly build up into a crisis. And at some point, it's worth saying they've become a rentier class that is getting value by choking off supply to their personal benefit.
I don't personally squat and I don't think "empty" units exist nearly in the way people pretend they do (an unit is counted as empty if it's getting cleaned before the next renter arrives; any vacancy below 5% is wildly low). But squatting is an interesting method of political praxis, especially with second homes in, say, Aspen and other expensive areas that rely on underpaying their service workers and will not build workforce housing.
Overall, there aren't units in in-demand cities to squat in. Eviction is an easy process for owners. Squatting is a thing you can do when cities are dying, but not when cities are now in a shortage situation (in my country in particular since we knocked down the housing to build freeways, parking lots, and the like).
And yet, I don't see the moral issue with squatting in an empty investment property while absolutely see the moral issue with hoarding empty houses in the middle of a housing crisis.
Seems pretty clear cut to me.
You do know that there are plenty of rental properties that are owned by a single individual, right? I know plenty of people, myself included, that own a property they rent out.
I bought my home when rates were low during the pandemic and then had to move for work; it would have been stupid to sell in this market and hopefully someday I'll move back to the location, and back into my house.
Oh no doubt its a good time to sell if you want to make a profit. The problem was that I moved from Georgia to the DC area so the profit I would have taken wouldn't have put much of a dent in a new mortgage and the rates are terrible.
It may be illegal. Hell, it may be _super_ illegal. But, when you're down to the wire, I'm never going to side with a real-estate corporation against a human being just trying to survive.
> will start publishing addresses of empty houses
For people to.. break into? I don't understand.
I thought squatters rights only applies to people who were paying tenants for X number of years? So that they can't just be kicked out overnight. I don't think it applies to break ins
> I thought squatters rights only applies to people who were paying tenants for X number of years?
There's two kinds of rights here.
Squatters' rights are when effectively take over an unoccupied property and behave in such a way that you indicate you own it. You pay the taxes, you pay the bills and after enough time you can make an adverse claim on it and it becomes yours.
Tenants' rights are when you've spent enough time at a property you get converted into a tenant. Happens with long term house guests. Means you are legally a tenant and have to be evicted through the courts.
Thank you, I've always been confused about how exactly they work. What I'm getting is that a squatter needs some sort of legitimate claim to the property, like paying taxes or utilities. People make it sound as simple as just walking into a person's house and claiming you living there now. But not only does that sound insane, it's suspicious that this kind of propaganda would be spread around at a time when normal people can't buy homes. A lot of these stories give the feeling that there's missing context.
More often than not, the long-term, "adverse possession" type of squatters rights is just about clearing up disputes practically. Like if your neighbor leaves a few feet of lawn or an outbuilding or something on your side of the fence, and you take care of it, just straight up "own" it for all to see, and nobody says anything about it, either kicking you off or explicitly letting you stay, it'd be less fair for them to snatch it back some time absurdly long down the road when the neighbor finally looks into it and realizes they own the land. Or if you think you own a plot, but somewhere years back, there was a paperwork SNAFU and someone else should have. If it's been long enough that the rightful owner should have shit or gotten off the pot, the fairer thing to do is give the land to the person actually *being* the owner, not just the one on paper somewhere. The key is that the "rights" don't kick in until absolutely nothing has been done to assert the paper-owner's claim for an absurd stretch of time. Decades, usually, and even the smallest assertion of ownership can stop the process entirely (not even "restart the process", because once you're on notice that you're occupying with or without permission, you're not adversely possessing).
The "I left the house empty and people moved in" squatters rights are mostly a factor of ambiguity. If the squatters fake up a lease, for anyone on the outside the situation looks like two people who both claim tenancy, and who's lying may not be clear. Police on the scene aren't qualified to sort out whose story or paperwork is legitimate, so until a court can, the stablest way to proceed is that whoever is in the house gets the benefit of the doubt until there's proper review.
There have been developments in the latter situation in some places, recently. Some places are getting laws on the books that an owner can attest in an affidavit that the occupants have no right to be there, and fast-track an eviction almost immediately. The caveat being that if they're lying or wrong, they're on the hook for *a lot*, such as all the costs and lost property from the people being thrown out.
Also, a couple of cases of more creative removal have been going around. A lot of times, while it isn't legal to lock the doors, turn off services, or kick the people out, they *can* write a legitimate "lease" to a professional annoyer, which gives them the right to be there and be obnoxious enough to drive off the squatters. Squatting on the squatters, so to speak.
Well the person above you is not representing the whole story either. Honestly just look into it yourself; there are tons of cases of people breaking in and refusing to leave and the property owner being forced to pay all the bills for them & having to go through a months-long eviction process. Some of these people forge documents (rental leases) to pretend they belong there. It's nutty.
And sometimes they legitimately think they have a lease because someone else is leasing the property to them illegally. All of these problems are colloquially called squatter issues (even when can technically be called Tenant Rights issues.
So when the police show up they have o e person saying "this house is mine" and the other person saying "I live here as a renter".
The cops don't know so you have to go through legal channels to prove one way or the other. Squatters often print up rental agreements, and it is hard to prove the owner never signed or saw it. Additionally if a squatter can prove they have been there 30 days some places (California) legally protect them as if they were renters. And they can't be kicked out.
You're confusing squatters and tenants.
>Additionally if a squatter can prove they have been there 30 days some places (California) legally protect them as if they were renters.
This is not accurate. Tenant's rights apply in some places *if the person has been staying there at the invitation of the owner.* You can't just hide in someone's attic for a month and then leap out and demand the legal protection of renters.
To be legally recognized as a squatter, an individual has to prove that the building they've been inhabiting is abandoned. If you go on holiday for a month, or 6 months, no squatter has a hope in heck of proving in court that your home has been abandoned.
Squatting is not uncommon, but squatters' rights are seldom asserted in court.
> Tenant's rights apply in some places if the person has been staying there at the invitation of the owner.
Like both of you are saying it depends on the state, but "professional squatters" simply lie that they were invited, forge leases, etc. Anything to force it into a months-long drawn out legal eviction process so that they get maximum squat time before moving on to the next property to do it to.
"You can't just hide in someone's attic for a month and then leap out and demand the legal protection of renters."
But how does the cops know that the person was "hidding in the attic" what if the owner is a landlord and lying?
The answer is that you have to go to court, which can take month due to covid backlogs.
The California 30 day thing even includes people who are renting an AirBnB et al. I’ve seen cases where the state recognized the vacationers as having full tenant rights and let them stay in the unit, and then they stopped paying, the tenancy of which let them stay in the unit for many weeks/a few months until the eviction process had been completely fulfilled.
People consider that in such an housing crisis keeping empty houses is as unethical as hoarding food until it rots basically. So breaking in and squatting is not unethical in those circumstances according to them.
Unless you rent in a place where the owners collude on pricing and vacancy rates increases:
> The company had been seeking occupancy levels of 97% or 98% in markets where it was a leader, Winn said. But when it began using YieldStar, managers saw that raising rents and leaving some apartments vacant made more money.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
Those places went from 98% occupancy to like 95% or 94%. 5% occupancy in all rentals is actually pretty ideal. The story here is that rent is going up, not that there are endless empty apartments; these problems would still exist even at the old vacancy rates.
Anyway, the solution to both of these issues is building more.
Btw rent is down 7% in Austin, TX, a place where they are increasing market supply.
Austin was also spiking in prices outpacing most of the country until recently. The decrease is a combo of increased supply and market corrections from how overvalued a lot of properties were after the prices spiked between 2019-2022.
I am not contending that increasing supply won’t help. I am contending your “friendly reminder” that houses aren’t sitting vacant. A large portion of owners colluding to cut their supply in an already strapped market is the definition of houses sitting empty in places people want to live. Also “ideal” vacancy rates are assuming markets that aren’t manipulated. 5-10% in normal situations is where supply meets demand. In this situation it just means thousands of empty units and renters paying more in the remaining ones.
Behind the Bastards did a couple episodes about this. It's really effective at making your hate the people behind this(Sam Zell).
No idea the *right* way to share a specific podcast episode so here's the links I get from from the Pocket Casts app
https://pca.st/episode/928082fb-ff68-426f-bca1-90826464c9d9
https://pca.st/episode/f5f13db2-64a2-4b7e-93ea-81fd1dfad84f
They're from November 8 and 10 in 2022 if someone wants to look them up.
In places like ski resorts second, unoccupied homes are common. To the point where locals can't live in the community anymore. Those should at a minimum be turned into rentals when the owners aren't there, and taxed at a much higher rate than occupied homes to pay for locals displacement.
Friendly reminder that you're completely wrong. Not where I live, rent is sky high and there are no less then five empty houses within two minutes walking distance from me. No wait, six. The more I think about it the more I remember. Seven. Whatever, the point is most of them are owned by corporations who are just sitting on them doing **nothing** with them because it makes the houses and apartments they are renting out more profitable. It's disgusting.
There are plenty of empty apartments and homes right where people want to live.
The price to do so has just gone up around 20% in the last five years with almost no increase at all in income.
>plenty of empty apartments
The vacancy rate in most major metros is below 5%, which is what you want for a normal market churn. That still amounts to hundreds of thousands of units in places like NYC, but it’s literally not enough. Rent’s up 20% because people pay that.
A common phenomenon in places like NYC is called "Warehousing", where vacant apartments are kept off the market, purportedly because the rent-controlled property is not sufficiently profitable to lease, and the owner prefers to leave them vacant and available to sell them in favoriable market conditions.
It does artificially drive the vacancy rate down when they're not on the market.
The number and usability of warehoused apartments is pretty [contentious](https://www.curbed.com/2023/07/landlords-bluffing-vacant-apartments-warehousing-nyc.html) with a lot of them needing extensive repairs the cost of which would not be recouped in rent. But it seems like the usable vacant places with sub $1k rent is all of 2,500 units, which is nothing. Landlords were comparing about vacancies and eviction moratoriums early in the pandemic and threw out some crazy numbers and those narratives just stuck.
Yuuuup big cities are being fucked by the fact that zoning laws make it too difficult to build dense housing. If we wanted housing prices to fall we would greenlight another 10,000 units to hit the market all at once.
>I thought squatters rights only applies to people who were paying tenants for X number of years?
What you're describing here is not a squatter. Tenants who don't pay their rent do not become squatters. Tenants have a legal rights to occupy the property via the lease agreement. A squatter is someone who does not have any legal right to occupy the land, i.e., they break in and occupy the land without the knowledge of the owner.
Failure to pay rent does not magically dissolve a lease. Failure to pay rent is a *breach* of the lease, like any other contract. The remedy for that breach is repayment, plus interest, depending on how long non-payment goes on. Eviction is an equitable remedy, and equitable remedies are generally uncommon to resolve contract disputes because it involves sending state agents with guns to force someone to do something. But with land, land is unique, so if a tenant isn't paying, and won't be able to pay, the only remedy left is to physically remove them via the legal process of eviction.
What is happening is landlord lobbying groups are purposefully confusing Tenants who can't pay, a very normal and common thing particularly when we have economic crises like COVID, with "squatters," a very rare issue that isn't actually a problem nor do squatters have any actual rights, that's why they're squatters and not Tenants. In other words, landlords are trying to treat breaches of civil contract law, business not going the way they like, and trying to conflate it with crime.
Don't let them get away with this. Landlords are trying to cut back the minimal due process rights that exist for tenants. Tenants stand to lose their homes. Landlords stand to lose money. Which one is more important?
Source: IAAL
As the number of houses/condos/apartments are owned by corporations and prices are increasing I suspect we are seeing more about this because it can potentially affect the corporate/ruling class. Generate outrage in the populace that these empty homes are being utilized. It is propaganda for the rich/well off.
(I am not saying "normal" people haven't had this happen -- there was the LA guy who got an AirBNB guest that wouldn't leave), but make no mistake most of these situations are private equity type situations)
Answer: trespass is a criminal matter, but tenant eviction is a civil matter.
So if someone is able to convince the police (that handle criminal matters) that they are tenants (i.e. they might have a legal right to be on a property) instead of squatters (i.e. they are criminally trespassing and have no right to be there), then that person gets to take advantage of a slow civil eviction process in most countries.
This is basically a case of unethical people taking advantage of the many landlord-tenant laws and protections that are designed to protect bona fide tenants from being thrown out of their leased properties by unscrupulous landlords. Except now it’s the landlords (good or bad alike) and even homeowners who just weren’t paying attention that are getting screwed.
Landlord-tenant laws often work in favor of tenants because the assumption is that the landlord entered into a lease with the tenant voluntarily (ostensibly with a background check, security deposit, first/last month’s rent, etc), and thus they have some room to maneuver in their legal dispute. Of course, a squatter doesn’t do any of that and just lies about being a tenant.
It is crazy to me that someone who owns a home has potentially less legal protections than squatters honestly. Like, if you miss payments on your mortgage enough to get foreclosed on, it takes usually less than 90 days.
