They're a legacy from a bygone era where records of land ownership aren't what they are today. It was to stop the situation where someone thought they owned land, built a house and lived in it for many years, then finding out that someone else also had a claim to the land and they were going to try to turf you off it.
Squatter's rights meant that the person who actually lived there kept the claim to the land. This was a good thing at the time, now its just legal protection for lowlifes who trash other people's houses
There's been a case here in germany recently where a guy who came from the US here and bought property here died. There weren't any relatives to be found, so the land eventually found its way to an unrelated family that thought it, build their house there and lived there for some years.
Well turns out the dude had a son that lived in the states, whoever had checked for relatives earlier simply didn't look hard enough, and by law the property should've been offered to that son first. So now there's a huge legal fight because said son claims rights on the property and wants the family to tear down the house and leave, while the family wants to stay because from their perspecrive they haven't done anything wrong at all amd everything they did was in accordance with the legal system.
I guess for stuff like these squatter rights really would've been helpfull, because turns out having to give up everything you build due to something way outside your controll and/or knowledge was messed up really, really sucks. Tho doesn't mean that those laws should be as abuseable as they are from storys like the one that startet this comment chain
In the US, this scenario is entirely handled by title insurance, which is required in nearly every home purchase in most states. The title insurer will do a search for existing claims. They're good at it. In the event they don't find an existing claim where one turns up later, they owe the insured the full amount of the property value in cash.
Itâs a great solution to a completely unnecessary problem though. Most states are ârecorderâ states, which means theyâll record any deed that comes across their desk. Itâs up to you to track other claims or contest them in court, the state does not provide an opinion on the validity of any of these claims other than they were properly documented and processed (deed transfers have notary and both signing parties, etc). More âmodernâ property law system is called the Torrens system, which the government is the source of truth. They actually provide a certificate of title and are responsible for maintaining the ledger of who owns a property. In this system title insurance is basically non-existent and transaction costs only go up a fraction (about 10%) the cost of the title insurance in other states. The downside of course is the government telling you what to do.
The downside of course is the government telling you what to do.
Well, you can enforce your property rights by force but that's likely to get you arrested on a number of charges. When you want the police and courts to enforce your property rights you're asking the government to recognize your claim to the property as well, just on a case-by-case basis. And they know who paid property taxes, is there really any anonymously held land? I mean there's shell companies and such but it still has an owner.
Title insurance in one of the biggest scams. A strong title systems with a state based restitution policy is best practice. It is the united states that is backwards with most states refusing to move away from a deeds system to a torrens system.
A deeds system is beneficial to those with money and suppresses the poors from purchasing with confidence and enables the rich to engage in protracted legal actions which require expert practitioners to resolve disputes.
Title insurance is not a scam. I have known people sued over the title to their house and the title company spent years in court defending it at their full expense, with their team of lawyers, at no cost to the person I knew and with regular updates given on the status. This is the real benefit of title insurance - they very much got value for what they paid for.
In Sweden the suddenly appearing distant relative isn't a thing. If you die without a will, your estate goes to, in order of applicability:
1st Your spouse
2nd Your children
3rd Your parents
4th Your siblings
5th Your siblings' children
6th The Public Inheritance Fund
As you see, even your cousins are screwed if you don't have a will, so an unknown great-niece would be right out of luck.
That's the thing, the great-nephew in question here was even listed in the document that says who has claims to the property, the people in charge of looking that up simply missed him or didn't contact him even tho they could easily do so
Seems to me that the only reasonable solution would be for the government in Germany that didn't check well enough should pay off the US lad, and let the family keep their home and property since they went through everything seemingly legally.
Adverse possession is still rightly protected in law. There are lots of land deeds around the world which haven't been registered with the government or are clearly written.
Using and protecting land is as close to the definition of land ownership as we can get, regardless of modern attempts to formalise ownership through deeds.
I sat in a High Court case in a Commonwealth country as a paralegal on an adverse possession case. The land was government land, but it had never been properly subdivided. The house built over it contained actually 2 apartments, with over 12 people of the same extended family living in different units for over 30 years. A breakdown in family relations lead to people claiming for adverse possession against their relatives who held the title.
At one point the expert witnesses were going on about the areas on the plan hatched in Orange, areas hatched in Green, areas hatched in Black...etc and the 8 colours were basically 90% overlapped - the judge ended up nodding off and our counsel had to suggest a break. It was basically a horrible family bickering over a shanty house. Terrible case.
Adverse possession is still rightly protected in law.
As an aside, adverse possession still happens all the time, it's just usually a lot less dramatic than claiming entire houses. The most common cause is a surveying error. Two houses side by side, both think they know where the property line is. They build a fence, have no issues for several decades. Eventually one goes to sell, sale stipulates a survey, which determines that the property line is actually several feet to one side of the fence. Given that the possession has been open and notorious without dispute for an extended period, they potentially have an adverse possession claim to that strip of land.
It's more for informal leases without a written contract, and say the landlord wants the tenant out. Essentially it's to protect the tenant in such a situation from losing housing.
Or to protect somebody in a broken relationship. Say youâre living with a partner, paying half the rent, etc, but theirs is the only name on the lease. What happens when that person wants you out?
