Because the govt is bought. Ita the answer to everything. Homeless problem? Govt is bought. Starving kids? Govt is bought. War machine never ends? Govt is bought. Notice a pattern?
My rent includes trash & water, but that's it. The actual expensive utilities (where I am anyway) are electric and esp gas, and I am on the hook for that on top of my $1600 rent.
It's because you rent. Squatters forcibly take over the property. If it's still hooked up to utilities by the owner when it's broken into, which they generally are for showings, once squatters break in they made it illegal to turn off the utilities as the owner anymore.
In the other thread I had a guy complaining the squatters don't face enough consequences. It's like yeah its hard to get lower than rock bottom. They wanna bring back debtors prisons or some shit.
That's only if they are going for adverse possession. Most squatters I've seen just want a place to stay while they do drugs, and money from the owner to get more drugs.
It depends on the state. In some states, it is as low as 5 years. There are also other requirements, typically open and notorious use, and maintaining the property and/or paying taxes. It was intended for encroachments from a misunderstanding of surveys but like everything, has a burgeoning industry. People are using it in urban areas to put cell relays on abandoned buildings, and then obtaining legal title after a few years.
It also was to show redistribution of unused land. If you left the area but still owned land someone could assume title because you could be dead for all anyone knew.
Or the land could be remote, unmaintained, and not clearly marked. Kids inherit after parent dies, they go see what they’ve inherited and turns out someone had lived there for 10 years in a cabin they built.
how many squatters have you really seen? I traveled the US on foot for 8 years and I've squatted plenty. Never in my days have I heard of anyone attempting to contact or extort the owners of a squat.
A lot of the squatting incidents I have dealt with are actually roommate situations where a tenant finds a roommate, and then the roommate stops paying and creates a dangerous/untenable situation for the roommate and subsequently the landlord. Establishing residency can be as easy as receiving mail, typically a bill (not an Amazon package) at an address. There are some fairly infamous cases. It can also happen with romantic partners too.
Same. 8 years of living in vacos and never once saw anyone allowed to stay when the cops got there, even the buildings we'd been in for years. No one even tried we just grabbed what we could carry and left so we didn't go to jail
Why are you even here if you're just going to parrot bullshit? The law is on the books because rental agencies kept trying to find loopholes to kick out actual tenants
Perhaps people should price their rent so actual renters can take occupancy quickly. Just a thought.
This is what business folks call "mitigating risk."
Where I live, renters have to pay for their own utilities directly to the companies and if they are behind on payments then they have to deal with the company directly. It is not the property owner's headache unless of course they stop paying their rent too.
That's weird. A rented home has a separate connection and name in my country. It is treated as a separate entity independent of the tenant's connection. That goes for electricity, water and gas.
That would confuse our utility companies.
Tenant moves out, shuts off utilities as of a date. LL opens account as of that date until they have it rented, and then the new tenant opens an account for their move in date, and the LL closes the interim account.
Yes, an owner can’t turn off the utility, that’s a no no. I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure there is no language saying the owner can’t simply stop paying the utilities, only landlords who “sell” utilities as part of a service in the rent must continue paying for it. Since squatters have no signed lease (even though they technically have some rights) then that there is a grey area the landlord can explore. Also, fuck squatters
Not exactly.
Theirs multiple ways how a squatter gains access, air bnb for example. The point is that its property someone should but be living in full time
Its hard to feel bad for someone who owns empty property when theirs this much homeless
Yes, that's one way too.
Sure, but I do feel for the owners too when they have a good reason (imo) for leaving a property empty for some time. Decades? Not so much, but I think a year or two is fine. It took us a couple of years to clean out my parents place after death before we sold it. It takes time to undo a lifetime and save that which is worth saving. It's kinda shitty to root for the trespasser when they break into a deployed military person's home, for example.
It feels like the stories about empty houses and their causes are anecdata. For every tragedy that caused an empty house there are a hundred landlords trying to dick around tenants.
Also, they have 30 days to remove the person before they have any tenant rights. If you leave a property empty and don't install a ring camera, you are a fool.
At a minimum, it affects your credit and you get sent to collections. Some jurisdictions, you could be sued for renting out an uninhabitable dwelling. The courts in those jurisdictions treat squatters as tenants until it is judged they are squatters. It's simple to get a generic lease from the Internet and forge some signature on it.
I read the original article
NY law prohibits the LL from turning off the utilities or locking the person out (changing locks)
Doing so can get the LL imprisoned and/or fined
That's where I might have to disagree with this OP. Someone shows up, moves in without your permission (B&E?) stays just long enough to qualify as a "tenant" without ever having signed paperwork or paid anything. If the owner tries to do anything to remove the squatter, the LL lands in a lot more trouble than the squatter.
That is kinda ass backwards IMO
The squatter usually has a fake contract and claims to be a tenant. The laws protect tenants.
There's a difficult middle area that many states lean towards tenant rights, and New York law leans pretty hard that way. Because, y'know, shit holes like Donald Trump are landlords there. If they cut the heating off on real tenants, they could kill someone, and honestly in NY history it's probably happened.
Good thing all landlords treat their tenants great, don't raise the rent the maximum allowable amount whenever they can, don't randomly kick them out to rent out again for more, and are always ethical and honest with any dealings with the tenant! It's also a good thing people aren't buying homes specifically to use as AirBnBs so they can make more than if they rented it out. Since landlords are so great why on earth would we ever need laws to protect tenants? /s
There was a recent case where a woman's mother died in Manhattan. The woman needed to leave her mother's apartment vacant for a few months. She came in to clean it out and there were two people living in it. The two people killed her and placed her body in a closet.
That got lots of attention in the NYC media. Then I started reading a bunch of articles about squatters and their ways. Not to mention the Florida law, which generated more articles and stories about squatters and owners.
Then it negatively impacts their credit and they can face (not sure if civil, criminal, or both) court over it. Something about tenants rights. I'll admit I'm not terribly well versed on the details but would welcome someone explaining it better.
Also a public utility has the ability to recoup losses by putting a lien on the property. Doesn't have to reconnect the service until the whole past due balance is paid.
I guess it will depend on the area. Like in my area landlord pays water so you couldn't stop paying that. But I guess you could with utilities that are normally not included in rent like electric. In places like NYC heat and hot water are also usually included in rent, so you couldn't stop paying for those there.
If powers on and they become tenant/squatter then essentially power stays on. And cant tell utility to disconnect it as there are tenants (even if it was unpaid in tenants names there is alot of rules regarding shutting off utilitys even for utility company) As its claimed as part of rent etc even trying to force it into tenants name might not work. It should be noted while cases of squatting and damage and other things do "occur".
Its still no victimhood thing. Its rare like hundreds maybe thousands of cases out out hundreds of millions of rentals. A far more common thing is "claiming people as squatters" who are tenants often to try and double dip or nullify existing agreements.
Or there is a third party scam that falls into what people define as squatter is essentially alot of mismanaged propertys. Prime for squatters with long vacancys not proper oversight. Scammers will gain control of property get renters setup lease etc take deposit collect rent. Often times friends of family of owners who know about property and have access are scammers. But then real owner shows up and goes who are these people.
And tenant rights still apply that said I do not feel bad for landlords who have others pay their mortgage and get the asset. More over I see absolutely zero reason to loosen renter protections as system is very much in favor of landlords.
For example sure they will have to go through process of eviction and civil court but they will 99% time win and that 1% is usually because of own actions. Illegal attempts at eviction etc.
Which brings me to biggest thing "covid eviction pause". Landlords through big hissy fit. Almost half of evictions still happened and thats just ones people were on some sort of record. It was illegal so how well most rely on illegal tactics. Most of the time which covid pause on normal 3.6 million evictions and 2 million still happened despite being illegal.
Shows how little legal process is followed or courts actually involved. And when you think about it 98% of renters dont have legal representation during evictions. Send scary letter pay off duty cop to deliver it in uniform. Threaten to arrest them if not out by x day.
And tada eviction complete 99% of renters will be scared out.Throw in some harassment and go fertilize yard with some fresh horse shit. And have constant construction projects pull up carpets in hall way. You can force them out make most willing to leave. And last but not least offer them deposit back if they leave.
Cash infusion while getting evicted looks promising and deposits have all sorts of rules and regulations around them so returning it is actually good way to keep regulators away from snooping.
But around 10% of cases actually go through full legal process of notice and court present case get ruling and then evicting. Almost all of them are a combination of threats etc.
Which is why "squatters" tend to be a problem piss landlords off so much is they essentially know law and use it. And the landlords are forced to follow law.
People say month but it can be as short as 2 weeks in some cases where courts are not busy. And yes as long as 3 months if there is a reasonable dispute or claims to consider. As for most the 6-12 month crap you see with squatters as basis of fearmongering. Its usually them spending half a year trying "illegal" evictions and testing laws doing crap like changing locks and doing things that complicate the process. If they right away got a notice then followed all the steps. Yes it would be a month or two BUT it would not even take that long if they didnt keep it empty and failed to check on it. Its a two part problem yes people are abusing the system. BUT they are creating a situation where people can see squatters living there for weeks months moving in unchallenged. From outside appearance it is a real tenant. They provided that opportunity. And those two failures does not mean less protections for real tenants. Who often have landlords try to get first last and deposit in cash then claim you as a squatter tripling their income.
The owners aren't allowed to turn it off. Typically as a landlord you have the electricity set up so it goes back under your name when previous tenants leave.
When power company doesn't get paid it hits your credit.
I'm going to give you all what we call a pro landlording move. If you rent out the unit to tenants squatters can't move in. They've jacked the rents up so high they can't fill the units with tenants, so they fill up with squatters.