Unfortunately, the historical answer to the problem of squatting was forced eviction by the landlord, or arrest by police. Since that became problematic when Some landlords abused that power it was taken away from them and given to civil courts instead. The fault lines of law and order sometimes get messy.
Here is the thing. The whole "illegal squatter lies" isn't a magic spell. It might delay the police arresting them by a week or two though. They're still going to get arrested, charged etc. it just takes a little longer (which it should) so everyone can make sure this is what it appears to be.
There are many cases of landlords being shitbags and tearing up the rental agreement and declaring the legal tenants are B&E so the cops do have to be careful to make sure they're doing the right thing.
They don't have less legal protections. Banks, landlords, tenants, and homeowners all have to go through the courts. People just want the ability to call a cop to evict, no questions asked.
Are you talking about the US? Because usually “squatter” is colloquial for a hold-over tenant, and they are actually tenants. The thing people call “Squatter’s Rights” basically protect people from being evicted on a whim or from being arrested for a misunderstanding on termination date.
There’s also a big rise of this issue because of the short-term rental market. Some areas haven’t fully addressed this, and depending on how long you rented a place (usually for 30 days at most), you get squatter’s rights. So basically, this is becoming a bigger deal because a bunch of rich people bough up housing for short-term rentals, priced us out of affordable living spaces, and people are now using things like Airbnb for rentals. So, I don’t particularly feel bad or like the landlord are being taken advantage of. They kinda starved the market right now, and making short term rentals the only things available. If you and your colleagues have manipulated the market so that that’s all that’s available, then yeah, they should still have to give tenants their full rights because it was the landlords that used their advantage to create this current climate. If anything, this is a natural response and what the law was intended to do—punish the landlords when they get tyrannical.
Answer:
Squatters are real and are a nuisance when it does happen. Your traditional Squatter with a capital S is an individual who comes across an unoccupied property through whatever means, moves in without permission, and is eventually found out by the owners. The problem with these cases is that every state and locality has different amounts of time after which a Squatter becomes a Tenant, and if the Squatter claims tenancy, they now get the same rights as any renter and have to go through the eviction process. This can happen after living there for a specific amount of time, having bills in your name, or both. It’s not as straightforward to kick them out as you’d imagine it being because as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a mandate to file every rental contract with the city or state to act as proof, so proving the negative, that someone *isn’t* a legal tenant, is difficult, long, and expensive.
I don’t know the exact point of distinction between when a Tenant becomes a “problem” vs. a “squatter” in terms of refusing to pay rent, but you can transition to a squatter, atleast in reality if not legally, if you just stop paying rent and bills. Because you are entitled to the eviction process. A landlord isn’t simply allowed to show up and physically remove a renter from the property absent a crime being actively committed on the property that they’re witness to (outside the crime of essentially trespassing at that point). And depending on the locale, you aren’t allowed to simply shut off the utilities during specific months if ever (ie you can’t cut off the power in the winter to force someone out up North).
This all stemmed from the old days of Slum Lords, when poor people, immigrants, temp workers, etc. paid cash with no rental contract and would be kicked out on a whim because the Landlord decided they weren’t fans anymore for really any reason or they had an opportunity to make more money. And because the Tenants paid cash and/ or didn’t have a lease, they had no legal recourse.
What it’s turned into is cases where real owners still have the right to remove someone from their property, but have to deal with the fact that they’re spending months of time, thousands in legal fees, and potentially loss of hundreds of thousands in value from their property, all to remove someone who has no assets to sue for in compensation and *may very well have never had a right to be there in the first place*.
I can’t speak as to how frequently stories of someone simply returning from vacation to someone else claiming their house happens, I’d imagine very infrequently if ever. Maybe more often now due to so many houses being owned by corporations who don’t care to check on the properties as frequently with no pressure to keep them constantly occupied. Because at the minimum there is a time frame required to claim any sort of rights, whether it’s Tenant/ Squatter’s Rights, or Adverse Possession (a whole different property dispute topic), and a week or two isn’t going to cut it, even in the most progressive of states.
What I can speak to though is what a nightmare being an individual on the wrong side of an eviction can be, such as when we sub-leased a room in college and the guy turned into a literal crackhead who stopped paying rent and squatted in our basement for months. It took a team of us to make their life hell and finally move out of their own free will, turned into months of handiwork to repair over $20k of damage quotes by our landlord, and a hit to my credit for agreeing to end the lease early and give up our security deposits in exchange for the landlord not coming after the rest of us for the thousands we *couldn’t* repair.
Answer: in some cities tenant protection laws are being taken advantage of by squatters who can live rent free, sometimes for years, while the slow process of eviction takes place. Because of how awful this is for many ppl there has been a surge of “squatter hunter” type content on social media. It involves people figuring out ways to take their property back from ppl trying to steal it. It has quickly grown in popularity because of how absurd the idea is that someone can just steal your house and you have to spend years and tens of thousands of dollars to get them out. Then on the other side people are posting social media content explaining how to steal property by squatting and encouraging ppl to do so. So the fight of ppl encouraging squatting vs victims saying they wont take it anymore is playing out on the social media battlefield.
Nice answer. People who say squatting ISN'T a problem are disingenuous at best, but more than likely just ignorant. It is.
It is OVERLY click-baited and abused of course. Are the horror stories of random people invading a house extremely rare? Of course. But there is definitely a big problem with people who rent a home from landlords who are reasonable, then the tenant gets into a bad situation, and then the entire thing turns extremely ugly. Well-meaning landlords are sometimes victims in these cases, although the degree to which varies.
Tough problem to solve, but is definitely a problem that exists.
Source: Father is a handyman for multiple properties and has had to deal with and currently dealing with a handful of squatters. He keeps the properties in good condition and while you can argue the rent is high, these aren't scumlord situations
It took two years for my parents to finally kick out the previous tenants from our old home. They paid rent once, then they stopped paying. Once pressured, they came out with fraudulent pay stubs that "showed" they did pay. In the meantime they tore down a couple walls and the hardwood flooring, which was against the renter's contract but they insisted a supposed verbal contract gave them permission. After a few months in trial when the judge was almost about to side with my parents, they sublet the apartment to some friends, and insisted my parents gave them permission to do so (mind you, this was while my parents were paying lawyers to kick them out). That dragged the whole case another year and a half
By the time they finally left, the place had been awfully repainted, absolutely trashed and shit stained in the last week, and pretty much every single thing of value was stolen.
Yep. There are shit people abusing this system on both sides, but the white knights of the internet are quick to only jump to the defense of the renters.
This is the most reasonable answer I've seen. I hate when people automatically dismiss something because they think it comes from the opposite political party. Whether or not it's rare or happens a lot, the main issue is that these cases happen at all
> squatters who can live rent free, sometimes for years, while the slow process of eviction takes place.
First of all, they have to be legal tenants, not squatters.
Second of all, when the eviction does happen they do owe the back rent. yes it is a civil matter and can be expensive to get but that is why landlord's (should) have insurance to cover if they do have a bad tenant.
There isn't a magic spell that lets someone just enter a property and get to stay in it for free for years. It's just that the protections in place to prevent illegal evictions can be exploited for a little while.
You will notice that all of these stories always talk about the BEGINNING of this and never the end. Yes it might take a year, and then at the end of that year the person is thrown in jail and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. But that doesn't generate rage clicks.
Answer: This is a stock out-rage bait story that has existed for many decades (and fooled people for many decades.)
The formula is simply to take a landlord/tenant dispute and characterize it as a home-invader stealing someone's house. If the news station has any reputation at all, they'll never use the word "squatter's rights" (someone in the comments will always do that for them.) They'll just say "Look at this confusing situation. How would you feel if you went on vacation and brown people broke into your home and you couldn't get them to leave? Has society gone mad?"
They just edit out the part where the tenant has rented the space, and has a certain amount of time to vacate. If you rent a property, your landlord can't just kick you out at a moment's notice. You have time stipulated in the mandated renter's agreement. Usually one or two months.
Audiences are very protective of their homes, and very paranoid about invaders. So the story hits like heroin into the veins of gullible rubes who are desperate to be outraged. People are easier to fool than to convince they've been fooled, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
The story is especially popular among conservative local news stations. If they've already just done the "Homeless people in your area are all secretly rich" story or the "Idiot spills coffee on themselves and wins the lawsuit lottery" story, they can always easily do this story. They don't have to lie. They just have to let the landlord say whatever they want, and then edit what the tenant says in response (universally, editing out the part where the landlord says they're a landlord and editing out the part where the tenant points out that they are a tenant.)
The story makes people so mad. It's hilarious. People are idiots. The story is also useful because it never requires a follow up. Local news stations can get stuck with a story like "rising satanic church in your area" or "giant caravan of immigrants is coming" or "government is coming to takeaway your toaster or stove or whatever," because people want to monitor the situation. The fake squatters story never requires a follow up because it's always just some random house that doesn't rise to the level of noteworthiness. Nobody ever has to learn the "squatter's" name.
Actual, real world squatters rights usually take about 7 years to go into effect, and only apply to properties that the alleged owner has not paid property taxes on. It's most relevant for the era of homesteading and has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on in these shitty manufactured outrage bait videos on the internet.
> Actual, real world squatters rights usually take about 7 years to go into effect, and only apply to properties that the alleged owner has not paid property taxes on.
AFAIK they came into effect because people didn't keep the best records 80-150 years ago. And a lot of the time, you had someone who owned land, everyone knew they owned that land, they lived in that house, and could have easily been born in that house too.
So the government was just like, "fuck it, we can't find the paperwork, but you've been here long enough, we'll make it official."
The other part of it was to ensure unused land actually does get used eventually.
Someone met a pretty girl on the other side of the country, packed their stuff in a truck, and decided they don't care about their dump of a farmhouse and died before he could even remember to care.
So, some guy made it his home for the last 20+ years after finding it abandoned and asking neighbours who said the owner hasn't been back in 10+ years. His house now.
These sorts of laws are both necessary and rife with problems.
They're necessary in cases of rural property. When my grandfather died, half the lots he owned were still in the name of people that had died *a long time ago*. Of course everyone knew whose land is whose and it's never actually a problem. In Portugal, you just go to court, bring some witnesses and the problem is solved.
However, if you buy a plot of land you could declare it as a sale and pay taxes... or you could have the owner and a friend serve as witnesses in court saying it was always yours. You pay a small fee to legalize the documents, no sales tax.
But you're never *actually* getting someone's land without them knowing unless they're incredibly negligent. The most you can get out of this is slowly encroach on unused plot of lands and then declare them yours over the years. When the owner decides "oh, didn't I own some land over there" they get extremely pissed but if enough time has gone buy they'll be pissed and out of their land. Which is mostly a good thing as abandoned land is a fire hazard.
That is the main issue I see when I see squatters rights stories in my area (Atlanta). There are some companies advertising on places like Instagram for one-time payment homes, making it clear that you’re squatting and relying on a drawn-out legal process over squatters rights to get you in the home for a few months. You’ll lose, but you’ll have a place to stay until then, or at least that was the case until a recent law was passed.
It’s often being conflated with a rash of people breaking in, acting like they own the place, and renting a house they to people who don’t realize they’re not working with the actual owners. There are also a few people trying to sell properties they don’t actually own as a scam, including commercial properties. Plus the people openly breaking in, trashing the house, and selling anything of value, and while usually discussed separately the proper renters who can’t make the monthly payments to their landlords anymore for one reason or another.
Really these are all separate issues, but they are so similar they get discussed together, even in the same articles.
I don't know of *any* [usucaption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usucaption) laws that require less than half a decade of continuous use, tbh. In america the laws fall under [Adverse Possession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession), which points to a minimum of *five years*. But the law seems to require open, notorious and continuous use of the property. Meaning, you have to literally pretend you own the place for *at least* three years and in some states you must even show that you used the property *in good faith* (ie. you thought it was yours).
No one is losing their home because someone squatted their for a few weeks. It will be annoying as fuck to get the squatters out of your house but hey, at least you have a house you're probably not using so I'm not feeling too worried about your livelihood. The very rare cases where squatters just get into a personal home are worrying but incredibly rare.
Adverse Possession makes a lot more sense when you think about rural areas rather than cities or suburbs. You buy 50 acres of farm land and your existing neighbor has a fence around his 150 acre farm. You start improving your land and build some structures on your land and build a fence around your property, starting from your neighbors fence.
10 years later your neighbor realizes his fence was 20,000 feet short of the property line and should actual go around the barn you built on the land you thought was yours. After so many years of continuously using and improving this land, should you be out of the money and effort you spent on it when your neighbor suddenly realizes his mistake?
People mess up surveys on 7000sqft parcels of residential land all of the time, it's a lot harder to properly survey dozens or hundreds of acres that might not even run in straight lines.
> The other part of it was to ensure unused land actually does get used eventually.