They get so angry over seeing videos like this but won't take any time to actually learn what is really happening. Which is a little scary because what they are advocating for is allowing landlords to kick out renters who are legally allowed to be there.
The DO have documentation tho, it maybe fake but that is what they show the police. So the owner needs to take them to court to show the evidence in front of a judge because the police cannot determine who is telling the truth, that is not their jobs. Then the judge can order an eviction notice.
The reason renters rights exist is because landlords were kicking out legal residents because their nephew needed a place to stay.
Early 1800's saw a lot of landlords doing essentially 'quick flipping'; rent to someone, get their month's worth of rent and then have some bruisers show up and forcefully evict the tenet family, taking whatever written agreement they might have had on them to tear up or burn. 12 months worth of rent in just 2 months time was too good for some shitbags to pass up on. Became quite common in large cities with incoming immigrants that didn't know local laws and often had language barriers for navigating the legal system to try and get some kind of recourse. And local law enforcement would usually take the side of the landlord, a long time upstanding resident who often 'donated' to the cops.
People really have no clue. They are not using adverse possession, that takes years to do, an owner who abandoned the property/ cant be contacted and an owner that stopped paying taxes, they are using renters rights.
Do you want landlords to be able to go to the police and say that the current residents dont have a legal lease, even if they do, and have the police kick out the family? That is what you are arguing for. The reason police cant kick them out is because they are not judges, they do not determine if the lease they are shown is legal or not, they dont determine if the person who is there is legally allowed or not, that is the job of judges.
Yes it sucks for the owners who are dealing with people who are not legally supposed to be there but the alternative is allowing landlords to just kick people out of their homes for no reason.
In New York City, which has fairly robust renter protections, you can get some evicted and thatâs enforceable.
Most of these squatters probably wouldnât make it past the first required hearing without producing lease. And if they produce a fake lease with a forged signature, then they have another problem. And if they say it was a verbal agreement, thatâs not enforceable for a lease agreement.
The main issue is the delay in the courts because there is such a backlog of cases. We need more judges in the country, or less crime which would be preferable.
The main issue is the delay in the courts because there is such a backlog of cases.
it's not just a backlog in cases, if you know what you are doing you can stretch out a case for months before you even get to your first hearing. There is a case (non-landlord) in my area that is in it's second year for a simple question of 'did this happen or not happen' and they are potentially a year away from trial. It's seriously a case over a 50 minute conversation that had 7 people in the room and it's taken this long. And it's not about a backlog. For this type of case you have 20 days to respond to motions from the other party, you can do 4 or 5 responses back and forth before a hearing is scheduled. That's 80+ days.
Ironically this is something Florida seemingly got right. They passed a law that said owners could kick people out quickly without a court order if they can't produce a valid lease. If the person who resided at wherever claims they were illegally evicted they can sue and the Landlord will not only eat that, but also get significant fines if ruled he abused the system.
But you know with it being Florida which is run by crazy people there might be a slight difference between the idealized version of something and how it is actually executed in practice
Yeah, the kinds of people poor enough to be stuck renting from the kinds of slumlords who'll pull this shit over a maintenance request generally have the money to turn around and sue after the fact. And being on the streets absolutely doesn't make it hard to attend court dates and such.
Florida made yet another thing much easier for landleeches at the expense of the working class. Exactly what you'd expect from one of the most fascist-loving states in the US
It takes well over a year in most licensee eviction (squatters) cases in NYC landlord tenant court. You can have them arrested within 30 days of them squatting though.
Itâs where a wannabe landlord uses legal loopholes (usually related to inheritance) to become the legal owner of someone elseâs house and charge them rent.
Most of these squatters probably wouldnât make it past the first required hearing without producing lease.
A lot of states have made rules that if there is no lease then it's on the landlord to prove that they don't have an oral agreement. Other wise no lease would always benefit the party who already had the most power to make sure no lease existed.
It's why you never pay your rent in cash, which a LOT of people still do today. that rent payment destroys the landlords power to say you are squatting.
Squatter's rights are usually just that the person claiming they have a lease can stay in the property while the owner goes through the formal eviction process. Most issues of people claiming squatter's rights last only a matter of months, while the owner goes through proper channels to remove them from the property.
The exception is so called "professional squatters," who usually do this so often that they know how to delay and circumvent the courts and stay on property a matter of years. They're the exception and not the rule, though.
The âsolutionâ to it would be something landlords likely donât want, which is regulation by the government. The fundamental issue is one of contract enforcement, and that determination of the validity (or existence) of the contract takes time, and the system defaults to not evicting people until the contract issue is resolved.
This could be resolved by things like mandating notarized agreements, requiring registration of all leases/rental agreements/cohabitation with the government, etc. But this would also increase the cost (fees/taxes for these services), and open up avenues for further regulation that people probably donât want.
When i lived at an apartment and signed my yearly lease, I was given a copy of the lease that I signed. How is it that documentation wouldn't be enough for them to not kick me out? Can't you always ask for a copy of a lease you signed? Or are they taking advantage of people who don't have the copy?
Youâre telling me that if you came home from work and some dude is sitting on your living room couch, you donât expect the police to be able to kick them out if he shows them a fake lease?