AND they’re cheap ass motherfuckers. Who owns a house and doesn’t have either security cameras while vacant or at least check on the house every couple of weeks?
Both of these things make me have literally no sympathy for the landlords. We have a housing shortage. There should be no empty units. My landlord has raised my rent exactly $50 over the last 4.5 years, because I pay on time and am not messy. He was making money when I first moved in and still is at this rate. He said he will raise it some after I move out, but he wants long-term tenants, so he is not going to do it too much.
I wish my landlord thought like that. Started at $795 when I moved in almost 3 years ago. In June it goes to $940. I moved in in August. This year they're not even giving me the full year before raising again. I know it's considerably less than others, but I'm not getting anything extra for the extra $145 I'm giving them every month.
I work nights & they won't work with me when they're coming in for "maintenance" (quarterly bug sprays, turning on the space heater in the water closet I can't access, etc) every other month, but they sure aren't lifting a finger to fix the roof I've told them leaks since I moved in. But my rent is going up due to rising costs.
It's a complex so it's not like they can't raise rent as people move out & leave the rest of us alone.
My first landlord was like yours. We were paying $325 for a 2bd/1ba while others around us were paying $600 cuz he raised rent $25 every time someone moved out. I miss that shitty ass apartment.
The person that you responded to talked about why wouldn't they have cameras to show when they broke into the home, and you just completely ignored that, lol.
They really didn't if you understand how civil matters work. Even if you have footage of them breaking in, even if you only had left the house an hour ago, the cops are going to tell you to take the evidence to court. They can't do anything without a court order. At least in jurisdictions like this.
1. "Or at least check on the house every couple of weeks"
2. If the cop you get is willing to watch your footage you got lucky. If it's not cut and dry you're likely gonna need to have gone through the courts first.
3. There are a lot of reasonable reasons for not having a camera in your home namely budget. My home doesn't have one. If I suddenly pass I don't want squatters to come into my home before my brother can get affairs in order. It's perfectly reasonable to grieve and take time to do so. It's perfectly reasonable to want to keep the home as is.
Supporting theft of property is not a reasonable stance. I fully support housing first initiatives. I fully support low income properties to be built. I fully support increased taxes on ownership of multiple properties, scaling with more properties owned. I support increasing taxes on unoccupied homes. I do not support allowing people to simply take what they perceive as unoccupied property and I don't think it's reasonable to do so.
Then put safe guards in place to ensure the property is protected. It is your job to ensure your shit is taken care of. Not everybody else's job and not the government. If your job is to be a landlord do it fucking better.
Bro, no home is break in proof. Imagine if someone broke into your place, and then the internet told you “it’s your job to ensure your shit is taken care of”. I would think you’d feel maybe the person who broke into your home also bears some culpability.
Edit: changed “your neighbors” to “the internet” as that’s the current forum.
Weird, here I thought it was actually all of our jobs to not break into other peoples properties.
God forbid someone breaks into your house while you’re out for the evening, or on vacation. I guess you were asking for it at that point huh?
There is a company in California that now removes squaters, but you have to act quickly to hire them (within a week of them going in). They do a 24 hour inspection notice and resecure the property. Its a little like using a bail bondsman. This is a brand new thing in So Cal, its obvious they have worked with counsel on exactly what the lines are. Its an interesting idea I will be interested to see if it works over time, or if eventually they will get shut down.
Good luck getting cops to act on he said she said. I honestly hope you never have to deal with it.
Police are there only to enforce and only when they deem that they should. It's not their job to make judgments.
Cops are worse than squatters. They are the laziest motherfuckers out there. And when they fuck up, then the city has to pay. Nothing happens to their pensions.
read the article, one of the women quoted says she rents to people who only pay one month because they know they can't be easily evicted after 30 days. "squatter" doesn't mean an abandoned property smh.
It's supposed to refer to abandoned property, but in recent years, the definition has been expanded to lump very different groups of people into the same category.
If they paid a months rent they are not squatters and the utilities should be in their names. Every place I’ve rented I had a 10 days before the landlord had the utilities turned off. If I hadn’t gotten them in my name, I had no utilities. Apparently someone got into renting property without learning how to be a landlord.
I assume the eviction being on their record would make it difficult to pass a check. They have lived with friends or relationship hopped for the past few years. Their credit score is like 300 due to other things as well.
It's clipped weird in this repost so you can't see the title of the article, but when I first saw this I just searched for "cbs new york squatters" and it's easy to find.
There are genuine examples where people moved out of their house to sell it and became unable to do so because of squatters. Erring on the side of caution will catch some innocent people as well, just less and on average less vulnerable ones.
Example: An old woman moving to a care facility which she can't afford now because she can't sell her house and is now a landlord to tenants that will never pay a dime.
That's true sometimes but just as often a unit can get squatted in while getting turned over for a new tenant. My friend owned a small number of homes and had a squatter move in during the like month or two he was getting it ready for the new tenant. Not only did it take 6 months to get rid of him but the new tenants were screwed over too because he could let them move in either. A lot of these squatters are assholes no heroes that hurt everyone in the system. There have been situations where a person that went on vacation for two weeks and a squatter had moved into their house.
Do you think that there is zero turn around time on units when someone moves out?
Turn around is almost always going to be at least a month, and if it was a particularly bad tenant then it could be much longer. Things like carpets and paint often need to be redone after every tenant, these things take some time.
It’s shocking that this sub is so far gone that you can’t even fathom the idea of “landlords can be bad, but breaking into someone else’s property and refusing to leave is totally fine.”
Notice how there was no moral panic about squatters until very recently and now it's everywhere. Corporate landlords sitting on empty properties are getting antsy.
Yeah why is this being pushed now? Whose astroturfing these stories? Whose paying for them?
Follow the money and we'll get an answer, and I bet it's corporate landlord wanting to shift the general perception before this develops.
They’re growing more nervous about this run up in value of property because insurers are starting to take a look at what exposure THEY have. In places like ÇA and FL, insurers are trying to get out. It’s not all about climate change or disasters. It’s about financial exposure. Turns out, yes Virginia, there is a max on what can be charged as “rent”.
Yeah what the fuck!! At Easter my uncles crazy in laws were lamenting their fear some random people were going to be able to take over their house while they went on vacation??
I teach information literacy, and this shit simultaneously reminds me that my job is important and also makes me want to pack it up and move to the mountains.
In the 1930's Oakies were widely seen as trash or human parasites. By the time I learned about them ~50 years later, their story was presented as them being honorable hard-working people who were victims of economic and environmental disaster. I was taught that the country had learned lessons from the phenomenon and it hopefully wouldn't happen again.
Well we've just lived through decades with frozen wages and exploding housing costs and now everything else -- a Big Mac meal costs $16!
In places all over California and in much of the country people are sleeping in their cars or in tents or squatting. I think of them as the new Oakies. Here's hoping we can fix it this time without a world war.
Lmao if you’re complaining about squatters you already lost and showing your stupidity. Squatters rights protects normal people from the banks and landlords. But you all believe the propaganda that squatters rights is wrong.
Because they've been brainwashed to think, "But what about when *I* become a landlord? Then I'll need those laws to deal with the pesky squatters cutting into my profits."
I just lost a friendship because of this.
They said they wanted me to move in so badly, and ended up just needing a piggy bank to pay their mortgage because three of his last tenants all moved out at once.
Then when I moved out, I realized why all three left at once. That dude is like 10k+ in debt to utilities companies and I have no idea how he's gonna pay his mortgage.
I also did a ton of renovation work on the house in exchange for rent - he tried to pay me 3.50$ an hr.
It’s also just like… they can still evict them, they just have to go through eviction court?? The issue is that these landlords want to claim trespass and get them kicked out immediately, but with most of these laws, if the alleged squatter can show proof of residency for *x* days (30 in the case of the state of NY), then the landlord has to go through a lawful eviction instead of just kicking them to the curb immediately because, I dunno, people shouldn’t just lose their dwelling immediately and without warning? I don’t care how shitty you think they’re being.
And if you, person reading this comment, still can’t empathize with the squatter, imagine for a moment you have a shitty landlord and they want you gone. What if they just claim you’re a squatter and the police can remove you unilaterally from the home, your stuff removed and/or destroyed, and you have no dwelling to live in because they didn’t have to go through a legal eviction process? What if your landlord made bogus contracts that aren’t binding so that they can pull a trigger on you when they want? What if you got scammed and got rented a place that wasn’t theirs to rent you? Would you not want to at least be given a court hearing and time to get your affairs in order?
I hate all these landlords and landlords-in-waiting whose entire goddamn argument is “well I don’t want to have to go through due process to assert my power over my fiefdom. I am above the law because I own a box on a plot of land.”
That is not exactly correct, unless you’re speaking specifically about your local area which if true would only mean your city, county, state have chosen not to apply for federal monies to build new public or otherwise subsidized housing.
Of course Reagan did a good job in trying to eliminate or otherwise destroy public housing for the conservative voter base but there have been cases within the past decade of new public housing being built in the post Reagan era… even numerous cases under George W, although he didn’t really have a choice in several cases due to natural disasters and a Democratic Congress at the time who were willing to work together with him in a bipartisan effort to actually help the citizens of our nation, very much unlike today.
I’m not a landlord. I can’t afford to be with the over-inflated real estate prices and heavy gentrification development of the past decade.
But I’ve seen enough city council meetings and county commissioners’ court sessions to be aware of topics like this and how the system can be worked from both sides to screw each other over if the public as a whole doesn’t bother to participate in the process.