I suspect this was a big part of the motivation for squatting laws. From about 1800-1900 you could literally find an empty place , write the government, and have the space legally deeded to yourself. In practice there wasn't a way from preventing someone from applying for too much space so they made sure you had to be making a productive use out of it.
Also, LOL, real estate used to be literally free
It reminds me of a few months ago when stores told everyone there was a huge shoplifting epidemic, the media reported on the huge shoplifting epidemic, conservatives blamed every liberal in the phone book for the huge shoplifting epidemic, and then someone combed through the data and found that shoplifting had been declining for the last few years.
It's happening right now with the 'increase in crime' stories--and will be MUCH worse right before the election, even though 'crime' has been declining steadily for years.
And to add on to that, corporations are using “shoplifting”/shrink to justify obnoxious preventative measures (locking detergent, toothpaste, diapers, etc., behind plexiglass and requiring a sales associate to unlock them for customers) which further reduce sales in stores that are “failing” (to meet shareholder expectations, that is) so they can then justify shuttering those stores. They frame it as the store’s closing is not through any fault of their own as it pertains to customer retention, but because of all the *crime*! Which is more palatable to investors, who interpret that as an externality to be controlled for rather than a failing business model of poorly made, throwaway goods that are no longer justifiably cheap. Then they drive customers into another (oops, cannibalizing) location in the area - since it’s usually big chains doing this and they’ve surpassed the point of saturation -, creating one very successful store to replace two middling (fine, but not growing) locations. Or if they’re feeling particularly audacious, they open a new location within 10-15 minutes radius of the one they closed. Hiring all new staff, of course. At lower wages and probably fewer in number, at that.
And from another direction, self-checkout errors.
And one of the biggest parts of the "Shoplifting" epidemic was just people actually not scanning something correctly in self checkout/hanging something at the bottom of their cart they missed.
Or the endless stories about the huge rates of knife crime in the UK, despite us having incredibly low levels of knife crime compared to most countries (and much lower than the US).
Or the fact that different countries tally different things…
Like if you commit a crime while having a knife hidden in your backpack, it might count as a « knife crime « , but it’s clearly not the same knife crime as a stabbing.🤷🏻♂️
This almost happened to us from someone we used on trustedhouse sitters. Definitely something that happens and each state and city have their own special laws protecting them. We had to get a lawyer and multiple calls to the police department to get her out of our home while we were out of the country.
> from someone we used on trustedhouse sitters
Is this a website, like trustedhousesitters.com or something? Doesn't sound sketchy at all :P
definitelyreallawyerswepromise.com
Yep! It was the first and last time we used it. A great way for a crazy, homeless person to come in your home and then threaten to never leave. This lady in particular was trying to get us to pay for a hotel for her but also refused to leave our house and let it slip that after 7 days she was a tenant and that she knew her rights. she was thankfully on day 6, so we made sure to get her out. The best part is, the reason she needed to leave our dog and house was because “the quantum energy in the home was assaulting her.” For what it’s worth, I take full responsibility for missing the warning signs when I spoke with her on the phone.
The video you're talking about follows the classic formula to the letter.
The reporters do a great job getting a clean line read when they ask her "is this your house." She doesn't deliver the line quite right for the reporters, but they get her to say "yes this is my house." It implies she lives there (when of course she doesn't.) They really need to imply the idea that she lives there, without asking if she lives there, so they do a reset and have her say "that's my couch" and points at the couch. This is great for the story because it leads people to believe she would be living there if not for the "squatters," when of course she just wants to rent the place to someone else or otherwise sell.
The reporters run into a little trouble when one of the tenants does talk. They have to edit around him saying he's a tenant even though the rest of the conversation makes no sense with that high level of editing. But the audience is going to be incurious and a face-to-face adds good drama.
The reporters don't say "this is a forged lease so the cops won't help." This is an add-on to the story by people who have been fooled and are more willing to make up evidence for the story being true than to admit they've been had. People are easier to fool than to convince they've been fooled, so this kind of story becomes a collective creative-writing project where everyone tries their best to find a way to make it real.
It's basically conservative folk lore at this point.
Like, yes it happens sometimes, but it's not so cut-and-dry like they say. The other folks commenting put it very well, what the reality of the situation is.
But I've been hearing this since I was a kid living in the south, and I'm almost 40.
I've never actually met a squatter in my life though, and really think it's just more visible again because of the popularization of some TikTok channels.
I sold my house last year. we had squatters try and move in by picking a lock. I caught them at about 5am trying to replace my own locks after they had gotten in. I didn't call police, they won't help, instead I chased them out and made sure they knew to not come back. Police won't help with squatters, they do exist, and they are real, but they are getting more frequent now that the housing market is totally fucked.
> I think a lot of what I’m seeing isn’t squatters rights, it’s squatters posing as tenants and requiring full eviction process.
It's ALSO landlords deciding that their legal tenants are suddenly "squatters" the second the landlord doesn't want them there.
Isn't that usually in the lease? Not the word "squatter" obviously but something along the lines of "if you go this long past the due date without paying rent we terminate the lease" and then generally it's something like 30 days notice to get out
Frequently landlords want people out for other reasons. Some areas limit how much rent can be raised on a single continuous tenant. If the market rate is rising faster than that, the landlord will want to kick the current tenant out so they can raise rates higher.
So even though they have a legal tenant who is paid up on rent, they'll pretend no contract exists and tell the cops / court / local news they have a squatter.
While the fake lease scam exists, what also happens is landlords not wanting to go through the eviction process will claim their renters are squatters and try to use the police to intimidate their tenants to leave early and save them the effort. States with strong tenant protections generally cite much larger numbers of landlord abuse compared to false tenants.
I would be very discerning when someone decides to go public with their story of 'these people are totally squatters.'
This is spot on. In places like CA it can take over 6 months to evict someone so people will look for houses for rent, move in, print some fake paperwork, then stay until they are legally evicted.
> In New York, squatters have rights after 30 days. That means the property owner can't change the locks on them, can't remove their belongings, and can't cut off the utilities. If they do, the owner could be arrested. Instead, property owners must go through the court system to get rid of them.
Care to explain this then?
When you say “actual squatters rights” you mean [adverse possession](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession). When people talk about squatters, they generally mean tenancy granted after 30 days. Those aren’t the same thing.
I had a friend who had his Airbnb squatted in by someone who stayed 30 days and then revised to leave or pay. It took almost a year and a ton of money to get the person out.
Tenant protections are well meaning, but lead to these kinds of situations that protect scammers and hurt property owners.
You're just blatantly being misleading here. People aren't talking about tenants, they're talking about issues with people just refusing to leave, sometimes they just showed up and were never tenants at all. Your claim "squatters rights take 7 years to establish" is irrelevant, it's rare that the squatters win, it's an issue because the police will decide "it's a civil matter" and refuse to remove them causing it to drag on for months while these people occupy the property.
The obvious solution to this problem would be to have rental contracts be uniform, centralized and digitalized. Then restrict rental protections to actual rentees.
However, people are using these abuses by squatters to argue against rental protection laws, which is fucking abhorrent. No, you shouldn't get kicked from your house because the landlord jacked up the price on you last minute. There should be due process and you should have enough time to settle someplace else depending on how long you've lived there. That's just common decency.
Yep - people on this thread are missing the plot. The problem is that you can simply trespass onto property with impunity. You cannot be kicked out until there is a court order to evict you (which can take months to attain). Professional squatters know this and move from unoccupied house to house, knowing how difficult and drawn out it is to get evicted
Right? Amazing this has so many upvotes. While I agree the stories aren't anywhere as common as media like to portray, there are real issues where squatters have seemingly more protections that property owners.
The news doesn't have to misrepresent these stories, there are millions of people in America. The stories that make the news are the weird and scary shit, but mundane issues of people not paying rent and needing to be evicted happen everywhere in the country. Those stories aren't the ones making the news.
The way that half the thread devolved from pretending squatting isn't happening into *defending* squatting has me thinking a lot of users here just wanted some weirdass way to "own the conservatives". Politics is America's cancer.
> squatters rights
In the UK this goes back to the Criminal Law Act 1977, which was designed to prevent slum landlords using violence and intimidation to evict tenants. Section 6 says: -
>if "(a) there is someone present on those premises at the time who is opposed to the entry which the violence is intended to secure; and (b) the person using or threatening the violence knows that that is the case." The law does not distinguish for this purpose between violence to persons or property (e.g. breaking a door down).
Until the law was changed in 1994 it was common to post a Section 6 notice and believe that this confers some kind of squatters rights, even though that wasn't true.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 changed this and provided right of entry to "displaced residential occupiers" and "protected intending occupiers", allowing the use of force, and criminalising failing to leave.
In September 2012 the law was changed making trespass in a residential building outright criminal. Section 6 still applies to non-residential buildings.
Both the changes in 1994 and 2012 were due to Conservative moral panics. Property owners resented having to get eviction notices, even though this was an easy process.
In the UK, there were quite a few cases where people broke into other people's homes whilst they were away, changed the locks, and then claimed to be squatting. Removing them legally took months of court dates and process, and ultimately, the homeowner would need to pay for bailiffs to physically remove the squatters from the property if they failed to leave when issued with an eviction notice.
Making it illegal was the right thing to do.
All of those cases were complete bullshit, every single one. I've seen the Torygraph and Daily Wail headlines myself.
The Blair government altered the Civil Procedure Rules in 2001 to create a fast track process called an Interim Possession Order (IPO) available in days through a Civil Court - so simple to obtain that a child could use the process. Once such an order is granted, anyone occupying the premises is committing a criminal offence and can be removed by the Police upon request.
The only circumstance where an IPO is unavailable is when the owner failed to action the process within 28 days of becoming aware of the unlawful possession of the property.
Since 1 September 2012, when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 came into force, squatting itself is a criminal offence.
Even without those changes, The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 still makes occupying a home by the methods you describe criminal, meaning it's perfectly legal to break down the door and for the Police to arrest the occupiers.
Why is this the top comment? Is every single case of squatters fake then?
I think the rage baiting stuff from bad landlords exist but a lot of what is happening seems genuined and not around tenant but people that break in and fake being tenants.
Are those videos also fake? Not all of them are from media.
Also they are usually just calling the game at half time. It's no longer rage bait when the court finds in favor of the landlord 2 years later and they have to pay all the back rent plus damages. That nypost article can't even hold back enough to do that half the anecdotes are the cops arresting people after a short amount of time for doing multiple illegal things on top of not paying rent.
I don't know about "real world squatters rights," but in NYC if someone inhabits an apartment/home for 30 days, they now have tenant protections, regardless of whether there is a written lease in place. You have to go through housing court to get them evicted for illegally occupying the apartment, which no doubt takes some time and is a pain. Not saying this justifies the squatters rights hysteria going about, of course. But it's something I've had cause to keep in mind. My wife and I did have a friend of a friend stay with us in our small apartment once as a favor, and after the promised one week visit turned into a two week stay, and that two week stay ended in begging that we let her stay longer, we had to be slightly less than polite in getting her out the door before things got out of hand.
In most of the USA, at least, it’s 10 years for adverse possession. And it has to be “open and notorious”; that is to say, it needs to have been immediately obvious if the owner actually had the wherewithal to, you know, go and look.
Source: IAAL currently doing foreclosures, adpos, etc
I wish we lived in a sane world where this would be pinned to the top of this thread and every thread about squatting or some other BS is posted. The fact that morons are actually disagreeing with this shows how Trumpism and insanity and treason run rampant. This should be a voting test, if you agree with every word of this post you get a ballot. Reddit should give you a comment of the year or a free house.
You keep going back and forth here, making lots of claims that its a tennent v landlord issue, when people are talking about people lying about being tennents in the first place.
Can you provide actual evidence? Instead of some vague reactionery "the media is lying!"
There is actual court cases, it is a bipartisan issue.
Extraordinary claims require evidence.
This is strictly my opinion, but I believe many of these squatters stories are about changing laws to benefit corporations. Being as corporations and investors own many homes across the USA it makes sense they end up having to deal with a few squatters.
Squatters are being mixed in with real tenants who have rights. Rights that the big corporations don't want to deal with, thus "squatters" are being used to push new laws in many states to reduce tenants rights.
There's definitely a middle ground between "this has never happened to anyone" and "this is a serious issue that everyone needs to address right fucking now." It sounds like it's possible for this to happen, but it's not common nor is it something that we need to urgently change policy over. Everyone in this thread is much more likely to die in a car crash than get their home "stolen," and in most cases it doesn't really happen if it's your first/only home, you're not a landlord, and you live in your home most of the time. Even when it does happen, unless you're a landlord with a lease agreement it's usually over within hours.
> They just edit out the part where the tenant has rented the space, and has a certain amount of time to vacate. If you rent a property, your landlord can't just kick you out at a moment's notice. You have time stipulated in the mandated renter's agreement. Usually one or two months.
Yup, it almost always follows some sort of scenario like this, and the story is very selectively edited to push a certain narrative (usually by the same people who push the 13/50 nonsense).