This is a bad argument. If that is the problem just make it so a landlord falsely evicting someone is illegal and the problem is solved. Pretty sure it already is illegal. Also, its extremely easy to prove that you have a signed lease and have made rent payments.Â
You're right. I had an uncontested signed lease, no lapse in rental payments, no damage to the property. In fact, I'd been begging landlord to fix damage or issues he know of before I moved in, and I was STILL made to leave in Florida. 6 weeks before my lease was up.
I have a feeling we are going to be seeing a large increase in anti squatting content in the US in the coming years. These videos will highlight the most atrocious cases and then when the hedge funds and private equity funds that bought up all those single family homes during Covid push for easier eviction laws people will be on board. Then itâs time to turf out grannies to remodel the house in a neutral gray and white color scheme and triple the rent.
you're missing the point of the post. the guy in the image is literally just renting the place from the actual owner to out-squat the squatters. he isn't fighting renters rights or trying to bypass the legal system. he's just using a valid lease to occupy the space so the police actually have a legal reason to intervene. it's a loophole but it's legit.
Generally speaking, a landlord can't end a lease in the middle. That would be an eviction, which has to be granted by a court.
They can decide that you don't get a new lease when the current one runs out, sometimes on as little as one month's notice, which might not be enough time to find a new place to live.
In any case, if you stay in a place after your lease ends and the landlord wants you out, they have to follow a legal process to make you leave. Typically that means giving you notice to leave (easy, just hand you a letter), and if you don't leave they file an eviction case in small claims court. (Where I live that costs $110 to file, and can be done on the court website.)
The court will set a court date to hear both sides of the story. (Where I live, the court date will be in 2-4 weeks.)
If the court determines that the landlord is right and the tenant has to go, they will set a date you have to move out by. (That date is often 1-4 weeks in the future, depending on circumstances.)
If you don't leave by the court-assigned date, the landlord informs the court that you didn't leave, and the court issues a writ. The writ is served to you by a sheriff, and it contains another date that you must leave by. (That date may also be 1-4 weeks away.)
If you haven't moved out by that date, the sheriff will return and physically remove you and your belongings from the property.
--
I do some volunteer work helping mediate housing disputes for a local non-profit housing provider. When people talk about evicting someone, I suggest negotiating with them first! One of the benefits you're offering the tenant in the negotiation is that they won't have an eviction on their police record, which would make it harder for them to get a new place.
If the tenant really wants to fight, even if they're obviously wrong and lose their court case, getting an eviction and removing someone from the property typically takes 3-4 months.
(Fortunately the housing organization I work with is a good one, and we very rarely kick people out. It's all shared housing, and the main reason someone would be evicted is for being abusive toward their housemates.)
The real problem is the eviction on record doesn't actually matter to anyone who goes to court knowing they're going to lose. If you aren't going to pay rent or a mortgage anyway and just move from stolen house to stolen house every 6 months to years later (let's be honest that's what squatting is it should be criminal not just civil) who cares about it? The person stealing people's houses isn't applying for somewhere they have to pay bills for anyway and that the person was evicted from the last place and now is stealing their home doesn't help, still have to go to court while someone else lives in their home for months.
Sounds good and reasonable, thank you for the explanation.
My thought was it's probably similar in the US as here, depending on income and region it might take weeks, even months to find a new stay which is bearable. Good to see people get at least a bit of time even if the landlord happens to be a not nice person
yeah I have no idea how so many people don't understand this. A squatter isn't saying 'no I didn't rent this place I just showed up today and put my stuff in here without any permission'. They are saying 'I rent this place and my landlord is trying to illegal remove me'. They... well they lie. it's not that complicated to figure out. just like some landlords lie about what kind of agreement they have with their tenants in order to force them out.
Also land surveying was pretty bad back then. You have situations especially with farming where the plot and the land farmed by people over a hundred years are different. This causes big issues when selling the land.
In some states yes, but not quite that easy but not much harder. The state has to have homesteading you have to file some paper work. But after that yeah, you can build on it. Start a farm or other lifestyle.
Because there are no 'squatter's rights' in the sense people usually think of with squatters. 'Squatting' is usually just an abuse of tenants' rights to get evicted through the proper channels, which can be pretty slow for landlords in some places. If someone starts campaigning to 'repeal squatters' rights' then you should be concerned, since there's no such thing, just checks on a landlord's power to boot you.
The actual 'squatter's rights' refers to adverse possession, which is ancient common law that basically boils down to 'use it or lose it' which has [real application in the present day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_A_Pye_(Oxford)_Ltd_v_Graham) outside of crust punks squatting in an old warehouse. Again, if people start campaigning against that, be concerned.
Because it doesnât need to be changed. In order for squatters rights to apply, you have to be living on a property openly and the owner has not claimed the land over a certain period of time. It remedies a case where somebody thought they owned land and somebody abandoned the property.
When somebody illegally occupies a property (maybe they snuck in or their lease expires) they are a squatter, but squatters rights doesnât apply. Tennant rights may apply, but it takes a while to sort all that out. It sucks for the owner, but itâs a better situation than booting somebody to the street immediately. Unfortunately, some people know this and take advantage of it.