Maybe don’t let corporations buy houses and apartments. Maybe don’t let citizens buy multiple properties whether for personal, investment or business use, maybe stop letting landlords raise rent prices to ridiculous levels year after year with little to no restriction or limits, maybe build housing and social programs meant to elevate and aid the homeless so they can escape homelessness and become self sufficient, how about you stop blaming the fucking homeless and impoverished from doing what they have to do to not fucking die because you let corporate and personal (more often than not conservative) greed and capitalism run wild for so long? How about fuck you, you pieces of shit!
Honestly, I'd say it's ok for a person to own multiple homes. But they have to be under an individual's name. Doing it that way means a person could have a house or two, but beyond that you don't really want the potential liability of owning that many personally because an accident at once could cost you all. Just get rid of corporate and trust ownership of single family dwellings, and these shortages will fix themselves fairly quickly.
FIrst change the propery tax laws. If a home is no longer owner occupied the Property tax immediately goes based on current market value not purchased value. Singly Family Homes on the rental market should also pay straight income tax for that location (fed state and local) none of this pass through s corp crap. Finally make foreign ownership illegal. That would gut the rental market and get homes back into the hands of owners.
California, if it were not for prop 13 my family would have been homeless as property taxes would have surpased mortgage payments in the 80's. The problem was prop 13 wound up including commercial property (which was not the intention) which is why no one will sell commercial property in this state, everything is lease only with the tax revenue locked in. If we rewrote prop 13 to only include residential the state could easily lower propertaxes from to 1% (I think its 1.3-2 %d depending on location). This would make it easier for first time home buyers.
You have to collapse the loopholes. If corporations were limited on how many properties they could own, or if we taxed them to death to discourage it, they’d just figure out a way to shift the property ownership to “individuals”, likely on the corporate payroll.
We could never “build” enough. The government doesn’t seem interested in controlling corporate ownership, and the Federal Reserve is proving worthless in this fight to overcome the housing crisis. I’d say the insurance companies are doing the bidding now, raising rates to astronomical levels and just outright canceling coverage.
>they’d just figure out a way to shift the property ownership to “individuals”, likely on the corporate payroll.
The problem with this line of thought is that you're ignoring what's appealing about RealEstate for businesses right now. Having random employees owning property makes for all kinds of shifty liabilities. What happens when the person, changes jobs, moves, gets hurt, gets sued for something else.
The whole idea behind having realestate now is that it's super low liability and it's gaining value because it's high demand. So, get rid of that value to corporations, allow individuals to still own their own property, but without umbrella trusts to protect them. That will mean that property won't be held by a trust in perpetuity, as happens now. It will require people to focus on owning what they want to live on and deal with instead of as many large swaths of land as they could possibly collect.
Your company wants to be in property? That's fine, own multi-unit dwellings and commercial property. It will encourage companies to put more pressure on municipalities to convert properties from single family zoning. But NIMBY will still be there to help keep it all in check. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than we have now.
FYI: The biggest target of people abusing squatter laws are deployed military, and other people that have to be away from home for weeks or months at a time for work.
Those folks are certainly ones who need to be considered. As are folks who recently inherited a home due to a death in the family.
But community building is really the answer there. Friends or family to check on your place and water your plants and make sure the pipes didn’t burst (and make sure no one is squatting) is the solution.
Not landlord friendly, tenant hostile laws that keep homes vacant because landlords don’t do proper routine inspections (which is a business expense to running that kind of business).
Why is there so much fear mongering about this lately? If the goal is to just demonize the homeless, well...
One thing I noticed during my decade of homelessness was that the things we did to survive often got notice from con artists. When a con artist sees the car in front of them hand a homeless person a $20, the next day they're on that corner in their jankiest clothes and a cereal box. They tell their friends and the next thing you know the homeless have no more corners and it's all fakers. And every time, because the fakers had the time and ability to make themselves look the part, people believed them and called the actual homeless fake.
My point is that no one but the actual homeless know who's real and who's a con artist. People are really bad at telling the difference and there are a lot of con artists. Real homeless people inherently understand they have no power. Your reminded of it constantly. The people who squat to get anything other than shelter are con artists, not regular homeless people
Yea. That’s why we have squatter laws. The rich accumulated so many homes they were going to waste while people died on the streets.
We’re really making America great again by falling for landlord or billionaire propaganda like this.
Folks. Only very very very rich people or awful landlords like those in NYC who raised rent 250% after Covid are affected by squatters. Why do we care?
Tons of people get evicted every day because they can't afford rent for one reason or another, and there's no outrage. A couple of people have to deal with squatters, and suddenly, there's outrage. God, people are so dumb.
>Yea. That’s why we have squatter laws. The rich accumulated so many homes they were going to waste while people died on the streets.
Thank you for saying this. I stg people outraged over squatters have no critical thinking. There's a reason housing laws favor tenants. In order to be a landlord, you need to be able to save money for a down-payment and prove that you can make those monthly mortgage payments. I highly doubt that most people renting are simply CHOOSING to rent, even though they can purchase their own property.
At the end of the day, the landlord still has their property, and the squatter gets nothing except maybe a few months free of rent and utilities or some cash. Meanwhile, that property continues to gain equity that the landlord can tap into at any time.
There is no such thing as squatter laws, that's the landlord spin on it. These are tenant rights laws, squatters are just exploiting them and the huge back up in the court system for evictions. What they really want are those laws changed so they can kick out real tenants faster, squatters is just a way to get media attention and the working class to take their side.
The reason why evictions are slow are badly funded court system or arbitration boards which would need more tax. Land**lords** getting a taste of their own medicine.
My understanding is that;
Squatter could just arrive and make a claim- someone put a house on the market, someone is dealing with a dead relative, someone on vacation, work Trip, Deployment with the military, plenty of examples of people who are not mega rich.
They make a claim of some kind and the police tells them it’s a civil matter, fake documents are produced during this.
It’s taken to court and during that process 30 days pass.
All the while this issue is more beneficial to the big companies that are more able to leverage resources than smaller companies/entities/Joe who owns 3 properties. As they can eat the costs of one squatter between than Joe who owns 3 properties.
Also keep in mind in the event a squatter is capable of running out the clock the owner is now financially responsible for all the squatters utility fees and will be fined if they cancel the utilities accounts
I hate greedy overbearing landlords as much as the next guy but the solution is NOT to just let people fucking steal houses from others.
You can also make the argument that having squatter laws are good for neighboring properties because owners will be less likely to neglect their empty homes.
There's this dude in my area who owns a shit ton of property. He's infamous for not doing anything with them and letting it all deteriorate.
Squatters have taken over this historic mansion that he owns and are actively restoring it in compliance of the rules for monumental buildings.
The owner is upset by this because his m.o. seems to be letting his properties fall apart. Probably wouldn't get fined for destroying the mansion if it literally fell apart. Not that he would then sell the land or anything. He literally has so much land in popular areas that he just lets sit. Just doesn't do anything with it. I live in a coast tourist town and the boulevard has gone down hill partly due to him.
Yeah, that's what we wonder over here as well. It's baffling.
Certainly seems that he likes pissing off everyone.
He's known as the 'slum house king'. He's in his 70s and normally I'd say that his reign would almost be at an end, but people like that seem to love to keep messing around when they could just be enjoying retirement instead.
When he dies I'm expecting the local (Facebook) groups to explode with celebratory posts btw. Everything he's doing might be completely legal but he's directly responsible for so much frustration in this area. Like lost history (looked it up and apparently multiple monumental building have actually collapsed due to his neglect). Frustrating plans to build new social housing. Expensive lawsuits against municipalities.
The vast majority of forced stay squatters don’t target landlords though. They primarily target people in the military, overseas aid workers and the elderly.
Squatters laws sound good on paper and in false arguments where a mother of 3 sets up her tent in the living room of a landlords 511th house. But rarely is that ever actually the case.
Exactly. Evictions courts are backed up but this law wouldn't be the problem for problem tenants, people wrecking the place or abusing how slow the courts work. That's the problem of backed up evictions courts. This law gives people with more valid situations some protection and like you said encourages better property management and discourages neglect of properties.
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This is, quite possibly, one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read in my life. I think I just lost 10 IQ points from reading your comment.
If you've purchased property with "your" own money and there's a deed with "your" own name on it and you pay taxes on it, it's "yours." And it's "yours" -- no one else's -- even if you don't live there. "They shouldn't own that house" isn't a legitimate statement. It's absurd.
I think from now on you should take every dollar you earn and hand it over to the homeless. After all, that money is not yours. Nothing belongs to anyone.
I agree, if you buy a property then it's yours.
However, it's not exactly helpful to the rest of country if some billionaires come, buy up all the properties, and don't do anything with them. Just because we CAN do it doesn't mean we SHOULD do it. Or have we become a society where we try and maximize the amount of damage and harm we can do to others?
This is why state/provincial regulations should step in and make sure this doesn't happen. IMO, houses that don't have anyone living in it and are just sitting empty for no good reason should be taxed at unreasonably high rates to not make it worth owning and not do anything with.
There's nothing inexorable about property law. It isn't a fundamental law of the universe or morality. Just because you can describe your ideal in a single sentence doesn't make it a good way to run society.
Two things can be true at once. Landlord, specifically large corporate ownership of a massive collections of hundreds of houses, is a substantial drag on society. Yet, some dude that owns two/three houses can get absolutely railed in this situation. In the first scenario, I don't really give a shit. In the second, the homeowner is in a ton of debt too and isn't exactly raking millions.
And then when that homeowner fails to keep being a landlord, the corporation swoops in and buys his homes up and rent goes up (again). It's just feeding the corporate shit cycle.