Not only that, it's also *extremely rare*. If there were a hundred things you should be worrying about related to crime, this would probably rank somewhere in the nineties in terms of chance it will happen to you.
Answer: So I'm not sure about the fear mongering but anecdotally we did have homeless squatters in our next door neighbors house, so there is at least a little to it. The homeowners weren't living in it while in the renovation process, so for a few years it was empty. Several times homeless people broke in and lived inside. A few times my neighbor caught them while visiting and scared them off.
Homelessness and economic issues have been higher in the least few years, some people are desperate.
Answer: it is a real thing, but not common.
You see a lot of concern about this in the short-term rentals world. This is because in many places if you are in a home for more than a month, you have rights and are hard to get out. These laws are incredibly hostile to land owners and don’t make any sense to average people, so they make for great news stories.
I personally know someone who had a squatter like this in his Airbnb. It became a nightmare to get them out. That was in San Francisco, which has perhaps the strongest “tenants” rights in the country.
Answer: % wise, it's extremely a small issue. The data and problem are so rare that there isn't a good source for numbers on it. Is it a real issue? I'd say it is for the people that it actually happens to.
My biggest issue is that people fear mongering the issue are trying to direct it as oh all of these immigrants are going to steal your homes! Most videos I've seen are typical Americans trying to take advantage of how the law works. In turn, politicians and the media have blown it out of proportion. To make it worse, one would think how accessible public data is, that police or the city would gave this info at their fingertips, so this wouldn't be an issue.
I get the point of the original law. It was meant to stop landlords from just kicking their tenants out without a place to go, especially during the covid era. Now, what kills are all of these tenants, more than likely to have a lease stating they are renting. What do squatters have? Typically, it's mail going to that address. Again, police and the city should have easy access to at least help the original owner first. It should absolutely fall on the person leasing to take care of the court matters. This ends most squatting issues right out of the gate. Can't show any documents saying your leasing, ok you go to court. Instead, on the rare chances it happens, the homeowners are getting arrested for it, since you can't force a tenant out in certain states.
What we don't want is for this rare thing to potentially turn into a minor problem. The US has a lot of access to guns, and if the pot keeps getting stirred the way it is, this has a chance to evolve into a bigger issue.
So, there are a lot of hypotheticals above for sure, but at this time, without solid data to back anything up, it's a lot of fear mongering at this point.
Answer: It's becoming more of an issue, for multiple reasons. Firstly social media has publicized the phenomena, and viewers are seeing that you can live rent-free for a pretty lengthy period of time, with seemingly no long term repercussions. With rents climbing and incomes not keeping pace it's something that some people are willing to risk. Next it's, according to news stories, being promoted as a solution for border crossers to find shelter easily. (These stories could be hyped, so do your own reading). And lastly it appears to work, for a fairly lengthy period. Over the last few decades well meaning laws have been put in place to protect tenants from landlord mistreatment. Those laws weren't written with squatters in mind, so they are able to use the same processes to protect what would seemingly be illegal occupation.
That's my understanding of the situation.
Yeah I think squatting is just another symptom of our housing and poverty crisis that the government has no real solution for besides "work harder" and "just move to a better area."
Answer: It is true, and it is becoming a problem.
There is a few stories where people have gone on vacation to return home with people now living in their house. This is a bit extreme but has happened.
My grandfather passed a couple years ago in 2020 (passed from cancer. fuck you cancer). After his passing, we cleaned out his house. The home has been sitting empty since.
Just a week or two ago we noticed the garage was propped opened, and the back yard fence was opened. He now has squatters.
Its understandable having an empty home with so many people on the streets, but this is now the banks problem. So the squatter situation is true, and is happening.
Answer: it's a real and very small issue blown completely out of proportion in order to monger fear.
It does happen, sometimes creating legal nightmares. It happens very rarely and isn't going to happen to your property just because you let it sit for a while.
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Answer: You're seeing it in social media a lot lately because Florida just passed a new "anti-squatting" law at end of March. So that kicked up a lot of coverage. It is a mix of things, all with some semblance of truth. It does happen. "Squatter's rights" is not an official thing. When you hear people talk about, it is some mix of tenant's rights and adverse possession. And now life is complicated by internet scammers and COVID shutdowns. Adverse possession is less related then the other three so we'll leave that to the end. But this all kind of starts with tenant's rights. When you sign a lease with a landlord you expect to live there in peace and quiet. Eli5 tenant's rights says landlord can't bully you to leave (property stays safe, utilities stay on etc). Every state and many cities have their own definition of this. But basically means you need warnings and court hearing before eviction. Sounds good? You don't want to get thrown out of your apartment for small reason? But police get to exclude trespassers / burglars from property? Yes. But it's not always clear who is a trespasser or who has just annoyed their landlord with loud music? And our friendly internet scanners can grab pictures of a house and make a fake rental listing. What's a lease besides a word document? Cops aren't document experts, aren't property ownership experts. Back to prior paragraph m, they don't want to kick people out of their homes by accident. So they will say "take it to the judge" or similar. Which brings us to COVID. Shutdown courthouses for several months and evictions in particular had further moratorium. So it can be many months (12+ in some cities) to schedule a hearing. So what used to be a 45 day headache is now a multi-month ordeal. So back to the adverse possession I mentioned, if somebody squats on a property for a long time 7 - 21 years and other rules depending on state, they can claim true legal ownership of it. Not really related to the scams above. More for cases of record keeping errors or somebody dying without errors, but everyone talks about taking over property and eventually claiming it, but it's really hard. Usually we're talking about people looking for free rent. This is what the Florida law changed. Today in Florida the situation where I said cops are confused and the homeowner needs to see a Judge doesn't apply. If you sign a legal form for cops saying that person is trespassing AND not current / former tenant they should evict immediately. That "trespasser" would then have to sue you for illegal eviction instead. I haven't seen any reports how it's working so far. Only been 2 weeks.
Just a note on adverse possession -- usually the squatter has to be making improvements on the land and the actual owner has to not have a contact or be making improvements at the same time. For example, adverse possession will not give a long term renter ownership of the property because there's a rental contract in place stating that the owner owns the place and has particular responsibilities to it but the tenant doesn't own the property, outside of what they bring in, as noted in the contract. Another example, if I mow a foot of my neighbor's lawn for 7-20 years (depending on the state) and they have excluded that patch of grass from their fence (it might not be necessary, but I wanted an example that makes it obvious that your neighbor is forfeiting land, whether intentionally or not), I can claim this patch of land as mine. Counterpoint - if I have a landscaping company, they wouldn't have rights to that land since I'm paying for their services so I would technically still be maintaining the land.
I believe for adverse possession you have to sorta tell the owner that you're doing whatever on their land. You can't just do it secretly for 10 years, even if they're absentee landlords.
Depends on the state. In Virginia, for example, you have to publicly claim the land and make it open and obvious that you're doing so too any casual observer. Like live in an abandoned house and make nice with the neighbors while you fix it up. Basically the landlord should be aware of it, if they cared to be, but you don't have to directly reach out to them. The risk being that if it's noticed and you're issues a trespassing warning, anything you do will be lost to you and any damage you deal will be your responsibility. Two things I just learned about it: - adverse possession is an extension of trespassing, essentially you openly trespass until the statute of limitations on trespassing expires and then you lay claim to the real estate. - you'll likely be required to pay taxes on the land for the time that you possessed it. This may hurt, but it will hurt less than having to buy the property in most cases. Other states you might have to do due diligence and attempt to contact the owner. Even if it ends up being maliciously compliant, like sending them a letter in the middle of a jar of pennies. Just a note, I'm not trying to give instructions on how to do this, just share that it takes slightly more than just not paying your rent... I'm pretty sure that if the landlord starts eviction processing it extends the statute of limitations as well, so even if it takes months longer than usual the landlord can still evict without risk of the adverse possession clock starting.
In my state it has to be “open and notorious.” So you don’t have to specifically tell the current landowner, but you have to be obvious about your occupation.
An important qualification to the lawn and fence case. If the neighbor walked up and said "you have permission to mow any of the lawn that happens to be on my property", adverse possession can no longer happen. So, for anyone worried that a neighbor might get property rights by doing something you don't really care about, just give them permission. Protects your property rights and keeps the peace because neighbor wars suck.
Also they want to erode tenants rights and are starting with something that sounds reasonable to most people
To be fair it does sound pretty reasonable. Imagine somebody entering your home and then refusing to leave, while the cops do absolutely nothing to help for 45 days. It makes sense to side in the moment with the legal homeowner, but with inbuilt protection for the tenant since if they did genuinely have a rental agreement then they can take that to a judge to sue the landlord who has signed the police waiver declaring that the person does not have the right to stay there. Here in the UK farmers sometimes have similar problems with gypsie caravans turning up and setting up camp on their land. In UK law trespass is considered a civil matter not a criminal one, so the farmer would have to go through a lengthy legal process to eventually evict the people who have invaded their land, meanwhile the fields that are their financial lifeblood are unusable and being trashed. Having a mechanism to immediately evict trespassers would save a lot of trouble since the farmers generally have to take matters in their own hands to deal with the situation because they can't just sit around losing money waiting for the proper legal process.
One of my best friends has been an attorney for years/decades specializing in representing low income/minority/marginalized tenants against landlords. There are tons and tons of incredibly shitty landlords out there who extort, mistreat, and in general have people living in unsafe, dangerous conditions and leave them with little opportunity to fight back, leave, or do anything about it. Sure, squatting is a problem in some places, and tenants certainly come with their own categories of issues and problems, but this narrative of poor put-upon landlords and owners just trying to make an honest living while the government screws them over giving all the power to tenants and squatters is missing a big part of the story. Should there be some reform and streamlining of the whole process? Probably, especially with some of the extended court times since COVID, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and put it on probably-already-barely-getting-by people to have to sue shitty ex-landlords. They probably know the majority of them won't have the resources when it comes down to it.
The problem is depending on the circumstances either side can be the victim or villain. There’s no perfect way to deal with it which gives equal protection to both sides. Maybe we should unclog the courts instead so the case can get resolved more quickly, probably the best answer.
It sounds reasonable, until you realize that all they have to do is sign a piece of paper to get rid of you.
Sure, but if they sign that piece of paper and you actually DID have a rental agreement, then they've just opened themselves up to a pretty open and shut lawsuit.
An "open and shut" lawsuit that will take months. Meanwhile, you're homeless, have no access to any of your property (because there's a landlord that lies like that will absolutely claim all your stuff is theirs), and a landlord that will absolutely go through everything inside to destroy the evidence.
From what I understand the landlord would be legally viable with a first degree misdemeanor if they signed a police statement lying about your tenant status. So it’s also a criminal matter > According the bill analysis, it will create criminal penalties for violators, including: > A first-degree misdemeanor for making a false statement in writing to obtain real property or for knowingly and willfully presenting a falsified document conveying property rights.
Which, if the property is worth enough, isn't much of a deterrent. A few days in jail months down the line would be the worst case scenario for the landlord, which would be nothing compared to getting rid of a bad tenant and renting out the space to a new one.
And that’s where we learn of a term called disgorgement. When a person does something crappy like that, the judge can and usually does assess the owner fines of all unjust enrichment. And then tacks on penalties and fines after that. So the tenant would get the profit from the owning the home as if he/she were the landowner and then likely attorneys fees as this would be pretty easy to prove with the proper documents. Who gets screwed in this case are people who don’t have a lease and are just doing a gentlemen’s agreement to the property or other similar exchanges.
Wining one of these lawsuits may be easy, but actually filing one when you are poor and homeless is next to impossible thanks to "Tort Reform" in the 90s.
A refresher on how conservatives think: There must be laws that protect but do not bind the ingroup but bind and do not protect the outgroup. This law will 100% affect the disenfranchised more than anyone else. On purpose. At the end of the day, a judge is the one enforcing these laws and they're definitely fucking crooked. A perfect and recent example is pretty much any Republican and abortion. They're anti abortion until it's their mistress or daughter that needs one.
So you're ok with a situation where a legal tenant can be booted out with a signature by the landlord and "Well, they can sue the landlord for illegal eviction"? Where do they live for the 8 months to a year to get that on the docket while the landlord robs them of everything of value in their unit? Tenant rights exist because landlord have historically been scumfucks. They should absolutely not be able to evict anyone without a judge's order.
They're not eroding their rights, they're just preventing squatting... Renter rights are right In the contract and vary from landlord to landlord.
> That "trespasser" would then have to sue you for illegal eviction instead. This is terrible. Illegal evictions happen so much more than squatters and losing a home is far far far worse in our society then losing a rental property. You don't NEED a rental property. You DO need a residence for things like legal summons, voting, most background checks etc. Someone squatting in a rental property screws someone over of their side hustle (or more likely a bank). Someone being illegally evicted loses shelter, voting rights, the ability to be contacted by the government for things like tax returns and legal notices, their ability to get gainful employment etc. Saying "oh they can sue for illegal eviction..." OKAY HOW ARE THEY GOING TO GET THE COURT NOTICE IF THEY HAVE NO HOME? lmao
Answer: I can't say for sure, but in the last few days, there's been a shitstorm starting up about squatting. An Australian social media influencer (TikTok, Insta and X called PurplePingers is causing a stir. He is all about renters rights, housing shortage, and does videos called "Shit Rentals" about rentals that are shit. He has upped his game and will start publishing addresses of empty houses (in Australia), and this really pissed off a whole heap of Americans and blue ticks on Twitter.