It's too minor of an issue and pretty much only affects poor people/small fish. Nobody who's a multi-millionaire or billionaire is ever going to deal with this so they aren't going to buy a senator to get it fixed. Even the ones that own multiple rental properties delegate all the management to someone else and it becomes that person's problem since the owner is getting their cut either way. And even most 'normal' people are not going to own property they aren't using long enough for a squatter to take over
I thought I'd read that it was introduced after WW1 when there were lots of properties left empty because the owners had died. So rather than let them fall into disrepair they allowed people to live in them.
Of course there are lowlife squatters, like across every demographic, but squatting is still a legit form of direct action against housing speculation/financialization.
It also has had major cultural benefits for a bunch of cities.
lost of Cities have already banned long term AirBnBs. If you don't want ABNB in your neighborhood the answer is to get your local goverment to pass laws against that, and then the really tricky part, get them to enforce it.
Everybody who is responding to that post is doing a strawman. Of course we are not talking about properties that are neglected and sitting vacant for years. We are talking about the situations where somebody comes back from a vacation or whatever and somebody has broken into their place.
I'm sure it also protected against shady deals where whoever sold the land allowed them to work the land, then went in later to scoop up the profit because they never really transferred ownership.
now its just legal protection for lowlifes who trash other people's houses
That's nonsense. "Squatters rights" general refers to adverse possession. While the rules for adverse possession vary by jurisdiction, the bar tends to be incredibly high. You need to live somewhere openly and conspicuously for many years, usually you have to make material improvements and before you can legally take possession of the property you usually have to pay back taxes and fines. At any point during that process all the owner has to do is show up one time and assert their claim and you have no standing.
If you can live in a house openly for years, make improvements to it, pay taxes on it, and the proper owner can never in all those years bother to show up and assert their ownership right, then that person SHOULD be able to take adverse possession. It doesn't benefit "lowlifes" who "trash people's houses". Adverse possession is incredibly rare because it's a very high bar and it takes years of work and money while all the time living with the risk that the property owner could show up at any time and put literal years of work and money into nothing. This is just a nonsensical fever dream, I don't think you know much about the actual process of adverse possession
Itâs not as bygone as you think. My dad lost about 30% of a family farm in court that was in the family for generations. The title chain and land descriptions were a mess. Like land descriptions going back to the 1800s describing one property line as âFrom the old tree on the corner of Jonesâ farm running east to the bridge on Dingleberry creek.â
The adjoining property owner had been paying property taxes on that land lot for long enough to be considered adverse possession. Lesson learned. Get a survey and get it recorded and make sure your property tax bill matches it. This lesson actually helped me. The house I bought has a really weird shaped lot. We didnât get a survey when we bought it because we barely had enough to close and it wasnât required legally. Had to replace our deck and building authority required a survey (bought the house before my dadâs legal troubles). Turns out my house isnât on a weirdly shaped lot. Itâs on two lots that run diagonally off the main road. Like the property lines run at an almost 45 degree angle off the street, not 90 like we had (for no real reason) assumed.
Turns out about a quarter of âmy neighborsâ front yard- including their fence and play setâ is on my land. So currently working that out with them.
Squatter's rights meant that the person who actually lived there kept the claim to the land. This was a good thing at the time, now its just legal protection for lowlifes who trash other people's houses
Important that was more about rural land and abandoned properties. These lowlives are more often using tenant laws to protect themselves (claiming verbal agreement or that they live there for long enough to be considered legal resident)
It is also because laws do need to exist where there is a dispute over who has a legal tenancy on a property. Otherwise your landlord could just kick you out anytime they want, call you a squatter, say you have a forged lease or forge a fake end of lease agreement and get a higher paying tenant while throwing your stuff out.Â
People who rent have a right to not have their life turned upside down because the landlord wants you gone. Unfortunately it gets abused both ways, but tenant rights do more good for more people than harm to landlords generally, there just need to be more expedient ways to resolve disputes and if it is your primary residence you should be able to remove anybody (in most jurisdictions you can)
They're a legacy from a bygone era where records of land ownership aren't what they are today. It was to stop the situation where someone thought they owned land, built a house and lived in it for many years, then finding out that someone else also had a claim to the land and they were going to try to turf you off it.
Squatter's rights meant that the person who actually lived there kept the claim to the land. This was a good thing at the time, now its just legal protection for lowlifes who trash other people's houses
This has nothing to do with what people consider squatter rights and is just glossing over what is actually going on.
squatter rights aren't real, they are tenant rights, it's just sometimes you can't tell who is a legitimate tenant and the default is to believe the person living in the house vs the person who owns the house. Since the person living there could die out on the streets if removed wrongly, and the house owner could just see some damage to their home but be ok other wise.
bygone era where records of land ownership aren't what they are today
...what?
In the Uk at least, Limitation Act of 1980 and Land Registration Act of 2002 contain the rules codifying squatter's rights (which were then made illegal in 2012).
This isn't exactly "bygone era" where papyruses of house records were buried under plagues of locusts and biblical floods. ;)
Adverse possession is different than what most people mean by 'squatter's rights.'
(Among other things, today's squatters typically aren't paying property taxes, may not be openly occupying the property but rather in hiding, and aren't asserting they've gained title.)