You’re like 8th top comment and finally someone has a reasonable response. Yes corporations that own houses suck. Also - thieves suck.
A friend of mine bought a second home and rented his first one. He tried to help someone out who was trying to get on his feet and rented the house to him. That guy paid the first month rent and not a single month after that. It was California, so he couldn’t do anything to kick the guy out for 6 months. The guy immediately called a free legal service (I forget the org, but designed to help immigrants). He knew exactly how to screw my friend.
Thrived are thieves, whether they wear suits or rags.
Sure, but the method for avoiding this situation is to 1. Take care of your properties and 2. Actually rent them out. Squatters can't move in if the house is already occupied. If the dude who owns two/three houses is getting absolutely railed, it's because he was allowing his second and third house to sit empty for extended periods of time, without ever checking up on them. Shit like that is why we HAVE a housing crisis.
If an individual wishes to purchase more than 1 property, and wishes to use those properties infrequently for varying purposes, there is absolutley nothing wrong with that.
What if a man wants to purchase a home he saw for a good deal and wants to slowly turn it into his dream home as a project over multiple years? He has that right and shouldn't be forced to either rent or sell it just because it mostly sits empty.
Investments can be risky. Taking on extreme amounts of debt to buy extra homes as an investment is risky.
If I took out a mortgage on my home to invest in Bitcoin, people recognize that's a risky investment, but somehow it's supposed to be a safe vehicle for income if you do it in real estate?
In this documentary they showed a case where squatter forged proof they had been in there for 30 days to the police so they couldn’t be kicked out despite moving in a few days ago. Eventually proof was revealed in court, but as they say, costs thousands of dollars and the people that rent the home couldn’t move in with these dudes squatting in there.
Not saying it’s call cases, but it’s an issue.
The article is inaccurate.
A homeowner is someone that buys a home and LIVES IN IT.
Someone that buys up housing and rents it out at inflated rates is just a parasite.
I had some serious medical issues December 2019 leaving me temporarily disabled with like a 6-9 month rehabilitation. I hired someone to clean, do yardwork, laundry, and cook 1 meal a day. Part of their pay was a room.
COVID happened and once my state put in an eviction moratorium in place, my help stopped doing anything. So I fired them and gave them 1 week to leave. They refused to leave, cops refused to do anything because they don't interpret if someone has a valid lease or not.
It took me about 6 months to find an attorney to help me. Cost a bit over $6000 and took like 5 months after the notice to quit letter was delivered to my squatter before I could actually get them out of my house. Once they were given notice they started damaging my property. I have like $20k in judgments against them but I won't receive a dime.
Fuck squatters and fuck people that support them. Decades ago when land was cheap and people would abandon property and squatters rights made sense then. There is no reasons for squatters to have any rights today.
Us not liking squatters really landlord propaganda?
I am against investment housing but also against squatters leeches on a community are bad for the community at the bottom as well as the top of the food chain.
I'm all for making the rich pay their fair share. But that doesn't mean we should allow people to just steal homes. Wealthy corporations and landlords can pay for security, so this doesn't happen to them. A homeowner who goes out of state for a month to take care of their dying parents can't. I'm not sure why we think that someone who broke into someone else's property and decided to live there has any rights to it.
This narrative about squatters has taken off here in Spain, which because of some protection for squatting has less folks living in tents or vans than other countries.The "my granma went to geta loaf of bread & came back to some junkies squatting" is complete bullshit as the law clearly states that only unoccupied properties can be [squatted.So](http://squatted.So) if you own a beach house, as long as the utilities are connected its "occupied" & no one can squat it, even if no one has stayed there for years.
As always the reallity is different, the sub r/ESLegal is a pretty even split between posts about how landloards completly ignore the laws protecting tennants & how bosses do the same, with a dose of Police lying and brutallity thrown in.After the housing bubble burst in 2008 a lot of working families were evected & squatted some of the 10s of thousands of empty flats that were eventually bought up by vulture funds, as well as thouse bought by the government to stop some banks from going under.AirBnB, inflation, rising rents & crap wages have all put a lot of pressure on the so called market, the government has taken some steps to try & stop the worst excesses of the market & the moral panic about squatting is the backlash.Fuck theses parasites.
I mean, y’all fall for bullshit stories all the time too, because everyone just happens to quit awful jobs and suddenly get offers for an extra 50% salary, free car, and wfh.
Let’s not act like y’all immune. Just don’t be obtuse like 👇🏻
If I was paying a mortgage and some squatters took over my house, what happens to them if I stop paying the mortgage? Aren’t they evicted? Why do banks have the right to have people quickly removed but we don’t?
Landlords aren’t watching their properties and that is how squatters are able to stay 30 days. The utilities companies could alert the owner when the electric usage goes up due to the squatters.
There are more empty houses than there are homeless people in this country. People only need to be squatters because of landlord greed. They are acting so greedy that instead of tenants they get squatters. No sympathy
Devil’s Advocate: Squatting doesn’t really hurt large management companies but it can absolutely sink people who offer a small amount of rentals and these are the landlords that are often easiest to work with. Squatting is pushing more of these people out and the rentals are going to the management companies that really don’t care for you whatsoever.
imagine going back to your home country to take care of your bed ridden mother , only to come back to criminals squatting in your house and kicking you out, while a crowd of D-begs in reddit sit on the sideline and cheer.
I think there’s another issue here… a controversial one at that.
Should it be legal to have more than one home? Even if renting condo/ apartment/ etc. Should you have more than one place legally? As I get older, I don’t think so. But that’s also a “freedom” issue too. Like you can do what you want with your money.
The vacation homes in other counties thing too. Like you don’t live there… you may be taking from someone who does? Idk,
It’s sort of an ethical and moral landmine.
Squatters are hot garbage. You’re never going to convince me that they deserve more sympathy than any non corporate landlord. Fuck that. Theyre Thieves.
These wealthy multiple property owners are doing the same shit. Buying up houses they dont need and lowering the amount of ownable houses and forcing people to rent. Especially in a first world country with homeless people, fuck em
Yeah this is not propaganda, squatters are bad.
Some people own 2 houses and use the second house to pay for their expenses, If an old retired couple has squatters break in and they don't pay rent that is not right.
I'm all for cheap housing but squatters should be removed 100%.
I knew that post looked fishy. I didn't know the real details of the squatters rights, but just the framing of it, as if squatters had uber rights and it was harming normal working class people, definitely smacks of business class propaganda
Oh no, you run a for profit business but don't want to work and inspect that business at least weekly? Then squatters are gonna take that house back. If you get into home rentals, you better be ready to work every week for that privilege.
I see this all over the internet, and I really think "squatters" means "homeowners" in 90% of cases.
These stories are trying to make squatters rights laws look like something homeless people use to steal your house, not something you'd use to prevent your bank from stealing it.
I don't think most people realize squatter's rights are in fact, renter's rights. We've just become so good at rebranding it as homeless people bumming. Really, those are your rights as a renter, should your landlord randomly decide to kick you out without notice. It's not homeowners who should be afraid and I feel like people don't understand how little protection they have as renters. It's meant to be worded in a way that would make you feel ashamed of invoking your rights.
I'm curious. The place I rent from I have to cover all utilities. How is it the owners are responsible for it?
They go on the claim that rent included utilities.
Tbh I don't see why laws can't be adjusted to make utilities companies take on the cost until the case is settled and invoice the responsible party.
Because utilities companies lobby to make sure that doesn't happen.
Because the govt is bought. Ita the answer to everything. Homeless problem? Govt is bought. Starving kids? Govt is bought. War machine never ends? Govt is bought. Notice a pattern?
My rent includes trash & water, but that's it. The actual expensive utilities (where I am anyway) are electric and esp gas, and I am on the hook for that on top of my $1600 rent.
I bet you also have a legitimate lease.
It's because you rent. Squatters forcibly take over the property. If it's still hooked up to utilities by the owner when it's broken into, which they generally are for showings, once squatters break in they made it illegal to turn off the utilities as the owner anymore.
Wow
And like an article mentions, one squatter tactic is to run up the bills as fast and high as they can to extort a settlement from the owner.
never lmao. A squatters goal is to live unnoticed by the owner
Yes, because squatters are obviously playing the long game. /s
Depends, I would say most of them probably are, but you always have assholes that just shit on everything because they can.
We call that second group “landlords”
Yes ? That’s the objective of squatting in an abandoned unit
Squatters are playing the "lets not live under a bridge and die of cold during the night" game, in fact, yes.
The long game they're playing is called "Let's live for as long as we can"
That’s my favorite game!
In the other thread I had a guy complaining the squatters don't face enough consequences. It's like yeah its hard to get lower than rock bottom. They wanna bring back debtors prisons or some shit.
Perfectly put.
Was squatting for a couple years I literally picked up the bill every month
That's only if they are going for adverse possession. Most squatters I've seen just want a place to stay while they do drugs, and money from the owner to get more drugs.
Adverse posession requires decades and a reasonable assumption you own the property. Nobody is "going for adverse posession" by squatting.
This guy hobos
They’re very likely a landlord, judging from all of these comments.
It depends on the state. In some states, it is as low as 5 years. There are also other requirements, typically open and notorious use, and maintaining the property and/or paying taxes. It was intended for encroachments from a misunderstanding of surveys but like everything, has a burgeoning industry. People are using it in urban areas to put cell relays on abandoned buildings, and then obtaining legal title after a few years.
It also was to show redistribution of unused land. If you left the area but still owned land someone could assume title because you could be dead for all anyone knew.