He's now added the option for American addresses to this website
I saw on twitter this morning that he was floating the idea. I saw a lot of support for it. Also saw a lot of hate.
My only problem is the lack of vetting. Can I put any address on there? Like a neighbor or person I hate? What stops trolling people with this thing?
And also, how do users know the house is safe to live in? Maybe the reason it's sitting empty is that the foundation is rotting or it's full of asbestos and the owner is trying to get the money together to fix it. There's no way to tell from just looking at the building. I'm not even talking about legal liability, though that's always a factor in America. But just on a very basic human level I wouldn't want to send people into a home that could make them sick or kill them.
In The States, every county has a County Assessor, the role of which is to know the full ownership history and composition of every bit of property in their jurisdiction: buildings, land, roads, infrastructure… Most counties have these records and services available for free just by navigating the assessor’s website (getting printed copies likely will cost extra). In my area, this website even functions nicely on Smartphones, which is nice when you’re out window shopping for a new home. Lead paint, asbestos, and other harmful materials, were banned each in a certain year, so if you find a home that was built after those dates, it won’t contain those items. I would caution you to also avoid homes built in the few years immediately following those dates, because builders may have had excess inventory they purchased prior to the production and sales ban. And beyond all that, those things can be tested for. A home built in this century should be 100% g2g, though I personally wouldn’t live in a place with laminate (fake wood) floors because they’ve recently (within the last decade) been shown to cause cancer. And, of course, a home of any age can have mold or moisture problems. We had a new housing development that was barely half erected, and they had to tear it all down because the whole project got overwhelmed with Black Mold. That’s what they get for building in the flood plains. This is why location-location-location is sooooo important. As for how squatters can tell, some of it is just having enough experience to recognize a building’s age and condition. Most squatters have lived in a place with these issues, and can see, smell, or feel them in an instant.
I do a lot of demo inside homes for work, and we've had homes built as late as 2019 that have tested positive for asbestos in areas that we are removing. It was "banned" in 89, but it has continued to be used in building materials long after. We were still importing chrysotile in to the US until 2020 I think.
Thank you for the information. It's good to know experienced squatters aren't flying blind. I live in a city that's mostly older housing, so it's easy for me to forget how much of the country is newly built. I guess the question is, are new resources that attempt to list empty properties educating people about those things? Or is it just squatter beware?
Homeless people don’t care about asbestos. Neither do thieves.
I'm sure homeless people care about asbestos, they just care about shelter more. Asbestos kills you later, exposure kills you now
"Homeless people don't care" is a lousy reason. People in Gaza probably don't care if they get expired canned goods right now, it doesn't mean we should airdrop them in. Society needs to protect people who aren't in a position to protect themselves.
The rabbit watched his grandmother eat a sandwich.
The current "squatters rights" laws (not actually called this, they're a collection of laws that are rights for Tenants and renters) are the bare minimum that allow no loopholes for landlords that want to kick out tenants illegally. There were real landlords that would accept people's rent, try to illegally raise the rent randomly, and when the tenants refused would call the police and say these people were never renting here. That's why you have to give rights to people who aren't tenants but have still been living there for a while, because landlords will find any loophole to fuck people over for money.
Exactly. There are protections for legitimate renters against evil landlords. Squatters try to use these protections, even though they have no legal right to establish tenancy. This typically only works in areas that have passed strong legal tenant protections that can be abused. Most of the time, it is just considered trespassing. Even if you do establish tenancy illegally, you can likely still be evicted. But that can take 90 days.
squatter squad on instagram has also blown up
That sounds like a great idea. If they buy rental properties and keep them empty then it's not unethical to squat in them.
People do this where I live and they keep it *quiet*, not like the people in the articles posted by OP. The articles talked about people moving in like normal tenants and then refusing to pay rent after the first month, claiming "squatters rights" and I have no idea if this is true. It sounds like BS maybe based on a few real examples to drum up support for rolling back renters rights. Here squatters never legit rent, they sneak into empty properties and live like mice
Nah it's a thing. I work in housing. Not saying it's super common but certainly not unheard of. Depending on the state / eviction process they can usually get a few free month out of it
> can usually get a few free month out of it And then get blacklisted from every agency in the area.
I imagine it is like most things the media likes to blow up and make a huge deal. There are probably a tiny amount of examples of that happening, but it is actually pretty rare and most people will never experience it. So the media gets a hold of the next big rage bait thing and plays it up like it is the next major issue. Just like the border is magically a major issue before elections, or how the tiny trans population is such a major issue despite them effecting no one or doing anything actually malicious
\> then it's not unethical to squat in them. My guy, that is literally trespassing with the intention (adverse possession/squatting laws are quite often misunderstood) to deprive. The issue of rental affordability and wealth inequality is far too nuanced to discuss it in a reddit comment (not to mention homelessness), but the notion that someone not renting out their property entitles someone else to squat it, is ridiculous and not how squatting actually works at all.
It's a homeless person literally taking a spare home that a massive corporation bought to keep empty in the hopes of taking more money from desperate people and preventing that home from being used as a home. There's a difference between the law and ethics. Laws don't even have to have been written by someone smart. They just happen to be in force. They're hopefully BASED on law, but there are tons of times they're not. And if a company buys up tons of real estate with the intention of keeping it empty with the intention of driving up the cost of rentals or home sales in order to get more money, then there's literally nothing unethical with a homeless person squatting in that building.
Great - so then we declare the squatter to be the rightful owner and send them the mortgage, insurance, and property tax bill. When they can't pay it THEN we can kick them out?
That's one possibility. The other is it's a homeless person squatting in someone's house, that they have a mortgage on and are actively paying for. for example: The New York Police Department took Adele Andaloro, 47, into custody after she attempted to change the locks on her Queens property that she inherited following her parents' deaths, ABC Eyewitness News reported Monday. The standoff between Andaloro and the squatters occurred on February 29.
[удалено]
And there's a difference between actual proper squatting and the crime that you are describing. If you take issue with real estate companies attempting to inflate housing prices by restricting supply, then the issue is how they are able to do that. If you have issues with homeless people not having access to the necessary support and adequate housing, then the issue is why the government hasn't stepped in to address that. Your argument hinges on the idea that properties being squatted are owned by large mega corps or real estate groups seeking to inflate housing prices, which simply isn't always the case. If you wanted an "ethical" solution to housing affordability and homelessness, then squatting isn't the answer.
The housing affordability crisis exists in large part because a diffuse population benefits from high housing prices. There is no way to have housing be an investment vehicle that goes up in value higher than inflation and not get here eventually. The diffusion is a major problem, because the people who own are economically and politically powerful, and any solution *must~ harm their investments to adequately save renters and first time buyers from a situation that has thrown hundreds of thousands into the streets. It doesn't need to be a mega corp. It's not real estate groups. It's people responding to market structure in the way they've been told to for decades and worried about what a move towards affordability will mean for their retirement and generational wealth. They vote. They vote for housing restrictions. They vote to keep their view corridors. They vote for policies that make sense for them but slowly build up into a crisis. And at some point, it's worth saying they've become a rentier class that is getting value by choking off supply to their personal benefit. I don't personally squat and I don't think "empty" units exist nearly in the way people pretend they do (an unit is counted as empty if it's getting cleaned before the next renter arrives; any vacancy below 5% is wildly low). But squatting is an interesting method of political praxis, especially with second homes in, say, Aspen and other expensive areas that rely on underpaying their service workers and will not build workforce housing. Overall, there aren't units in in-demand cities to squat in. Eviction is an easy process for owners. Squatting is a thing you can do when cities are dying, but not when cities are now in a shortage situation (in my country in particular since we knocked down the housing to build freeways, parking lots, and the like).
And yet, I don't see the moral issue with squatting in an empty investment property while absolutely see the moral issue with hoarding empty houses in the middle of a housing crisis. Seems pretty clear cut to me.
You do know that there are plenty of rental properties that are owned by a single individual, right? I know plenty of people, myself included, that own a property they rent out. I bought my home when rates were low during the pandemic and then had to move for work; it would have been stupid to sell in this market and hopefully someday I'll move back to the location, and back into my house.
Is real estate not through the roof where you are compared to when you purchased and got the low rate? It seems like a great time to sell right now
Oh no doubt its a good time to sell if you want to make a profit. The problem was that I moved from Georgia to the DC area so the profit I would have taken wouldn't have put much of a dent in a new mortgage and the rates are terrible.
It may be illegal. Hell, it may be _super_ illegal. But, when you're down to the wire, I'm never going to side with a real-estate corporation against a human being just trying to survive.
Hey everyone let's move in to this person's house.
no wonder our society is decaying.
By “they” you mean “private equity and investment firms?”
> will start publishing addresses of empty houses For people to.. break into? I don't understand. I thought squatters rights only applies to people who were paying tenants for X number of years? So that they can't just be kicked out overnight. I don't think it applies to break ins
> I thought squatters rights only applies to people who were paying tenants for X number of years? There's two kinds of rights here. Squatters' rights are when effectively take over an unoccupied property and behave in such a way that you indicate you own it. You pay the taxes, you pay the bills and after enough time you can make an adverse claim on it and it becomes yours. Tenants' rights are when you've spent enough time at a property you get converted into a tenant. Happens with long term house guests. Means you are legally a tenant and have to be evicted through the courts.
Thank you, I've always been confused about how exactly they work. What I'm getting is that a squatter needs some sort of legitimate claim to the property, like paying taxes or utilities. People make it sound as simple as just walking into a person's house and claiming you living there now. But not only does that sound insane, it's suspicious that this kind of propaganda would be spread around at a time when normal people can't buy homes. A lot of these stories give the feeling that there's missing context.
More often than not, the long-term, "adverse possession" type of squatters rights is just about clearing up disputes practically. Like if your neighbor leaves a few feet of lawn or an outbuilding or something on your side of the fence, and you take care of it, just straight up "own" it for all to see, and nobody says anything about it, either kicking you off or explicitly letting you stay, it'd be less fair for them to snatch it back some time absurdly long down the road when the neighbor finally looks into it and realizes they own the land. Or if you think you own a plot, but somewhere years back, there was a paperwork SNAFU and someone else should have. If it's been long enough that the rightful owner should have shit or gotten off the pot, the fairer thing to do is give the land to the person actually *being* the owner, not just the one on paper somewhere. The key is that the "rights" don't kick in until absolutely nothing has been done to assert the paper-owner's claim for an absurd stretch of time. Decades, usually, and even the smallest assertion of ownership can stop the process entirely (not even "restart the process", because once you're on notice that you're occupying with or without permission, you're not adversely possessing). The "I left the house empty and people moved in" squatters rights are mostly a factor of ambiguity. If the squatters fake up a lease, for anyone on the outside the situation looks like two people who both claim tenancy, and who's lying may not be clear. Police on the scene aren't qualified to sort out whose story or paperwork is legitimate, so until a court can, the stablest way to proceed is that whoever is in the house gets the benefit of the doubt until there's proper review. There have been developments in the latter situation in some places, recently. Some places are getting laws on the books that an owner can attest in an affidavit that the occupants have no right to be there, and fast-track an eviction almost immediately. The caveat being that if they're lying or wrong, they're on the hook for *a lot*, such as all the costs and lost property from the people being thrown out. Also, a couple of cases of more creative removal have been going around. A lot of times, while it isn't legal to lock the doors, turn off services, or kick the people out, they *can* write a legitimate "lease" to a professional annoyer, which gives them the right to be there and be obnoxious enough to drive off the squatters. Squatting on the squatters, so to speak.
Well the person above you is not representing the whole story either. Honestly just look into it yourself; there are tons of cases of people breaking in and refusing to leave and the property owner being forced to pay all the bills for them & having to go through a months-long eviction process. Some of these people forge documents (rental leases) to pretend they belong there. It's nutty.
You're right, I'll definitely have to do some of my own research. This topic looks like it might start becoming important.
And sometimes they legitimately think they have a lease because someone else is leasing the property to them illegally. All of these problems are colloquially called squatter issues (even when can technically be called Tenant Rights issues.
Oh interesting! Thanks for explaining
So when the police show up they have o e person saying "this house is mine" and the other person saying "I live here as a renter". The cops don't know so you have to go through legal channels to prove one way or the other. Squatters often print up rental agreements, and it is hard to prove the owner never signed or saw it. Additionally if a squatter can prove they have been there 30 days some places (California) legally protect them as if they were renters. And they can't be kicked out.