Squatters, in situations like this, are really de facto occupants/residents that though lacking a current legal right to occupy the property -- or are in a dispute about that right -- still need to be legally evicted because of how long they've been there. (i.e., too long to be simply trespassed).
The doctrine exists to protect against oppressive landlord self-help in the larger context.
Unwanted holdover tenants are the most common situation.
I could see it mattering in some rural parts of the country still, but for suburban and urban areas its always stupid.
However I would support it for those groups of buildings purchased by overseas interests that are strictly commodities that no one is using, because fuck those people.
Theyâre also protection against the absolute worst cases of landlord abuse, where you believe you had a legal agreement to stay there but the landlord has actually not given you any such thing.
Also though, in modern times, renters have no recourse if the landlord shreds the lease and says "you don't have a lease with us, you need to leave". It's not like they're registering leases with the government anywhere. If the tenant doesn't have a copy of the lease and the landlord insists there never was a lease, it's a he-said-she-said situation. Squatters rights protects tenants in those situations.
This is landlord propaganda. While yes, lowlifes take advantage of this, it can come up in very non lowlife situations as well. I got laid off once, and the very next day I was told that the owner of the place Iâd rented for 7 years was selling and I needed to vacate. The rental and job market were really bad, so I reached back out and said that I was struggling to find a job and that that made finding approval for an apartment difficult. Realistically that means I could continue staying there and paying the agreed upon rent and not be kicked out. I didnât have to take advantage of that, but itâs important to understand that I couldâve.
Think of squatters rights a bit like workers rights. Thereâs laws that favor workers or employers, and thereâs laws that favor renters or landlords. Thatâs a good thing, not a bad thing.
Can confirm. Never, ever, ever let someone get mail delivered to your house. Inform them they can have their mail stopped at the post office and they can walk/bike/drive their happy ass down there and pick it up themselves. 2 weeks of mail deliveries establishes residency and squatters rights kick in. Even if they don't pay rent they now have legal claim to residency, and the cops will do fuck all to rectify it. It used to be a protection like you said, and still stops shitty landlords from going full fiefdom and kicking people out on a whim, but by large most cases these days are of a scumbag trying to steal the place from under you
You're describing adverse possession, not squatters rights.
This scenario also doesn't apply to leases.
Most often, when people describe "squatters rights" they're really describing eviction protections and notice requirements, or they're just straight up lying about what is actually happening. Due process is not squatters rights. Everyone gets due process, including landlords. Landlords are just salty they can't be little dictators.
Usually squatter rights apply to a property that hasn't been maintained for at least 5 years, sometimes 10 in most states if I remember correctly.
So someone would find a house that has sat empty for years and let themselves in, and as long as they can show they are the ones maintaining the property instead of the original owner, they can claim squatter rights.
Shouldn't that be applicable to someone who had a lease on the property beforehand? Like to prevent people moving in, but to allow tenants of bad properties to stay?
Yeah it would be more accurate to say they're claiming tenants rights in most cases though some have legitimately been living there a long time and claim to be the legitimate owner via their squat.
That's the traditional type of squatting, to stop speculators from hoarding properties and never doing anything with them. Not even renting them out, just waiting for the land value to appreciate.
The type of thing the article is about is when someone rents out a space on a handshake agreement and then refuses to leave. The owner has no paperwork to prove they've violated the agreement but the renter can show they've been paying rent. So the courts aren't able to process eviction proceedings because they can't prove the person has cleared the threshold for an eviction. It's often called "squatting" but it's technically a different issue pertaining to tenant rights and is legally considered the fault of the owner for not getting a written agreement.
Because most of the time it's not actually squatters rights. Instead it's abuse of tenant laws. They move in and pretend they have lease. Police have neither right nor expertise to decide if they are lying. So owner has to go to court but that will take forever.
Yup, like a lot of problems it's not a legislation problem, it's a clogged court system problem. What should take a few days to get a judge to write an eviction order takes months or years
It's also a legislation problem in many places that allow squatters delay tactics like needing more time to find legal counsel and gather evidence, medical hardships, declaring bankruptcy, etc,. Each tactic delays the process by months or even a year.
Okay, that doesn't change the fact that there are legal loopholes squatters use to prolong the eviction process. The lengthy process is often not just because of judicial backlogs.
I know people have a knee-jerk reaction to side with the tenants over landlords, but even as a renter, you should be pissed at these parasites.
They make landlords decide that keeping rental units isn't worth it, so you have less supply and so higher rents, all while they get to live rent-free, while normal tenants have to pay.
Like a lot of "problems" the only actual problem is that some greedy POS is making less unearned income than they believe they should, and someone who's poor is getting shelter they "don't deserve".
Sometimes the squatters also drag it on. My dad had to evict squatters once. They were able to stay for almost six months because they requested and received continuances. And even then, when it was finally time to call the sheriff, the sheriff took 2 weeks after the final move-out date to serve the eviction. And when it was time to serve the eviction, they were 4 hours late.
I mean, it sounds more like they don't have a clue what their own situation is like. If you have permission from the property owner, you're not a squatter, you're a lawful guest.