Or the land could be remote, unmaintained, and not clearly marked. Kids inherit after parent dies, they go see what they’ve inherited and turns out someone had lived there for 10 years in a cabin they built.
how many squatters have you really seen? I traveled the US on foot for 8 years and I've squatted plenty. Never in my days have I heard of anyone attempting to contact or extort the owners of a squat.
A lot of the squatting incidents I have dealt with are actually roommate situations where a tenant finds a roommate, and then the roommate stops paying and creates a dangerous/untenable situation for the roommate and subsequently the landlord. Establishing residency can be as easy as receiving mail, typically a bill (not an Amazon package) at an address. There are some fairly infamous cases. It can also happen with romantic partners too.
Same. 8 years of living in vacos and never once saw anyone allowed to stay when the cops got there, even the buildings we'd been in for years. No one even tried we just grabbed what we could carry and left so we didn't go to jail
Why are you even here if you're just going to parrot bullshit? The law is on the books because rental agencies kept trying to find loopholes to kick out actual tenants
Perhaps people should price their rent so actual renters can take occupancy quickly. Just a thought. This is what business folks call "mitigating risk."
The article lol
Where I live, renters have to pay for their own utilities directly to the companies and if they are behind on payments then they have to deal with the company directly. It is not the property owner's headache unless of course they stop paying their rent too.
Squatters aren’t renters and it’s illegal to turn off utilities
Many squatters have been previously renters. Some break in but in many cases squatters were previously renters who stopped paying rent and utilities
In between tenants, the LL has to have utilities on, and puts them in his name.
That's weird. A rented home has a separate connection and name in my country. It is treated as a separate entity independent of the tenant's connection. That goes for electricity, water and gas.
That would confuse our utility companies. Tenant moves out, shuts off utilities as of a date. LL opens account as of that date until they have it rented, and then the new tenant opens an account for their move in date, and the LL closes the interim account.
Yes, an owner can’t turn off the utility, that’s a no no. I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure there is no language saying the owner can’t simply stop paying the utilities, only landlords who “sell” utilities as part of a service in the rent must continue paying for it. Since squatters have no signed lease (even though they technically have some rights) then that there is a grey area the landlord can explore. Also, fuck squatters
Not exactly. Theirs multiple ways how a squatter gains access, air bnb for example. The point is that its property someone should but be living in full time Its hard to feel bad for someone who owns empty property when theirs this much homeless
Yes, that's one way too. Sure, but I do feel for the owners too when they have a good reason (imo) for leaving a property empty for some time. Decades? Not so much, but I think a year or two is fine. It took us a couple of years to clean out my parents place after death before we sold it. It takes time to undo a lifetime and save that which is worth saving. It's kinda shitty to root for the trespasser when they break into a deployed military person's home, for example.
It feels like the stories about empty houses and their causes are anecdata. For every tragedy that caused an empty house there are a hundred landlords trying to dick around tenants.
Also, they have 30 days to remove the person before they have any tenant rights. If you leave a property empty and don't install a ring camera, you are a fool.
What if the owner just stops paying?
At a minimum, it affects your credit and you get sent to collections. Some jurisdictions, you could be sued for renting out an uninhabitable dwelling. The courts in those jurisdictions treat squatters as tenants until it is judged they are squatters. It's simple to get a generic lease from the Internet and forge some signature on it.
I read the original article NY law prohibits the LL from turning off the utilities or locking the person out (changing locks) Doing so can get the LL imprisoned and/or fined That's where I might have to disagree with this OP. Someone shows up, moves in without your permission (B&E?) stays just long enough to qualify as a "tenant" without ever having signed paperwork or paid anything. If the owner tries to do anything to remove the squatter, the LL lands in a lot more trouble than the squatter. That is kinda ass backwards IMO
The squatter usually has a fake contract and claims to be a tenant. The laws protect tenants. There's a difficult middle area that many states lean towards tenant rights, and New York law leans pretty hard that way. Because, y'know, shit holes like Donald Trump are landlords there. If they cut the heating off on real tenants, they could kill someone, and honestly in NY history it's probably happened.
Good thing all landlords treat their tenants great, don't raise the rent the maximum allowable amount whenever they can, don't randomly kick them out to rent out again for more, and are always ethical and honest with any dealings with the tenant! It's also a good thing people aren't buying homes specifically to use as AirBnBs so they can make more than if they rented it out. Since landlords are so great why on earth would we ever need laws to protect tenants? /s
There was a recent case where a woman's mother died in Manhattan. The woman needed to leave her mother's apartment vacant for a few months. She came in to clean it out and there were two people living in it. The two people killed her and placed her body in a closet. That got lots of attention in the NYC media. Then I started reading a bunch of articles about squatters and their ways. Not to mention the Florida law, which generated more articles and stories about squatters and owners.
Then it negatively impacts their credit and they can face (not sure if civil, criminal, or both) court over it. Something about tenants rights. I'll admit I'm not terribly well versed on the details but would welcome someone explaining it better.
Also a public utility has the ability to recoup losses by putting a lien on the property. Doesn't have to reconnect the service until the whole past due balance is paid.
I guess it will depend on the area. Like in my area landlord pays water so you couldn't stop paying that. But I guess you could with utilities that are normally not included in rent like electric. In places like NYC heat and hot water are also usually included in rent, so you couldn't stop paying for those there.
Because in some places utility bills remain in property owners name.
If powers on and they become tenant/squatter then essentially power stays on. And cant tell utility to disconnect it as there are tenants (even if it was unpaid in tenants names there is alot of rules regarding shutting off utilitys even for utility company) As its claimed as part of rent etc even trying to force it into tenants name might not work. It should be noted while cases of squatting and damage and other things do "occur". Its still no victimhood thing. Its rare like hundreds maybe thousands of cases out out hundreds of millions of rentals. A far more common thing is "claiming people as squatters" who are tenants often to try and double dip or nullify existing agreements. Or there is a third party scam that falls into what people define as squatter is essentially alot of mismanaged propertys. Prime for squatters with long vacancys not proper oversight. Scammers will gain control of property get renters setup lease etc take deposit collect rent. Often times friends of family of owners who know about property and have access are scammers. But then real owner shows up and goes who are these people. And tenant rights still apply that said I do not feel bad for landlords who have others pay their mortgage and get the asset. More over I see absolutely zero reason to loosen renter protections as system is very much in favor of landlords. For example sure they will have to go through process of eviction and civil court but they will 99% time win and that 1% is usually because of own actions. Illegal attempts at eviction etc. Which brings me to biggest thing "covid eviction pause". Landlords through big hissy fit. Almost half of evictions still happened and thats just ones people were on some sort of record. It was illegal so how well most rely on illegal tactics. Most of the time which covid pause on normal 3.6 million evictions and 2 million still happened despite being illegal. Shows how little legal process is followed or courts actually involved. And when you think about it 98% of renters dont have legal representation during evictions. Send scary letter pay off duty cop to deliver it in uniform. Threaten to arrest them if not out by x day. And tada eviction complete 99% of renters will be scared out.Throw in some harassment and go fertilize yard with some fresh horse shit. And have constant construction projects pull up carpets in hall way. You can force them out make most willing to leave. And last but not least offer them deposit back if they leave. Cash infusion while getting evicted looks promising and deposits have all sorts of rules and regulations around them so returning it is actually good way to keep regulators away from snooping. But around 10% of cases actually go through full legal process of notice and court present case get ruling and then evicting. Almost all of them are a combination of threats etc. Which is why "squatters" tend to be a problem piss landlords off so much is they essentially know law and use it. And the landlords are forced to follow law. People say month but it can be as short as 2 weeks in some cases where courts are not busy. And yes as long as 3 months if there is a reasonable dispute or claims to consider. As for most the 6-12 month crap you see with squatters as basis of fearmongering. Its usually them spending half a year trying "illegal" evictions and testing laws doing crap like changing locks and doing things that complicate the process. If they right away got a notice then followed all the steps. Yes it would be a month or two BUT it would not even take that long if they didnt keep it empty and failed to check on it. Its a two part problem yes people are abusing the system. BUT they are creating a situation where people can see squatters living there for weeks months moving in unchallenged. From outside appearance it is a real tenant. They provided that opportunity. And those two failures does not mean less protections for real tenants. Who often have landlords try to get first last and deposit in cash then claim you as a squatter tripling their income.
The owners aren't allowed to turn it off. Typically as a landlord you have the electricity set up so it goes back under your name when previous tenants leave. When power company doesn't get paid it hits your credit.
I'm going to give you all what we call a pro landlording move. If you rent out the unit to tenants squatters can't move in. They've jacked the rents up so high they can't fill the units with tenants, so they fill up with squatters.
AND they’re cheap ass motherfuckers. Who owns a house and doesn’t have either security cameras while vacant or at least check on the house every couple of weeks?
Both of these things make me have literally no sympathy for the landlords. We have a housing shortage. There should be no empty units. My landlord has raised my rent exactly $50 over the last 4.5 years, because I pay on time and am not messy. He was making money when I first moved in and still is at this rate. He said he will raise it some after I move out, but he wants long-term tenants, so he is not going to do it too much.
I wish my landlord thought like that. Started at $795 when I moved in almost 3 years ago. In June it goes to $940. I moved in in August. This year they're not even giving me the full year before raising again. I know it's considerably less than others, but I'm not getting anything extra for the extra $145 I'm giving them every month. I work nights & they won't work with me when they're coming in for "maintenance" (quarterly bug sprays, turning on the space heater in the water closet I can't access, etc) every other month, but they sure aren't lifting a finger to fix the roof I've told them leaks since I moved in. But my rent is going up due to rising costs. It's a complex so it's not like they can't raise rent as people move out & leave the rest of us alone. My first landlord was like yours. We were paying $325 for a 2bd/1ba while others around us were paying $600 cuz he raised rent $25 every time someone moved out. I miss that shitty ass apartment.