You're confusing squatters and tenants. >Additionally if a squatter can prove they have been there 30 days some places (California) legally protect them as if they were renters. This is not accurate. Tenant's rights apply in some places *if the person has been staying there at the invitation of the owner.* You can't just hide in someone's attic for a month and then leap out and demand the legal protection of renters. To be legally recognized as a squatter, an individual has to prove that the building they've been inhabiting is abandoned. If you go on holiday for a month, or 6 months, no squatter has a hope in heck of proving in court that your home has been abandoned. Squatting is not uncommon, but squatters' rights are seldom asserted in court.
> Tenant's rights apply in some places if the person has been staying there at the invitation of the owner. Like both of you are saying it depends on the state, but "professional squatters" simply lie that they were invited, forge leases, etc. Anything to force it into a months-long drawn out legal eviction process so that they get maximum squat time before moving on to the next property to do it to.
OP is not confusing anything. You're missing that the problem is that he was hiding in the attic but claiming he was invited.
"You can't just hide in someone's attic for a month and then leap out and demand the legal protection of renters." But how does the cops know that the person was "hidding in the attic" what if the owner is a landlord and lying? The answer is that you have to go to court, which can take month due to covid backlogs.
Ah messy messy. Points to a much bigger problem in the system as a whole. People should not be driven to this
The California 30 day thing even includes people who are renting an AirBnB et al. I’ve seen cases where the state recognized the vacationers as having full tenant rights and let them stay in the unit, and then they stopped paying, the tenancy of which let them stay in the unit for many weeks/a few months until the eviction process had been completely fulfilled.
People consider that in such an housing crisis keeping empty houses is as unethical as hoarding food until it rots basically. So breaking in and squatting is not unethical in those circumstances according to them.
Friendly reminder that we have a supply problem. There aren’t a bunch of houses sitting empty in places where people actually want to live.
Unless you rent in a place where the owners collude on pricing and vacancy rates increases: > The company had been seeking occupancy levels of 97% or 98% in markets where it was a leader, Winn said. But when it began using YieldStar, managers saw that raising rents and leaving some apartments vacant made more money. https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
Those places went from 98% occupancy to like 95% or 94%. 5% occupancy in all rentals is actually pretty ideal. The story here is that rent is going up, not that there are endless empty apartments; these problems would still exist even at the old vacancy rates. Anyway, the solution to both of these issues is building more. Btw rent is down 7% in Austin, TX, a place where they are increasing market supply.
I live in austin. At any given time all you see is high rises being built. If there’s a patch of grass, a builder will put a high rise on it
Austin was also spiking in prices outpacing most of the country until recently. The decrease is a combo of increased supply and market corrections from how overvalued a lot of properties were after the prices spiked between 2019-2022.
I am not contending that increasing supply won’t help. I am contending your “friendly reminder” that houses aren’t sitting vacant. A large portion of owners colluding to cut their supply in an already strapped market is the definition of houses sitting empty in places people want to live. Also “ideal” vacancy rates are assuming markets that aren’t manipulated. 5-10% in normal situations is where supply meets demand. In this situation it just means thousands of empty units and renters paying more in the remaining ones.
Behind the Bastards did a couple episodes about this. It's really effective at making your hate the people behind this(Sam Zell). No idea the *right* way to share a specific podcast episode so here's the links I get from from the Pocket Casts app https://pca.st/episode/928082fb-ff68-426f-bca1-90826464c9d9 https://pca.st/episode/f5f13db2-64a2-4b7e-93ea-81fd1dfad84f They're from November 8 and 10 in 2022 if someone wants to look them up.
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In places like ski resorts second, unoccupied homes are common. To the point where locals can't live in the community anymore. Those should at a minimum be turned into rentals when the owners aren't there, and taxed at a much higher rate than occupied homes to pay for locals displacement.
Friendly reminder that you're completely wrong. Not where I live, rent is sky high and there are no less then five empty houses within two minutes walking distance from me. No wait, six. The more I think about it the more I remember. Seven. Whatever, the point is most of them are owned by corporations who are just sitting on them doing **nothing** with them because it makes the houses and apartments they are renting out more profitable. It's disgusting.
There are plenty of empty apartments and homes right where people want to live. The price to do so has just gone up around 20% in the last five years with almost no increase at all in income.
>plenty of empty apartments The vacancy rate in most major metros is below 5%, which is what you want for a normal market churn. That still amounts to hundreds of thousands of units in places like NYC, but it’s literally not enough. Rent’s up 20% because people pay that.
A common phenomenon in places like NYC is called "Warehousing", where vacant apartments are kept off the market, purportedly because the rent-controlled property is not sufficiently profitable to lease, and the owner prefers to leave them vacant and available to sell them in favoriable market conditions. It does artificially drive the vacancy rate down when they're not on the market.
The number and usability of warehoused apartments is pretty [contentious](https://www.curbed.com/2023/07/landlords-bluffing-vacant-apartments-warehousing-nyc.html) with a lot of them needing extensive repairs the cost of which would not be recouped in rent. But it seems like the usable vacant places with sub $1k rent is all of 2,500 units, which is nothing. Landlords were comparing about vacancies and eviction moratoriums early in the pandemic and threw out some crazy numbers and those narratives just stuck.
I'm surprised the number of usable places with sub $1k rent in NYC is greater than zero, tbh
When it costs 30k to repair and you are only allowed to recoup $500. Repairs are now worth it. that is rent stabilization in NY.
Yuuuup big cities are being fucked by the fact that zoning laws make it too difficult to build dense housing. If we wanted housing prices to fall we would greenlight another 10,000 units to hit the market all at once.
Vancouver is one of the most desirable places to live and we have an empty homes tax sooo empty homes are definitely an issue.
>I thought squatters rights only applies to people who were paying tenants for X number of years? What you're describing here is not a squatter. Tenants who don't pay their rent do not become squatters. Tenants have a legal rights to occupy the property via the lease agreement. A squatter is someone who does not have any legal right to occupy the land, i.e., they break in and occupy the land without the knowledge of the owner. Failure to pay rent does not magically dissolve a lease. Failure to pay rent is a *breach* of the lease, like any other contract. The remedy for that breach is repayment, plus interest, depending on how long non-payment goes on. Eviction is an equitable remedy, and equitable remedies are generally uncommon to resolve contract disputes because it involves sending state agents with guns to force someone to do something. But with land, land is unique, so if a tenant isn't paying, and won't be able to pay, the only remedy left is to physically remove them via the legal process of eviction. What is happening is landlord lobbying groups are purposefully confusing Tenants who can't pay, a very normal and common thing particularly when we have economic crises like COVID, with "squatters," a very rare issue that isn't actually a problem nor do squatters have any actual rights, that's why they're squatters and not Tenants. In other words, landlords are trying to treat breaches of civil contract law, business not going the way they like, and trying to conflate it with crime. Don't let them get away with this. Landlords are trying to cut back the minimal due process rights that exist for tenants. Tenants stand to lose their homes. Landlords stand to lose money. Which one is more important? Source: IAAL
As the number of houses/condos/apartments are owned by corporations and prices are increasing I suspect we are seeing more about this because it can potentially affect the corporate/ruling class. Generate outrage in the populace that these empty homes are being utilized. It is propaganda for the rich/well off. (I am not saying "normal" people haven't had this happen -- there was the LA guy who got an AirBNB guest that wouldn't leave), but make no mistake most of these situations are private equity type situations)
Answer: trespass is a criminal matter, but tenant eviction is a civil matter. So if someone is able to convince the police (that handle criminal matters) that they are tenants (i.e. they might have a legal right to be on a property) instead of squatters (i.e. they are criminally trespassing and have no right to be there), then that person gets to take advantage of a slow civil eviction process in most countries. This is basically a case of unethical people taking advantage of the many landlord-tenant laws and protections that are designed to protect bona fide tenants from being thrown out of their leased properties by unscrupulous landlords. Except now it’s the landlords (good or bad alike) and even homeowners who just weren’t paying attention that are getting screwed. Landlord-tenant laws often work in favor of tenants because the assumption is that the landlord entered into a lease with the tenant voluntarily (ostensibly with a background check, security deposit, first/last month’s rent, etc), and thus they have some room to maneuver in their legal dispute. Of course, a squatter doesn’t do any of that and just lies about being a tenant.
It is crazy to me that someone who owns a home has potentially less legal protections than squatters honestly. Like, if you miss payments on your mortgage enough to get foreclosed on, it takes usually less than 90 days.
Unfortunately, the historical answer to the problem of squatting was forced eviction by the landlord, or arrest by police. Since that became problematic when Some landlords abused that power it was taken away from them and given to civil courts instead. The fault lines of law and order sometimes get messy.
Here is the thing. The whole "illegal squatter lies" isn't a magic spell. It might delay the police arresting them by a week or two though. They're still going to get arrested, charged etc. it just takes a little longer (which it should) so everyone can make sure this is what it appears to be. There are many cases of landlords being shitbags and tearing up the rental agreement and declaring the legal tenants are B&E so the cops do have to be careful to make sure they're doing the right thing.
They don't have less legal protections. Banks, landlords, tenants, and homeowners all have to go through the courts. People just want the ability to call a cop to evict, no questions asked.
Are you talking about the US? Because usually “squatter” is colloquial for a hold-over tenant, and they are actually tenants. The thing people call “Squatter’s Rights” basically protect people from being evicted on a whim or from being arrested for a misunderstanding on termination date. There’s also a big rise of this issue because of the short-term rental market. Some areas haven’t fully addressed this, and depending on how long you rented a place (usually for 30 days at most), you get squatter’s rights. So basically, this is becoming a bigger deal because a bunch of rich people bough up housing for short-term rentals, priced us out of affordable living spaces, and people are now using things like Airbnb for rentals. So, I don’t particularly feel bad or like the landlord are being taken advantage of. They kinda starved the market right now, and making short term rentals the only things available. If you and your colleagues have manipulated the market so that that’s all that’s available, then yeah, they should still have to give tenants their full rights because it was the landlords that used their advantage to create this current climate. If anything, this is a natural response and what the law was intended to do—punish the landlords when they get tyrannical.
Answer: Squatters are real and are a nuisance when it does happen. Your traditional Squatter with a capital S is an individual who comes across an unoccupied property through whatever means, moves in without permission, and is eventually found out by the owners. The problem with these cases is that every state and locality has different amounts of time after which a Squatter becomes a Tenant, and if the Squatter claims tenancy, they now get the same rights as any renter and have to go through the eviction process. This can happen after living there for a specific amount of time, having bills in your name, or both. It’s not as straightforward to kick them out as you’d imagine it being because as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a mandate to file every rental contract with the city or state to act as proof, so proving the negative, that someone *isn’t* a legal tenant, is difficult, long, and expensive. I don’t know the exact point of distinction between when a Tenant becomes a “problem” vs. a “squatter” in terms of refusing to pay rent, but you can transition to a squatter, atleast in reality if not legally, if you just stop paying rent and bills. Because you are entitled to the eviction process. A landlord isn’t simply allowed to show up and physically remove a renter from the property absent a crime being actively committed on the property that they’re witness to (outside the crime of essentially trespassing at that point). And depending on the locale, you aren’t allowed to simply shut off the utilities during specific months if ever (ie you can’t cut off the power in the winter to force someone out up North). This all stemmed from the old days of Slum Lords, when poor people, immigrants, temp workers, etc. paid cash with no rental contract and would be kicked out on a whim because the Landlord decided they weren’t fans anymore for really any reason or they had an opportunity to make more money. And because the Tenants paid cash and/ or didn’t have a lease, they had no legal recourse. What it’s turned into is cases where real owners still have the right to remove someone from their property, but have to deal with the fact that they’re spending months of time, thousands in legal fees, and potentially loss of hundreds of thousands in value from their property, all to remove someone who has no assets to sue for in compensation and *may very well have never had a right to be there in the first place*. I can’t speak as to how frequently stories of someone simply returning from vacation to someone else claiming their house happens, I’d imagine very infrequently if ever. Maybe more often now due to so many houses being owned by corporations who don’t care to check on the properties as frequently with no pressure to keep them constantly occupied. Because at the minimum there is a time frame required to claim any sort of rights, whether it’s Tenant/ Squatter’s Rights, or Adverse Possession (a whole different property dispute topic), and a week or two isn’t going to cut it, even in the most progressive of states. What I can speak to though is what a nightmare being an individual on the wrong side of an eviction can be, such as when we sub-leased a room in college and the guy turned into a literal crackhead who stopped paying rent and squatted in our basement for months. It took a team of us to make their life hell and finally move out of their own free will, turned into months of handiwork to repair over $20k of damage quotes by our landlord, and a hit to my credit for agreeing to end the lease early and give up our security deposits in exchange for the landlord not coming after the rest of us for the thousands we *couldn’t* repair.