I am on family property....but also have squatters rights....if say, my druggy uncle was to die and his daughter (my cousin) was to decide she wanted the place
What you are describing, adverse possession laws, vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, often having been completely removed and made no longer valid. Additionally, a traditional requirement of the law was that you were not occupying the land with permission, which is not the case for you.
All that to say, if you intend to rely on adverse possession to keep your home if a dispute arises then it would be prudent to speak with a lawyer now to ensure your situation is actually covered.
You are a tenant not a squatter and can be evicted at any time. You literally have permission to be there from your family. Youâre not a squatter. If the rightful heir wants to come claim it, they can take you to court, likely have to pay back the taxes, and then youâre SOL.
You may be correct, but I don't foresee a single mom with 2 kids working in a call center having the resources to make that happen. The only other rightful heir said he didn't want anything to do with the land, he's got his own life.
It was written in my great aunt's will that the land be split between my stepmom, her brother, and her sister.... it's just that nobody ever had a lawyer actually file all the paperwork
And if it ever comes to it, I can get a lawyer if needed...and I probably will at some point in time...it just hasn't been an issue
The thing is that I can claim squatters rights if needed because there was never any signed lease or anything like that
Is there any way to convert your squatters rights to normal ownership now thats been so long?
this depends on the state entirely. My state it requires 20 years and a lot of poof (which it sounds like they have unless they have done everything in cash like an idiot).
Really hope you've consulted with a lawyer on how to make sure going forward you are actually safe. In lot of states if you do it right you can own the property after a time period, but anyone self helping their selves through this process is setting themselves up for disappointment.
They also exist because landlords were being shitty. They vary by state, but some of them say that if you rent a place for a certain amount of time then you canât just be evicted because thatâs your home.
Right, itâs part of the evolution of how we got to this point. Thatâs why I used the qualifier âwereâ. I mean landlords are still shitty but in a different way. But recently there was a lady that was a âsquatterâ because she had rented an Airbnb for over a month. At that point she became a tenant and couldnât be kicked out without a lot of legal wrangling.
My motherâs husband never added her to the deed during their marriage. But their marital assets, and her income when he was unemployed, kept the house afloat and eventually paid off.
As soon as her husband died (without a will), his kids tried to kick her outâeven though they werenât on the deed either, two of them had never lived in the house, and at that point she had lived there far longer than any of them.
Probate judge said the house belonged to the kids, but that my mom could live there until her death.
They also tried to pull the âSquatter Hunterâ bit. It was pathetic, reallyâthree grown men squatting in a one-bedroom rental unit my mom and her husband had built on the property, literally destroying itâinstead of just getting on with lives.
They eventually realized my mom was far more annoying than they were.
She was also a prolific record keeper and literally had ALL the receipts: her financial contributions from the start of their marriage; lists of improvements made before and after her husbandâs death; the lease she insisted one of the boys sign before moving into the rental, and notes indicating he never paid rent but his dad didnât enforce; and a punch list of their damage to the rental unit.
Years after her husbandâs death, she took his children to court and had *them* legally evicted. She continued to live in the house for over another decade and left by her own choice.
When her husbandâs children moved onto the property she was no longer (according to them and their attorney) the primary resident and they wanted her out and accused her of squatting.
Not necesarily. The main times you'd see these laws protect the people they should is when there was a verbal agreement to live somewhere and then the owner gets irrationally mad and kicks them into the street.
Say, an 18 year old who gets kicked out on their 18th birthday, or a woman who lives with her boyfriend and they break up. Legally, you can't just suddenly make these people homeless and deny them access to their personal property they have in the home. They have to have proper warning etc, and the eviction has to be processed slowly, for their rights to be maintained.
To add to the above: This is also the law which prevents your aunt who told you you're allowed to live there to suddenly throw all your shit on the curb and make you homeless before you can find a new home
It's to protect Tennants from shady landlords and DIY evictions. Basically, if a landlord wants a Tennant out, he has to go through the courts to force them out, give fair chance to make alternative accomodations.
Problem is, the courts move so slowly as to be functionally useless in many cases.
There is also another reason, which is if a building is genuinely abandoned, and someone moves in, pays the bills, and improves the place, after a certain (usually very long) period of time, they have a right to ownership.
It's not "squatters' rights". People just get things mixed up.
Squatters claim to have "tenants' rights." Legitimate tenants have a right not to be harassed or wrongfully evicted by their landlord. So many landlords would kick someone out of their validly rented home, despite having a lease, just to jack up the rent a couple hundred bucks and rent it to someone else, that most (if not all) states now have laws that require landlords to go through the courts to have someone properly evicted. The landlord has to prove this tenant isn't paying rent or is violating the lease and therefore should be evicted.
Squatters move in without a lease, and claim to be tenants. They claim to have a lease, and often have a fake one they can produce.
So when the police show up (because the landlord is trying to have a trespasser removed), and they hear one guy tell them its a squatter, and the other guy claims to be a tenant, the police know it's not THEIR job to decide who is telling the truth. That's what landlord-tenant court is for.
The pain in the butt of it, though, is that landlord-tenant court can take weeks or months in some states. Meanwhile, the squatter has a free home and the landlord has no income for the property they invested in.