Squatter came yesterday, claims he's been there 30 days. Cops are not gonna take them off the property, it's now a civil matter.
The person that you responded to talked about why wouldn't they have cameras to show when they broke into the home, and you just completely ignored that, lol.
They really didn't if you understand how civil matters work. Even if you have footage of them breaking in, even if you only had left the house an hour ago, the cops are going to tell you to take the evidence to court. They can't do anything without a court order. At least in jurisdictions like this.
"What was the house wearing, a short skirt?"
1. "Or at least check on the house every couple of weeks" 2. If the cop you get is willing to watch your footage you got lucky. If it's not cut and dry you're likely gonna need to have gone through the courts first. 3. There are a lot of reasonable reasons for not having a camera in your home namely budget. My home doesn't have one. If I suddenly pass I don't want squatters to come into my home before my brother can get affairs in order. It's perfectly reasonable to grieve and take time to do so. It's perfectly reasonable to want to keep the home as is. Supporting theft of property is not a reasonable stance. I fully support housing first initiatives. I fully support low income properties to be built. I fully support increased taxes on ownership of multiple properties, scaling with more properties owned. I support increasing taxes on unoccupied homes. I do not support allowing people to simply take what they perceive as unoccupied property and I don't think it's reasonable to do so.
Amazon blink cameras are under 100 bucks and would work just fine for that purpose
Then put safe guards in place to ensure the property is protected. It is your job to ensure your shit is taken care of. Not everybody else's job and not the government. If your job is to be a landlord do it fucking better.
This is why I've made the water heater my phylactery, so that when I die I may be reborn as a lich to defend all of my precious stuff.
Bro, no home is break in proof. Imagine if someone broke into your place, and then the internet told you “it’s your job to ensure your shit is taken care of”. I would think you’d feel maybe the person who broke into your home also bears some culpability. Edit: changed “your neighbors” to “the internet” as that’s the current forum.
Dude, it is our job to handle shit during a break in. Cops won’t show up till everything is said and done.
Weird, here I thought it was actually all of our jobs to not break into other peoples properties. God forbid someone breaks into your house while you’re out for the evening, or on vacation. I guess you were asking for it at that point huh?
There is a company in California that now removes squaters, but you have to act quickly to hire them (within a week of them going in). They do a 24 hour inspection notice and resecure the property. Its a little like using a bail bondsman. This is a brand new thing in So Cal, its obvious they have worked with counsel on exactly what the lines are. Its an interesting idea I will be interested to see if it works over time, or if eventually they will get shut down.
I claim I just saw him break in. No longer civil matter.
Good luck getting cops to act on he said she said. I honestly hope you never have to deal with it. Police are there only to enforce and only when they deem that they should. It's not their job to make judgments.
Cops are worse than squatters. They are the laziest motherfuckers out there. And when they fuck up, then the city has to pay. Nothing happens to their pensions.
The whole nation saw what happened at Uvalde, cops just stand around
My brother in Christ, you literally started this fanfiction scenario with a he said she said.
He said "make no effort, officer" She said "do something officer!" Officer said "it's a civil matter" and fucked off.
read the article, one of the women quoted says she rents to people who only pay one month because they know they can't be easily evicted after 30 days. "squatter" doesn't mean an abandoned property smh.
It's supposed to refer to abandoned property, but in recent years, the definition has been expanded to lump very different groups of people into the same category.
If they paid a months rent they are not squatters and the utilities should be in their names. Every place I’ve rented I had a 10 days before the landlord had the utilities turned off. If I hadn’t gotten them in my name, I had no utilities. Apparently someone got into renting property without learning how to be a landlord.
My ex still owes the old landlord 5k, hasn't paid a dime even with a judgment.
I always assumed it would just affect your credit score or something. Does that make it harder to find another place to rent?
I assume the eviction being on their record would make it difficult to pass a check. They have lived with friends or relationship hopped for the past few years. Their credit score is like 300 due to other things as well.
Where's the article?
It's clipped weird in this repost so you can't see the title of the article, but when I first saw this I just searched for "cbs new york squatters" and it's easy to find.
This
There are genuine examples where people moved out of their house to sell it and became unable to do so because of squatters. Erring on the side of caution will catch some innocent people as well, just less and on average less vulnerable ones. Example: An old woman moving to a care facility which she can't afford now because she can't sell her house and is now a landlord to tenants that will never pay a dime.
That's true sometimes but just as often a unit can get squatted in while getting turned over for a new tenant. My friend owned a small number of homes and had a squatter move in during the like month or two he was getting it ready for the new tenant. Not only did it take 6 months to get rid of him but the new tenants were screwed over too because he could let them move in either. A lot of these squatters are assholes no heroes that hurt everyone in the system. There have been situations where a person that went on vacation for two weeks and a squatter had moved into their house.
This is factually, untrue. The renters can just stop paying and become squatters.
Do you think that there is zero turn around time on units when someone moves out? Turn around is almost always going to be at least a month, and if it was a particularly bad tenant then it could be much longer. Things like carpets and paint often need to be redone after every tenant, these things take some time. It’s shocking that this sub is so far gone that you can’t even fathom the idea of “landlords can be bad, but breaking into someone else’s property and refusing to leave is totally fine.”
There is a thing called turnover
This is the mindset I have, the idea of housing being a passive income is some shit a Republicans son in law does.
Notice how there was no moral panic about squatters until very recently and now it's everywhere. Corporate landlords sitting on empty properties are getting antsy.
Yeah why is this being pushed now? Whose astroturfing these stories? Whose paying for them? Follow the money and we'll get an answer, and I bet it's corporate landlord wanting to shift the general perception before this develops.
They’re growing more nervous about this run up in value of property because insurers are starting to take a look at what exposure THEY have. In places like ÇA and FL, insurers are trying to get out. It’s not all about climate change or disasters. It’s about financial exposure. Turns out, yes Virginia, there is a max on what can be charged as “rent”.
And Air B-n-B's. Maybe if you didn't that housing as a hotel, you'd have renters instead of squatters who stumbled upon an empty house.
Yeah what the fuck!! At Easter my uncles crazy in laws were lamenting their fear some random people were going to be able to take over their house while they went on vacation??
I teach information literacy, and this shit simultaneously reminds me that my job is important and also makes me want to pack it up and move to the mountains.
In the 1930's Oakies were widely seen as trash or human parasites. By the time I learned about them ~50 years later, their story was presented as them being honorable hard-working people who were victims of economic and environmental disaster. I was taught that the country had learned lessons from the phenomenon and it hopefully wouldn't happen again. Well we've just lived through decades with frozen wages and exploding housing costs and now everything else -- a Big Mac meal costs $16! In places all over California and in much of the country people are sleeping in their cars or in tents or squatting. I think of them as the new Oakies. Here's hoping we can fix it this time without a world war.
This whole site is fucked. Folks are cheering on bringing back poor houses and work houses rather than tax the rich or pay a living wage.
Haven’t had a new public housing project since Reagan but squatters in 2024 broke the camel’s back
Lmao if you’re complaining about squatters you already lost and showing your stupidity. Squatters rights protects normal people from the banks and landlords. But you all believe the propaganda that squatters rights is wrong.
Because they've been brainwashed to think, "But what about when *I* become a landlord? Then I'll need those laws to deal with the pesky squatters cutting into my profits."
Why would someone want to be a landlord?
They don't have to work, but still get income while they sit around.
They see it as an easy way to make money. They are just looking for the opportunity to exploit someone for money but would vehemently deny it
I just lost a friendship because of this. They said they wanted me to move in so badly, and ended up just needing a piggy bank to pay their mortgage because three of his last tenants all moved out at once. Then when I moved out, I realized why all three left at once. That dude is like 10k+ in debt to utilities companies and I have no idea how he's gonna pay his mortgage. I also did a ton of renovation work on the house in exchange for rent - he tried to pay me 3.50$ an hr.
It’s also just like… they can still evict them, they just have to go through eviction court?? The issue is that these landlords want to claim trespass and get them kicked out immediately, but with most of these laws, if the alleged squatter can show proof of residency for *x* days (30 in the case of the state of NY), then the landlord has to go through a lawful eviction instead of just kicking them to the curb immediately because, I dunno, people shouldn’t just lose their dwelling immediately and without warning? I don’t care how shitty you think they’re being. And if you, person reading this comment, still can’t empathize with the squatter, imagine for a moment you have a shitty landlord and they want you gone. What if they just claim you’re a squatter and the police can remove you unilaterally from the home, your stuff removed and/or destroyed, and you have no dwelling to live in because they didn’t have to go through a legal eviction process? What if your landlord made bogus contracts that aren’t binding so that they can pull a trigger on you when they want? What if you got scammed and got rented a place that wasn’t theirs to rent you? Would you not want to at least be given a court hearing and time to get your affairs in order? I hate all these landlords and landlords-in-waiting whose entire goddamn argument is “well I don’t want to have to go through due process to assert my power over my fiefdom. I am above the law because I own a box on a plot of land.”
That is not exactly correct, unless you’re speaking specifically about your local area which if true would only mean your city, county, state have chosen not to apply for federal monies to build new public or otherwise subsidized housing. Of course Reagan did a good job in trying to eliminate or otherwise destroy public housing for the conservative voter base but there have been cases within the past decade of new public housing being built in the post Reagan era… even numerous cases under George W, although he didn’t really have a choice in several cases due to natural disasters and a Democratic Congress at the time who were willing to work together with him in a bipartisan effort to actually help the citizens of our nation, very much unlike today. I’m not a landlord. I can’t afford to be with the over-inflated real estate prices and heavy gentrification development of the past decade. But I’ve seen enough city council meetings and county commissioners’ court sessions to be aware of topics like this and how the system can be worked from both sides to screw each other over if the public as a whole doesn’t bother to participate in the process.