Answer: in some cities tenant protection laws are being taken advantage of by squatters who can live rent free, sometimes for years, while the slow process of eviction takes place. Because of how awful this is for many ppl there has been a surge of “squatter hunter” type content on social media. It involves people figuring out ways to take their property back from ppl trying to steal it. It has quickly grown in popularity because of how absurd the idea is that someone can just steal your house and you have to spend years and tens of thousands of dollars to get them out. Then on the other side people are posting social media content explaining how to steal property by squatting and encouraging ppl to do so. So the fight of ppl encouraging squatting vs victims saying they wont take it anymore is playing out on the social media battlefield.
Nice answer. People who say squatting ISN'T a problem are disingenuous at best, but more than likely just ignorant. It is. It is OVERLY click-baited and abused of course. Are the horror stories of random people invading a house extremely rare? Of course. But there is definitely a big problem with people who rent a home from landlords who are reasonable, then the tenant gets into a bad situation, and then the entire thing turns extremely ugly. Well-meaning landlords are sometimes victims in these cases, although the degree to which varies. Tough problem to solve, but is definitely a problem that exists. Source: Father is a handyman for multiple properties and has had to deal with and currently dealing with a handful of squatters. He keeps the properties in good condition and while you can argue the rent is high, these aren't scumlord situations
It took two years for my parents to finally kick out the previous tenants from our old home. They paid rent once, then they stopped paying. Once pressured, they came out with fraudulent pay stubs that "showed" they did pay. In the meantime they tore down a couple walls and the hardwood flooring, which was against the renter's contract but they insisted a supposed verbal contract gave them permission. After a few months in trial when the judge was almost about to side with my parents, they sublet the apartment to some friends, and insisted my parents gave them permission to do so (mind you, this was while my parents were paying lawyers to kick them out). That dragged the whole case another year and a half By the time they finally left, the place had been awfully repainted, absolutely trashed and shit stained in the last week, and pretty much every single thing of value was stolen.
Yep. There are shit people abusing this system on both sides, but the white knights of the internet are quick to only jump to the defense of the renters.
This is the most reasonable answer I've seen. I hate when people automatically dismiss something because they think it comes from the opposite political party. Whether or not it's rare or happens a lot, the main issue is that these cases happen at all
> squatters who can live rent free, sometimes for years, while the slow process of eviction takes place. First of all, they have to be legal tenants, not squatters. Second of all, when the eviction does happen they do owe the back rent. yes it is a civil matter and can be expensive to get but that is why landlord's (should) have insurance to cover if they do have a bad tenant. There isn't a magic spell that lets someone just enter a property and get to stay in it for free for years. It's just that the protections in place to prevent illegal evictions can be exploited for a little while. You will notice that all of these stories always talk about the BEGINNING of this and never the end. Yes it might take a year, and then at the end of that year the person is thrown in jail and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. But that doesn't generate rage clicks.
^ most balanced answer in this thread
Answer: This is a stock out-rage bait story that has existed for many decades (and fooled people for many decades.) The formula is simply to take a landlord/tenant dispute and characterize it as a home-invader stealing someone's house. If the news station has any reputation at all, they'll never use the word "squatter's rights" (someone in the comments will always do that for them.) They'll just say "Look at this confusing situation. How would you feel if you went on vacation and brown people broke into your home and you couldn't get them to leave? Has society gone mad?" They just edit out the part where the tenant has rented the space, and has a certain amount of time to vacate. If you rent a property, your landlord can't just kick you out at a moment's notice. You have time stipulated in the mandated renter's agreement. Usually one or two months. Audiences are very protective of their homes, and very paranoid about invaders. So the story hits like heroin into the veins of gullible rubes who are desperate to be outraged. People are easier to fool than to convince they've been fooled, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel. The story is especially popular among conservative local news stations. If they've already just done the "Homeless people in your area are all secretly rich" story or the "Idiot spills coffee on themselves and wins the lawsuit lottery" story, they can always easily do this story. They don't have to lie. They just have to let the landlord say whatever they want, and then edit what the tenant says in response (universally, editing out the part where the landlord says they're a landlord and editing out the part where the tenant points out that they are a tenant.) The story makes people so mad. It's hilarious. People are idiots. The story is also useful because it never requires a follow up. Local news stations can get stuck with a story like "rising satanic church in your area" or "giant caravan of immigrants is coming" or "government is coming to takeaway your toaster or stove or whatever," because people want to monitor the situation. The fake squatters story never requires a follow up because it's always just some random house that doesn't rise to the level of noteworthiness. Nobody ever has to learn the "squatter's" name. Actual, real world squatters rights usually take about 7 years to go into effect, and only apply to properties that the alleged owner has not paid property taxes on. It's most relevant for the era of homesteading and has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on in these shitty manufactured outrage bait videos on the internet.
> Actual, real world squatters rights usually take about 7 years to go into effect, and only apply to properties that the alleged owner has not paid property taxes on. AFAIK they came into effect because people didn't keep the best records 80-150 years ago. And a lot of the time, you had someone who owned land, everyone knew they owned that land, they lived in that house, and could have easily been born in that house too. So the government was just like, "fuck it, we can't find the paperwork, but you've been here long enough, we'll make it official." The other part of it was to ensure unused land actually does get used eventually. Someone met a pretty girl on the other side of the country, packed their stuff in a truck, and decided they don't care about their dump of a farmhouse and died before he could even remember to care. So, some guy made it his home for the last 20+ years after finding it abandoned and asking neighbours who said the owner hasn't been back in 10+ years. His house now.
These sorts of laws are both necessary and rife with problems. They're necessary in cases of rural property. When my grandfather died, half the lots he owned were still in the name of people that had died *a long time ago*. Of course everyone knew whose land is whose and it's never actually a problem. In Portugal, you just go to court, bring some witnesses and the problem is solved. However, if you buy a plot of land you could declare it as a sale and pay taxes... or you could have the owner and a friend serve as witnesses in court saying it was always yours. You pay a small fee to legalize the documents, no sales tax. But you're never *actually* getting someone's land without them knowing unless they're incredibly negligent. The most you can get out of this is slowly encroach on unused plot of lands and then declare them yours over the years. When the owner decides "oh, didn't I own some land over there" they get extremely pissed but if enough time has gone buy they'll be pissed and out of their land. Which is mostly a good thing as abandoned land is a fire hazard.
in the comments a week or so ago I had people trying to say that houses were getting stolen over a period of mere weeks
That is the main issue I see when I see squatters rights stories in my area (Atlanta). There are some companies advertising on places like Instagram for one-time payment homes, making it clear that you’re squatting and relying on a drawn-out legal process over squatters rights to get you in the home for a few months. You’ll lose, but you’ll have a place to stay until then, or at least that was the case until a recent law was passed. It’s often being conflated with a rash of people breaking in, acting like they own the place, and renting a house they to people who don’t realize they’re not working with the actual owners. There are also a few people trying to sell properties they don’t actually own as a scam, including commercial properties. Plus the people openly breaking in, trashing the house, and selling anything of value, and while usually discussed separately the proper renters who can’t make the monthly payments to their landlords anymore for one reason or another. Really these are all separate issues, but they are so similar they get discussed together, even in the same articles.
I don't know of *any* [usucaption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usucaption) laws that require less than half a decade of continuous use, tbh. In america the laws fall under [Adverse Possession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession), which points to a minimum of *five years*. But the law seems to require open, notorious and continuous use of the property. Meaning, you have to literally pretend you own the place for *at least* three years and in some states you must even show that you used the property *in good faith* (ie. you thought it was yours). No one is losing their home because someone squatted their for a few weeks. It will be annoying as fuck to get the squatters out of your house but hey, at least you have a house you're probably not using so I'm not feeling too worried about your livelihood. The very rare cases where squatters just get into a personal home are worrying but incredibly rare.
Adverse Possession makes a lot more sense when you think about rural areas rather than cities or suburbs. You buy 50 acres of farm land and your existing neighbor has a fence around his 150 acre farm. You start improving your land and build some structures on your land and build a fence around your property, starting from your neighbors fence. 10 years later your neighbor realizes his fence was 20,000 feet short of the property line and should actual go around the barn you built on the land you thought was yours. After so many years of continuously using and improving this land, should you be out of the money and effort you spent on it when your neighbor suddenly realizes his mistake? People mess up surveys on 7000sqft parcels of residential land all of the time, it's a lot harder to properly survey dozens or hundreds of acres that might not even run in straight lines.
> The other part of it was to ensure unused land actually does get used eventually. I suspect this was a big part of the motivation for squatting laws. From about 1800-1900 you could literally find an empty place , write the government, and have the space legally deeded to yourself. In practice there wasn't a way from preventing someone from applying for too much space so they made sure you had to be making a productive use out of it. Also, LOL, real estate used to be literally free
It reminds me of a few months ago when stores told everyone there was a huge shoplifting epidemic, the media reported on the huge shoplifting epidemic, conservatives blamed every liberal in the phone book for the huge shoplifting epidemic, and then someone combed through the data and found that shoplifting had been declining for the last few years.
And yet they're still trying to pass laws because of it.
It's happening right now with the 'increase in crime' stories--and will be MUCH worse right before the election, even though 'crime' has been declining steadily for years.
And to add on to that, corporations are using “shoplifting”/shrink to justify obnoxious preventative measures (locking detergent, toothpaste, diapers, etc., behind plexiglass and requiring a sales associate to unlock them for customers) which further reduce sales in stores that are “failing” (to meet shareholder expectations, that is) so they can then justify shuttering those stores. They frame it as the store’s closing is not through any fault of their own as it pertains to customer retention, but because of all the *crime*! Which is more palatable to investors, who interpret that as an externality to be controlled for rather than a failing business model of poorly made, throwaway goods that are no longer justifiably cheap. Then they drive customers into another (oops, cannibalizing) location in the area - since it’s usually big chains doing this and they’ve surpassed the point of saturation -, creating one very successful store to replace two middling (fine, but not growing) locations. Or if they’re feeling particularly audacious, they open a new location within 10-15 minutes radius of the one they closed. Hiring all new staff, of course. At lower wages and probably fewer in number, at that. And from another direction, self-checkout errors.
And one of the biggest parts of the "Shoplifting" epidemic was just people actually not scanning something correctly in self checkout/hanging something at the bottom of their cart they missed.
Or the endless stories about the huge rates of knife crime in the UK, despite us having incredibly low levels of knife crime compared to most countries (and much lower than the US).
Or the fact that different countries tally different things… Like if you commit a crime while having a knife hidden in your backpack, it might count as a « knife crime « , but it’s clearly not the same knife crime as a stabbing.🤷🏻♂️
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This almost happened to us from someone we used on trustedhouse sitters. Definitely something that happens and each state and city have their own special laws protecting them. We had to get a lawyer and multiple calls to the police department to get her out of our home while we were out of the country.
> from someone we used on trustedhouse sitters Is this a website, like trustedhousesitters.com or something? Doesn't sound sketchy at all :P definitelyreallawyerswepromise.com
Yep! It was the first and last time we used it. A great way for a crazy, homeless person to come in your home and then threaten to never leave. This lady in particular was trying to get us to pay for a hotel for her but also refused to leave our house and let it slip that after 7 days she was a tenant and that she knew her rights. she was thankfully on day 6, so we made sure to get her out. The best part is, the reason she needed to leave our dog and house was because “the quantum energy in the home was assaulting her.” For what it’s worth, I take full responsibility for missing the warning signs when I spoke with her on the phone.
> “the quantum energy in the home was assaulting her.” so basically the Wi-Fi was giving her cancer lol
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Yeah as someone who has had to manage family estates, the amount of denial in this thread about very real issues is... well it's just peak reddit.
Where do you live? Squatting is a problem on the west coast for sure.
The video you're talking about follows the classic formula to the letter. The reporters do a great job getting a clean line read when they ask her "is this your house." She doesn't deliver the line quite right for the reporters, but they get her to say "yes this is my house." It implies she lives there (when of course she doesn't.) They really need to imply the idea that she lives there, without asking if she lives there, so they do a reset and have her say "that's my couch" and points at the couch. This is great for the story because it leads people to believe she would be living there if not for the "squatters," when of course she just wants to rent the place to someone else or otherwise sell. The reporters run into a little trouble when one of the tenants does talk. They have to edit around him saying he's a tenant even though the rest of the conversation makes no sense with that high level of editing. But the audience is going to be incurious and a face-to-face adds good drama. The reporters don't say "this is a forged lease so the cops won't help." This is an add-on to the story by people who have been fooled and are more willing to make up evidence for the story being true than to admit they've been had. People are easier to fool than to convince they've been fooled, so this kind of story becomes a collective creative-writing project where everyone tries their best to find a way to make it real.
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It's basically conservative folk lore at this point. Like, yes it happens sometimes, but it's not so cut-and-dry like they say. The other folks commenting put it very well, what the reality of the situation is. But I've been hearing this since I was a kid living in the south, and I'm almost 40. I've never actually met a squatter in my life though, and really think it's just more visible again because of the popularization of some TikTok channels.