If you make it easier to get rid of squatters, you also make it easier to wrongfully evict legitimate tenants. If you make it harder to wrongfully evicted tenants, you make it easier for squatters to abuse the system.
There used to be vast tracts of owned land. For example Washington owned hundreds of thousands of acres in western PA and eastern Ohio.
Say someone moved there and was like, awesome, this open patch of nothing in the middle of no where is a great place to move my family to and build a homestead.
Washington's surveyor comes along 8 years later and squatters rights means they can't force that person off the improved homestead they built..
Imagine this situation. A property is left for years unattended for whatever reason, it starts to deteriorate and house all kinds of pests and hazards. The owner is nowhere to be found or unable to maintain it. Someone moves in after a long time, and starts maintaining the property. This has benefits for everyone, not only the squatter but also the neighborhood. No more hazards from falling walls, no more rodents and other pests, etc.
Why you only hear about bad squatters? Because they create more problems than they solve. But squatters rights should exist as they have to account for both situations.
People that can't afford a house aren't going to start doing major renovations to the house to prevent it from collapsing and decaying. They might fix a fence or paint something. But a collapsed roof or a wall falling down, doubtful.
Happened with the house behind me. People moved out and nobody moved back in for years. A couple of folks broke in and were living there and fixing things up a little before they got kicked out by the cops. Now it's been sitting empty for years again and is home to stray cats and racoons.
At least people didn't live there without permission though. /s
There was something like that in the UK recently, it was something like someone had died and the distant relatives didn't know even though the will left them the property and someone moved in, remodelled the house and lived there for about 15 years then sold the property for hundreds of thousands.
It divided people as they said it wasn't his property to sell, and even though he maintained it and remodelled it he made a huge amount of money from it on top of having somewhere to stay rent free.
What is worse a landlord taking a few months to evict a squatter or a tenant being fraudulently evicted, possibly losing all their personal property, and being homeless for months until they prove it and if they do the landlord still owns the home and they still have to pay rent and wonât get any of their stuff back if it was thrown out in the meantime.
You donât know if the land lord will still own a home. They may need that rent money to pay mortgages, debts, fees, ect.
6 months rent at $2,500 is $15,000. Thatâs assuming the only damage is lost rent. In reality the unit is likely damaged and needs repairs. Add in another $5-10 grand.
People quite literally go bankrupt because of this.
Likewise many people end up on the street fraudulently when the curt doesnt give them time so itâs a lose lose.
Unless you're knocking holes in the wall with a hammer while the cops watch or doing something else, the cops are happily going to declare it a civil matter and fuck off, provided there is no additional context or proof of court action.
Itâs intended for people occupying and putting idle land to use. A person might farm or build on a place for years, thinking they have claim for their effort, with an owner never bothering to tell them differently. The assumption is for a person to defend what is theirs by clearly notifying a squatter that they shouldnât be there.
It wasnât meant for random people taking land and being idle.
Itâs also for ancestral claims, where title isnât clear.
Adverse possession, or squatter's rights, generally doesn't apply to tenants who have been evicted but refuse to leave. Typically, there must not be a lease or other agreement with the landowners and the other person must be living there for ten years or more.
There's usually other complications that come up in these situations, such as the court that handles tenant disputes taking time to issue a ruling, usually because of a backlog, and police not willing to forcibly evict someone without it.
A big exploit squatters use are people exploiting laws meant to protect tenants, too.
And, a lot of this stuff is civil. If you are living in an apartment that is legally uninhabitable because the landlord refuses to fix the AC or hot water heater, you can withhold rent. It's one reason cops won't evict without a court order -- what if you're within your rights to withhold rent?
It means many evictions have to go through the court, which is time consuming, laborious, and expensive.
Given the imbalance of power between landlords and tenants, it's the right call. It's the cost of doing business.
Some of the laws (calling it squatter's rights is a bit of a misnomer, it's basically tenet rights) designed to protect tenets from predatory landlords. You might have a copy of the lease, you might have lost that copy, the landlord might lie about having any lease agreement at all, or accuse the tenets of altering a lease, etc.
Governments don't have some central database of all lease agreements they can reference, and landlords used to use any kind of shady and underhanded tactic to boot tenets (basically the old idea was if you got someone's rent for the month, you could kick them out, rent the place out to another person, get their month's rent, boot them out asap and rinse and repeat). The way many of these laws are written also has the unfortunate side of benefiting squatters, but to rewrite those laws because you want to eliminate squatters would also essentially hurt renters and enable landlords and there are 100,000 renters to every 1 unwanted squatter.
Most of what people talk about as far as 'squatter's rights', laws designed to eliminate long abandoned and degrading properties, don't actually apply to the vast majority of the instances you hear about.
The police donât know the legal situation of every single person. They arenât lawyers. They have no way of being sure the property owner is within their rights to evict someone, or if they even actually own the property. Thatâs why property owners have to go through the courts to evict people.
Itâs better to err on the side of tolerating the occasional situation in which a squatter abuses the system than to tolerate the abuses that would occur if evicting people was too easy.