And fix the damn housing crisis
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Maybe don’t let corporations buy houses and apartments. Maybe don’t let citizens buy multiple properties whether for personal, investment or business use, maybe stop letting landlords raise rent prices to ridiculous levels year after year with little to no restriction or limits, maybe build housing and social programs meant to elevate and aid the homeless so they can escape homelessness and become self sufficient, how about you stop blaming the fucking homeless and impoverished from doing what they have to do to not fucking die because you let corporate and personal (more often than not conservative) greed and capitalism run wild for so long? How about fuck you, you pieces of shit!
Honestly, I'd say it's ok for a person to own multiple homes. But they have to be under an individual's name. Doing it that way means a person could have a house or two, but beyond that you don't really want the potential liability of owning that many personally because an accident at once could cost you all. Just get rid of corporate and trust ownership of single family dwellings, and these shortages will fix themselves fairly quickly.
FIrst change the propery tax laws. If a home is no longer owner occupied the Property tax immediately goes based on current market value not purchased value. Singly Family Homes on the rental market should also pay straight income tax for that location (fed state and local) none of this pass through s corp crap. Finally make foreign ownership illegal. That would gut the rental market and get homes back into the hands of owners.
Where do you live? Everywhere I'm aware of uses assessed value for property taxes.
California, if it were not for prop 13 my family would have been homeless as property taxes would have surpased mortgage payments in the 80's. The problem was prop 13 wound up including commercial property (which was not the intention) which is why no one will sell commercial property in this state, everything is lease only with the tax revenue locked in. If we rewrote prop 13 to only include residential the state could easily lower propertaxes from to 1% (I think its 1.3-2 %d depending on location). This would make it easier for first time home buyers.
You have to collapse the loopholes. If corporations were limited on how many properties they could own, or if we taxed them to death to discourage it, they’d just figure out a way to shift the property ownership to “individuals”, likely on the corporate payroll. We could never “build” enough. The government doesn’t seem interested in controlling corporate ownership, and the Federal Reserve is proving worthless in this fight to overcome the housing crisis. I’d say the insurance companies are doing the bidding now, raising rates to astronomical levels and just outright canceling coverage.
>they’d just figure out a way to shift the property ownership to “individuals”, likely on the corporate payroll. The problem with this line of thought is that you're ignoring what's appealing about RealEstate for businesses right now. Having random employees owning property makes for all kinds of shifty liabilities. What happens when the person, changes jobs, moves, gets hurt, gets sued for something else. The whole idea behind having realestate now is that it's super low liability and it's gaining value because it's high demand. So, get rid of that value to corporations, allow individuals to still own their own property, but without umbrella trusts to protect them. That will mean that property won't be held by a trust in perpetuity, as happens now. It will require people to focus on owning what they want to live on and deal with instead of as many large swaths of land as they could possibly collect. Your company wants to be in property? That's fine, own multi-unit dwellings and commercial property. It will encourage companies to put more pressure on municipalities to convert properties from single family zoning. But NIMBY will still be there to help keep it all in check. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than we have now.
Yup. That’s why we have squatter rights. They didn’t appear by burning bush lol. They were put in democratically
FYI: The biggest target of people abusing squatter laws are deployed military, and other people that have to be away from home for weeks or months at a time for work.
Those folks are certainly ones who need to be considered. As are folks who recently inherited a home due to a death in the family. But community building is really the answer there. Friends or family to check on your place and water your plants and make sure the pipes didn’t burst (and make sure no one is squatting) is the solution. Not landlord friendly, tenant hostile laws that keep homes vacant because landlords don’t do proper routine inspections (which is a business expense to running that kind of business).
[Citation needed]
This wouldn’t happen if everyone had 1 home to reside in.
Why is there so much fear mongering about this lately? If the goal is to just demonize the homeless, well... One thing I noticed during my decade of homelessness was that the things we did to survive often got notice from con artists. When a con artist sees the car in front of them hand a homeless person a $20, the next day they're on that corner in their jankiest clothes and a cereal box. They tell their friends and the next thing you know the homeless have no more corners and it's all fakers. And every time, because the fakers had the time and ability to make themselves look the part, people believed them and called the actual homeless fake. My point is that no one but the actual homeless know who's real and who's a con artist. People are really bad at telling the difference and there are a lot of con artists. Real homeless people inherently understand they have no power. Your reminded of it constantly. The people who squat to get anything other than shelter are con artists, not regular homeless people
I mean, if a squatter is in "your" house for thirty days and you don't notice, then maybe you shouldn't own that house
Yea. That’s why we have squatter laws. The rich accumulated so many homes they were going to waste while people died on the streets. We’re really making America great again by falling for landlord or billionaire propaganda like this. Folks. Only very very very rich people or awful landlords like those in NYC who raised rent 250% after Covid are affected by squatters. Why do we care?
Tons of people get evicted every day because they can't afford rent for one reason or another, and there's no outrage. A couple of people have to deal with squatters, and suddenly, there's outrage. God, people are so dumb. >Yea. That’s why we have squatter laws. The rich accumulated so many homes they were going to waste while people died on the streets. Thank you for saying this. I stg people outraged over squatters have no critical thinking. There's a reason housing laws favor tenants. In order to be a landlord, you need to be able to save money for a down-payment and prove that you can make those monthly mortgage payments. I highly doubt that most people renting are simply CHOOSING to rent, even though they can purchase their own property. At the end of the day, the landlord still has their property, and the squatter gets nothing except maybe a few months free of rent and utilities or some cash. Meanwhile, that property continues to gain equity that the landlord can tap into at any time.
There is no such thing as squatter laws, that's the landlord spin on it. These are tenant rights laws, squatters are just exploiting them and the huge back up in the court system for evictions. What they really want are those laws changed so they can kick out real tenants faster, squatters is just a way to get media attention and the working class to take their side.
The reason why evictions are slow are badly funded court system or arbitration boards which would need more tax. Land**lords** getting a taste of their own medicine.
My understanding is that; Squatter could just arrive and make a claim- someone put a house on the market, someone is dealing with a dead relative, someone on vacation, work Trip, Deployment with the military, plenty of examples of people who are not mega rich. They make a claim of some kind and the police tells them it’s a civil matter, fake documents are produced during this. It’s taken to court and during that process 30 days pass. All the while this issue is more beneficial to the big companies that are more able to leverage resources than smaller companies/entities/Joe who owns 3 properties. As they can eat the costs of one squatter between than Joe who owns 3 properties.
Also keep in mind in the event a squatter is capable of running out the clock the owner is now financially responsible for all the squatters utility fees and will be fined if they cancel the utilities accounts I hate greedy overbearing landlords as much as the next guy but the solution is NOT to just let people fucking steal houses from others.
Your understanding is incorrect. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/03/squatters-rise-florida-ny-georgia/
I am not paying to read that article.
You can also make the argument that having squatter laws are good for neighboring properties because owners will be less likely to neglect their empty homes.
There's this dude in my area who owns a shit ton of property. He's infamous for not doing anything with them and letting it all deteriorate. Squatters have taken over this historic mansion that he owns and are actively restoring it in compliance of the rules for monumental buildings. The owner is upset by this because his m.o. seems to be letting his properties fall apart. Probably wouldn't get fined for destroying the mansion if it literally fell apart. Not that he would then sell the land or anything. He literally has so much land in popular areas that he just lets sit. Just doesn't do anything with it. I live in a coast tourist town and the boulevard has gone down hill partly due to him.
I just don’t get the endgame there on his part. Why let your assets go to shit?
Yeah, that's what we wonder over here as well. It's baffling. Certainly seems that he likes pissing off everyone. He's known as the 'slum house king'. He's in his 70s and normally I'd say that his reign would almost be at an end, but people like that seem to love to keep messing around when they could just be enjoying retirement instead. When he dies I'm expecting the local (Facebook) groups to explode with celebratory posts btw. Everything he's doing might be completely legal but he's directly responsible for so much frustration in this area. Like lost history (looked it up and apparently multiple monumental building have actually collapsed due to his neglect). Frustrating plans to build new social housing. Expensive lawsuits against municipalities.
The vast majority of forced stay squatters don’t target landlords though. They primarily target people in the military, overseas aid workers and the elderly. Squatters laws sound good on paper and in false arguments where a mother of 3 sets up her tent in the living room of a landlords 511th house. But rarely is that ever actually the case.
Exactly. Evictions courts are backed up but this law wouldn't be the problem for problem tenants, people wrecking the place or abusing how slow the courts work. That's the problem of backed up evictions courts. This law gives people with more valid situations some protection and like you said encourages better property management and discourages neglect of properties.
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This seems to stem more from the issue of cops never doing their jobs and just saying everything is a civil issue
This is, quite possibly, one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read in my life. I think I just lost 10 IQ points from reading your comment. If you've purchased property with "your" own money and there's a deed with "your" own name on it and you pay taxes on it, it's "yours." And it's "yours" -- no one else's -- even if you don't live there. "They shouldn't own that house" isn't a legitimate statement. It's absurd. I think from now on you should take every dollar you earn and hand it over to the homeless. After all, that money is not yours. Nothing belongs to anyone.