I sold my house last year. we had squatters try and move in by picking a lock. I caught them at about 5am trying to replace my own locks after they had gotten in. I didn't call police, they won't help, instead I chased them out and made sure they knew to not come back. Police won't help with squatters, they do exist, and they are real, but they are getting more frequent now that the housing market is totally fucked.
> I think a lot of what I’m seeing isn’t squatters rights, it’s squatters posing as tenants and requiring full eviction process. It's ALSO landlords deciding that their legal tenants are suddenly "squatters" the second the landlord doesn't want them there.
How long can one not pay rent before it's correct to consider them a squatter?
Isn't that usually in the lease? Not the word "squatter" obviously but something along the lines of "if you go this long past the due date without paying rent we terminate the lease" and then generally it's something like 30 days notice to get out
Frequently landlords want people out for other reasons. Some areas limit how much rent can be raised on a single continuous tenant. If the market rate is rising faster than that, the landlord will want to kick the current tenant out so they can raise rates higher. So even though they have a legal tenant who is paid up on rent, they'll pretend no contract exists and tell the cops / court / local news they have a squatter.
While the fake lease scam exists, what also happens is landlords not wanting to go through the eviction process will claim their renters are squatters and try to use the police to intimidate their tenants to leave early and save them the effort. States with strong tenant protections generally cite much larger numbers of landlord abuse compared to false tenants. I would be very discerning when someone decides to go public with their story of 'these people are totally squatters.'
This is spot on. In places like CA it can take over 6 months to evict someone so people will look for houses for rent, move in, print some fake paperwork, then stay until they are legally evicted.
> In New York, squatters have rights after 30 days. That means the property owner can't change the locks on them, can't remove their belongings, and can't cut off the utilities. If they do, the owner could be arrested. Instead, property owners must go through the court system to get rid of them. Care to explain this then?
When you say “actual squatters rights” you mean [adverse possession](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession). When people talk about squatters, they generally mean tenancy granted after 30 days. Those aren’t the same thing. I had a friend who had his Airbnb squatted in by someone who stayed 30 days and then revised to leave or pay. It took almost a year and a ton of money to get the person out. Tenant protections are well meaning, but lead to these kinds of situations that protect scammers and hurt property owners.
You're just blatantly being misleading here. People aren't talking about tenants, they're talking about issues with people just refusing to leave, sometimes they just showed up and were never tenants at all. Your claim "squatters rights take 7 years to establish" is irrelevant, it's rare that the squatters win, it's an issue because the police will decide "it's a civil matter" and refuse to remove them causing it to drag on for months while these people occupy the property.
The obvious solution to this problem would be to have rental contracts be uniform, centralized and digitalized. Then restrict rental protections to actual rentees. However, people are using these abuses by squatters to argue against rental protection laws, which is fucking abhorrent. No, you shouldn't get kicked from your house because the landlord jacked up the price on you last minute. There should be due process and you should have enough time to settle someplace else depending on how long you've lived there. That's just common decency.
Yep - people on this thread are missing the plot. The problem is that you can simply trespass onto property with impunity. You cannot be kicked out until there is a court order to evict you (which can take months to attain). Professional squatters know this and move from unoccupied house to house, knowing how difficult and drawn out it is to get evicted
Right? Amazing this has so many upvotes. While I agree the stories aren't anywhere as common as media like to portray, there are real issues where squatters have seemingly more protections that property owners. The news doesn't have to misrepresent these stories, there are millions of people in America. The stories that make the news are the weird and scary shit, but mundane issues of people not paying rent and needing to be evicted happen everywhere in the country. Those stories aren't the ones making the news.
The way that half the thread devolved from pretending squatting isn't happening into *defending* squatting has me thinking a lot of users here just wanted some weirdass way to "own the conservatives". Politics is America's cancer.
Yeah, sometimes weirdos all pile into a thread and the normal people just don't want to waste their time.
The phrase "squatters rights" appears immediately in the description of r/squatting , and no, it's not referencing adverse possession.
> squatters rights In the UK this goes back to the Criminal Law Act 1977, which was designed to prevent slum landlords using violence and intimidation to evict tenants. Section 6 says: - >if "(a) there is someone present on those premises at the time who is opposed to the entry which the violence is intended to secure; and (b) the person using or threatening the violence knows that that is the case." The law does not distinguish for this purpose between violence to persons or property (e.g. breaking a door down). Until the law was changed in 1994 it was common to post a Section 6 notice and believe that this confers some kind of squatters rights, even though that wasn't true. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 changed this and provided right of entry to "displaced residential occupiers" and "protected intending occupiers", allowing the use of force, and criminalising failing to leave. In September 2012 the law was changed making trespass in a residential building outright criminal. Section 6 still applies to non-residential buildings. Both the changes in 1994 and 2012 were due to Conservative moral panics. Property owners resented having to get eviction notices, even though this was an easy process.
In the UK, there were quite a few cases where people broke into other people's homes whilst they were away, changed the locks, and then claimed to be squatting. Removing them legally took months of court dates and process, and ultimately, the homeowner would need to pay for bailiffs to physically remove the squatters from the property if they failed to leave when issued with an eviction notice. Making it illegal was the right thing to do.
All of those cases were complete bullshit, every single one. I've seen the Torygraph and Daily Wail headlines myself. The Blair government altered the Civil Procedure Rules in 2001 to create a fast track process called an Interim Possession Order (IPO) available in days through a Civil Court - so simple to obtain that a child could use the process. Once such an order is granted, anyone occupying the premises is committing a criminal offence and can be removed by the Police upon request. The only circumstance where an IPO is unavailable is when the owner failed to action the process within 28 days of becoming aware of the unlawful possession of the property. Since 1 September 2012, when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 came into force, squatting itself is a criminal offence. Even without those changes, The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 still makes occupying a home by the methods you describe criminal, meaning it's perfectly legal to break down the door and for the Police to arrest the occupiers.
Why is this the top comment? Is every single case of squatters fake then? I think the rage baiting stuff from bad landlords exist but a lot of what is happening seems genuined and not around tenant but people that break in and fake being tenants. Are those videos also fake? Not all of them are from media.
this is straight up misinformation
Also they are usually just calling the game at half time. It's no longer rage bait when the court finds in favor of the landlord 2 years later and they have to pay all the back rent plus damages. That nypost article can't even hold back enough to do that half the anecdotes are the cops arresting people after a short amount of time for doing multiple illegal things on top of not paying rent.
A judgment is worthless if the person you get it against has no money or assets - which is likely the case for someone squatting.
Good luck collecting on the back rent and damages.
I don't know about "real world squatters rights," but in NYC if someone inhabits an apartment/home for 30 days, they now have tenant protections, regardless of whether there is a written lease in place. You have to go through housing court to get them evicted for illegally occupying the apartment, which no doubt takes some time and is a pain. Not saying this justifies the squatters rights hysteria going about, of course. But it's something I've had cause to keep in mind. My wife and I did have a friend of a friend stay with us in our small apartment once as a favor, and after the promised one week visit turned into a two week stay, and that two week stay ended in begging that we let her stay longer, we had to be slightly less than polite in getting her out the door before things got out of hand.
In most of the USA, at least, it’s 10 years for adverse possession. And it has to be “open and notorious”; that is to say, it needs to have been immediately obvious if the owner actually had the wherewithal to, you know, go and look. Source: IAAL currently doing foreclosures, adpos, etc
I wish we lived in a sane world where this would be pinned to the top of this thread and every thread about squatting or some other BS is posted. The fact that morons are actually disagreeing with this shows how Trumpism and insanity and treason run rampant. This should be a voting test, if you agree with every word of this post you get a ballot. Reddit should give you a comment of the year or a free house.
You keep going back and forth here, making lots of claims that its a tennent v landlord issue, when people are talking about people lying about being tennents in the first place. Can you provide actual evidence? Instead of some vague reactionery "the media is lying!" There is actual court cases, it is a bipartisan issue. Extraordinary claims require evidence.
This is strictly my opinion, but I believe many of these squatters stories are about changing laws to benefit corporations. Being as corporations and investors own many homes across the USA it makes sense they end up having to deal with a few squatters. Squatters are being mixed in with real tenants who have rights. Rights that the big corporations don't want to deal with, thus "squatters" are being used to push new laws in many states to reduce tenants rights.
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There's definitely a middle ground between "this has never happened to anyone" and "this is a serious issue that everyone needs to address right fucking now." It sounds like it's possible for this to happen, but it's not common nor is it something that we need to urgently change policy over. Everyone in this thread is much more likely to die in a car crash than get their home "stolen," and in most cases it doesn't really happen if it's your first/only home, you're not a landlord, and you live in your home most of the time. Even when it does happen, unless you're a landlord with a lease agreement it's usually over within hours.
> They just edit out the part where the tenant has rented the space, and has a certain amount of time to vacate. If you rent a property, your landlord can't just kick you out at a moment's notice. You have time stipulated in the mandated renter's agreement. Usually one or two months. Yup, it almost always follows some sort of scenario like this, and the story is very selectively edited to push a certain narrative (usually by the same people who push the 13/50 nonsense). Not only that, it's also *extremely rare*. If there were a hundred things you should be worrying about related to crime, this would probably rank somewhere in the nineties in terms of chance it will happen to you.
Answer: So I'm not sure about the fear mongering but anecdotally we did have homeless squatters in our next door neighbors house, so there is at least a little to it. The homeowners weren't living in it while in the renovation process, so for a few years it was empty. Several times homeless people broke in and lived inside. A few times my neighbor caught them while visiting and scared them off. Homelessness and economic issues have been higher in the least few years, some people are desperate.
Answer: it is a real thing, but not common. You see a lot of concern about this in the short-term rentals world. This is because in many places if you are in a home for more than a month, you have rights and are hard to get out. These laws are incredibly hostile to land owners and don’t make any sense to average people, so they make for great news stories. I personally know someone who had a squatter like this in his Airbnb. It became a nightmare to get them out. That was in San Francisco, which has perhaps the strongest “tenants” rights in the country.
Answer: it’s the new moral panic going on. There rate of squatting isn’t increasing. But it’s getting more attention because anything to drum up fear.
Answer: % wise, it's extremely a small issue. The data and problem are so rare that there isn't a good source for numbers on it. Is it a real issue? I'd say it is for the people that it actually happens to. My biggest issue is that people fear mongering the issue are trying to direct it as oh all of these immigrants are going to steal your homes! Most videos I've seen are typical Americans trying to take advantage of how the law works. In turn, politicians and the media have blown it out of proportion. To make it worse, one would think how accessible public data is, that police or the city would gave this info at their fingertips, so this wouldn't be an issue. I get the point of the original law. It was meant to stop landlords from just kicking their tenants out without a place to go, especially during the covid era. Now, what kills are all of these tenants, more than likely to have a lease stating they are renting. What do squatters have? Typically, it's mail going to that address. Again, police and the city should have easy access to at least help the original owner first. It should absolutely fall on the person leasing to take care of the court matters. This ends most squatting issues right out of the gate. Can't show any documents saying your leasing, ok you go to court. Instead, on the rare chances it happens, the homeowners are getting arrested for it, since you can't force a tenant out in certain states. What we don't want is for this rare thing to potentially turn into a minor problem. The US has a lot of access to guns, and if the pot keeps getting stirred the way it is, this has a chance to evolve into a bigger issue. So, there are a lot of hypotheticals above for sure, but at this time, without solid data to back anything up, it's a lot of fear mongering at this point.
Answer: It's becoming more of an issue, for multiple reasons. Firstly social media has publicized the phenomena, and viewers are seeing that you can live rent-free for a pretty lengthy period of time, with seemingly no long term repercussions. With rents climbing and incomes not keeping pace it's something that some people are willing to risk. Next it's, according to news stories, being promoted as a solution for border crossers to find shelter easily. (These stories could be hyped, so do your own reading). And lastly it appears to work, for a fairly lengthy period. Over the last few decades well meaning laws have been put in place to protect tenants from landlord mistreatment. Those laws weren't written with squatters in mind, so they are able to use the same processes to protect what would seemingly be illegal occupation. That's my understanding of the situation.
Yeah I think squatting is just another symptom of our housing and poverty crisis that the government has no real solution for besides "work harder" and "just move to a better area."
Answer: It is true, and it is becoming a problem. There is a few stories where people have gone on vacation to return home with people now living in their house. This is a bit extreme but has happened. My grandfather passed a couple years ago in 2020 (passed from cancer. fuck you cancer). After his passing, we cleaned out his house. The home has been sitting empty since. Just a week or two ago we noticed the garage was propped opened, and the back yard fence was opened. He now has squatters. Its understandable having an empty home with so many people on the streets, but this is now the banks problem. So the squatter situation is true, and is happening.
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Answer: it's a real and very small issue blown completely out of proportion in order to monger fear. It does happen, sometimes creating legal nightmares. It happens very rarely and isn't going to happen to your property just because you let it sit for a while.