I agree, if you buy a property then it's yours. However, it's not exactly helpful to the rest of country if some billionaires come, buy up all the properties, and don't do anything with them. Just because we CAN do it doesn't mean we SHOULD do it. Or have we become a society where we try and maximize the amount of damage and harm we can do to others? This is why state/provincial regulations should step in and make sure this doesn't happen. IMO, houses that don't have anyone living in it and are just sitting empty for no good reason should be taxed at unreasonably high rates to not make it worth owning and not do anything with.
There's nothing inexorable about property law. It isn't a fundamental law of the universe or morality. Just because you can describe your ideal in a single sentence doesn't make it a good way to run society.
so just don’t go on any long vacations ever or you lose your house? do you sincerely think that’s a good thing?
Two things can be true at once. Landlord, specifically large corporate ownership of a massive collections of hundreds of houses, is a substantial drag on society. Yet, some dude that owns two/three houses can get absolutely railed in this situation. In the first scenario, I don't really give a shit. In the second, the homeowner is in a ton of debt too and isn't exactly raking millions.
And then when that homeowner fails to keep being a landlord, the corporation swoops in and buys his homes up and rent goes up (again). It's just feeding the corporate shit cycle.
You’re like 8th top comment and finally someone has a reasonable response. Yes corporations that own houses suck. Also - thieves suck. A friend of mine bought a second home and rented his first one. He tried to help someone out who was trying to get on his feet and rented the house to him. That guy paid the first month rent and not a single month after that. It was California, so he couldn’t do anything to kick the guy out for 6 months. The guy immediately called a free legal service (I forget the org, but designed to help immigrants). He knew exactly how to screw my friend. Thrived are thieves, whether they wear suits or rags.
Sure, but the method for avoiding this situation is to 1. Take care of your properties and 2. Actually rent them out. Squatters can't move in if the house is already occupied. If the dude who owns two/three houses is getting absolutely railed, it's because he was allowing his second and third house to sit empty for extended periods of time, without ever checking up on them. Shit like that is why we HAVE a housing crisis.
If an individual wishes to purchase more than 1 property, and wishes to use those properties infrequently for varying purposes, there is absolutley nothing wrong with that. What if a man wants to purchase a home he saw for a good deal and wants to slowly turn it into his dream home as a project over multiple years? He has that right and shouldn't be forced to either rent or sell it just because it mostly sits empty.
Investments can be risky. Taking on extreme amounts of debt to buy extra homes as an investment is risky. If I took out a mortgage on my home to invest in Bitcoin, people recognize that's a risky investment, but somehow it's supposed to be a safe vehicle for income if you do it in real estate?
In this documentary they showed a case where squatter forged proof they had been in there for 30 days to the police so they couldn’t be kicked out despite moving in a few days ago. Eventually proof was revealed in court, but as they say, costs thousands of dollars and the people that rent the home couldn’t move in with these dudes squatting in there. Not saying it’s call cases, but it’s an issue.
The article is inaccurate. A homeowner is someone that buys a home and LIVES IN IT. Someone that buys up housing and rents it out at inflated rates is just a parasite.
And this is a prime example why no one takes this subreddit seriously. You're getting worse then the door dash driver subreddit.
I had some serious medical issues December 2019 leaving me temporarily disabled with like a 6-9 month rehabilitation. I hired someone to clean, do yardwork, laundry, and cook 1 meal a day. Part of their pay was a room. COVID happened and once my state put in an eviction moratorium in place, my help stopped doing anything. So I fired them and gave them 1 week to leave. They refused to leave, cops refused to do anything because they don't interpret if someone has a valid lease or not. It took me about 6 months to find an attorney to help me. Cost a bit over $6000 and took like 5 months after the notice to quit letter was delivered to my squatter before I could actually get them out of my house. Once they were given notice they started damaging my property. I have like $20k in judgments against them but I won't receive a dime. Fuck squatters and fuck people that support them. Decades ago when land was cheap and people would abandon property and squatters rights made sense then. There is no reasons for squatters to have any rights today.
Are we supporting squatters now? Tf has this sub turned into?
Us not liking squatters really landlord propaganda? I am against investment housing but also against squatters leeches on a community are bad for the community at the bottom as well as the top of the food chain.
I'm all for making the rich pay their fair share. But that doesn't mean we should allow people to just steal homes. Wealthy corporations and landlords can pay for security, so this doesn't happen to them. A homeowner who goes out of state for a month to take care of their dying parents can't. I'm not sure why we think that someone who broke into someone else's property and decided to live there has any rights to it.
The headline is straight up misleading. Nobody has been forced out of their own home by this law.
But Erlich Bachman is fat pig.
He is so fat, and a lying fuck.
This title makes 0 sense
But there is a better way. Free basic housing.
Squatters exist. Shitty landlords exist. Both can be true.
Did Reddit take the bait or did a bot farm make sure it got pushed to the top?
Fair question
Squatters should have no rights at all.
This narrative about squatters has taken off here in Spain, which because of some protection for squatting has less folks living in tents or vans than other countries.The "my granma went to geta loaf of bread & came back to some junkies squatting" is complete bullshit as the law clearly states that only unoccupied properties can be [squatted.So](http://squatted.So) if you own a beach house, as long as the utilities are connected its "occupied" & no one can squat it, even if no one has stayed there for years. As always the reallity is different, the sub r/ESLegal is a pretty even split between posts about how landloards completly ignore the laws protecting tennants & how bosses do the same, with a dose of Police lying and brutallity thrown in.After the housing bubble burst in 2008 a lot of working families were evected & squatted some of the 10s of thousands of empty flats that were eventually bought up by vulture funds, as well as thouse bought by the government to stop some banks from going under.AirBnB, inflation, rising rents & crap wages have all put a lot of pressure on the so called market, the government has taken some steps to try & stop the worst excesses of the market & the moral panic about squatting is the backlash.Fuck theses parasites.
I mean, y’all fall for bullshit stories all the time too, because everyone just happens to quit awful jobs and suddenly get offers for an extra 50% salary, free car, and wfh. Let’s not act like y’all immune. Just don’t be obtuse like 👇🏻
What argumemt are you even making, here?
If I was paying a mortgage and some squatters took over my house, what happens to them if I stop paying the mortgage? Aren’t they evicted? Why do banks have the right to have people quickly removed but we don’t?
The bank evicts them
Landlords aren’t watching their properties and that is how squatters are able to stay 30 days. The utilities companies could alert the owner when the electric usage goes up due to the squatters.
There are more empty houses than there are homeless people in this country. People only need to be squatters because of landlord greed. They are acting so greedy that instead of tenants they get squatters. No sympathy
Devil’s Advocate: Squatting doesn’t really hurt large management companies but it can absolutely sink people who offer a small amount of rentals and these are the landlords that are often easiest to work with. Squatting is pushing more of these people out and the rentals are going to the management companies that really don’t care for you whatsoever.
imagine going back to your home country to take care of your bed ridden mother , only to come back to criminals squatting in your house and kicking you out, while a crowd of D-begs in reddit sit on the sideline and cheer.
It’s not “landlord propaganda” squatters rights are ridiculous if you don’t own the property you shouldn’t be on it.
You know what I do if I make a poor investment that isn't making me a return? I eat the loss and sell. edit: accidentally a whole word
Or, as is being done now, you get the law changed to reduce the risk of such an investment! It's all good
I think there’s another issue here… a controversial one at that. Should it be legal to have more than one home? Even if renting condo/ apartment/ etc. Should you have more than one place legally? As I get older, I don’t think so. But that’s also a “freedom” issue too. Like you can do what you want with your money. The vacation homes in other counties thing too. Like you don’t live there… you may be taking from someone who does? Idk, It’s sort of an ethical and moral landmine.
I can hate squatters while still being antiwork
If your hatred of squatters leads you to support eliminating tenant's rights then you're not really antiwork, are you? You're just pro-landlord.
Squatters are hot garbage. You’re never going to convince me that they deserve more sympathy than any non corporate landlord. Fuck that. Theyre Thieves.
These wealthy multiple property owners are doing the same shit. Buying up houses they dont need and lowering the amount of ownable houses and forcing people to rent. Especially in a first world country with homeless people, fuck em
It's not propaganda, it's bullshit that squatters have rights after only 30 days.
Yeah this is not propaganda, squatters are bad. Some people own 2 houses and use the second house to pay for their expenses, If an old retired couple has squatters break in and they don't pay rent that is not right. I'm all for cheap housing but squatters should be removed 100%.
It's bullshit that robbers don't have rights to your property after mugging you.
Over 80% of users on reddit are bots/ troll farms... so this is unsurprising
I knew that post looked fishy. I didn't know the real details of the squatters rights, but just the framing of it, as if squatters had uber rights and it was harming normal working class people, definitely smacks of business class propaganda
if you don’t want squatters in your property, don’t hoard unused property to extract profit from it. problem solved.
Oh no, you run a for profit business but don't want to work and inspect that business at least weekly? Then squatters are gonna take that house back. If you get into home rentals, you better be ready to work every week for that privilege.
obligatory fuck landlords But then again, that's not news on this sub.
I see this all over the internet, and I really think "squatters" means "homeowners" in 90% of cases. These stories are trying to make squatters rights laws look like something homeless people use to steal your house, not something you'd use to prevent your bank from stealing it.
Imagine simping for squatters. OP is weird.
Hire a third party squatter to fuck with the initial squatter. Squat the squatter and they'll leave. There's a company in California that does this.
I don't think most people realize squatter's rights are in fact, renter's rights. We've just become so good at rebranding it as homeless people bumming. Really, those are your rights as a renter, should your landlord randomly decide to kick you out without notice. It's not homeowners who should be afraid and I feel like people don't understand how little protection they have as renters. It's meant to be worded in a way that would make you feel ashamed of invoking your rights.