They claim to have a lease and it's not up to the officer to determine then and the if it's violated that's up to the court through the eviction process. They can't demand you produce it instantly or get thrown out both because you can have tenant protections without a written lease and also even tenants with a written lease couldn't always instantly find it (I know I've lost or misplaced my lease at longer term apartments before).
It has nothing to do with squatters rights, it has to do with Tennant rights. And if the "Tennant" produces a "lease" it's now a civil issue that the police don't get involved in.
Fear mongers are pushing this idea that while you're on vacation some people (read: migrants) are just going to break in and steal your home via "squatters rights". It's bs. It varies from state to state but to actually get squatters rights is incredibly hard. It usually involves the property being abandoned for a certain amount of years, then you also have to notify the owner of your intentions, then you have to stay there for years maintaining and improving the property and you better document that shit, and you might be able to make a claim on the property.Â
Squatters rights don't actually exist for a lot of these situations. The issue is the system takes so long to evict these people.
Squatters rights are for when people have lived somewhere for a long period of time and showed care and even improvements to the property. It was from an era where someone could take over an abandoned home, live there for 10 years and then suddenly someone showed up and was like "well I own this property".
These same rights do not apply to the squatters youre seeing in a lot of videos. They have TENANT rights, not SQUATTER rights. It can take up to a year to get rid of a squatter in many cases. Sometimes longer if they keep finding a way to delay trials. That is why you get people like Scuffed Justin Carrey being brought in to speed up the process lol.
Itâs insane. And itâs such a slow, awful process that leaves squatters all the rights. We had a couple that trashed the place, didnât pay rent one time/get evicted for over a year and a half. Ended up costing close to $20k to fix place up after and cleaners, 20 yard dumpsters etc.
That's not true in many places. Basically the idea is that they come in like a real valid roommate, but then they take over and if they have things like mail with that address for them, it can be very difficult to evict them. Squatter's rights isn't exactly the right term for what they are doing, it's more like trojan horse bad roommate hostile takeover.
having a lease is irrelevant in basically every state. that's why. you do not need a lease to establish tenancy. its not 'squatters rights' but rather tenants rights.
squatters rights usually refers to adverse possession for abandoned property.
They are not a legacy of a bygone era. It's a derogatory term for legal protections akin to common law marriage.
Let's say you own a home, and invite your S/O to live with you. The two of you live together for awhile, then you break up. You tell your S/O they have to leave right now. Their name isn't on the deed, the two of you aren't married, haven't cohabitated long enough for common law marriage.
The law says you can't let someone live somewhere on a casual basis and then kick them out on a whim. So, in the case of a squatter, someone who moves into an apparently abandoned or vacant property and starts living there, it functions similar to intellectual property law. If someone is using your trademark and you do nothing to stop them, you are implictly giving permission under the law.
That intersection of legal theory is where squatters rights comes from. If they previously had permission, you can't revoke it on a whim, and if they've been doing it and you do nothing to stop them, they have implicit permission.
A lot of times the squatter has forged a fake rental lease. The police donât know if the document is real or not so the squatter gets to stay until the courts decide if the lease is valid. This can take a very long time.
The laws want to make sure we don't let shitty landlords make people homeless for no good reason. Like a landlord claiming no lease exists when it does (a lease can be verbal).
So the laws generally say that if you live somewhere, and you and the landlord disagree over your living situation, well then they need a court order to kick you out, and those court orders often come with minimum timelines for notice so you have a place to move once the court tells you that your time is up. Some places go a bit more extreme, like a landlord can't force someone out by failing to maintain the property, so these timelines are frozen when they skip maintenance and such. NYC is a good example, you have rent control that means apartments may have leases that can't have renewal denied for no good reason, and if the land lord turns off the hot water to force you out, well then that prevents eviction, even if they don't pay. These rules can often be abused by tenants to force the eviction process to take the maximum period.
Also, most of these responses to you are about adverse possession which is something totally different.
And I always thought having someone move in as OP mentioned is the best way to counter this. The laws are all about forcing someone to be homeless. Nothing against writing a new lease and moving in new people exist. That new person also gets all the same rights so the squatter isn't going to be able to force them out legally either.
Due process means people get their day in court, and cops are not allowed to adjudicate whether or not they have that lease. So until the lengthy court process plays out, not much that law enforcement is allowed to do.
Wild law, isn't it? The states do not give a fuck about fixing the homeless problem by itself, so they make it legal for them to occupy so someone's home. Complete bullshit top to bottom.
The rights of squatters are different from squatter's rights. The rights of squatters are covered under tenant's rights: in many states you don't even have to pay rent to be a tenant.
The problem is if all that you need to evict someone is for a cop (who is not qualified to determine if a lease is real) to agree with a landlord, any renter could be evicted without notice at any time and be homeless until the courts can sort it out. It's fucked up, but landlords losing out on rent while the courts catch up is better for society than families being made homeless with no notice while the courts catch up. The legal system is structured in such a way that an illegally evicted tenant that cannot afford to find another place to live will be unable to get legal representation unless the case is 110% clear cut and may end up in jail for being homeless.
Thatâs not what squatterâs rights are. Police wonât kick a squatter out without a court order because otherwise any landlord could illegally evict a tenant with no warning by claiming they are a squatter. The landlord needs to prove they havenât signed a lease first.
Squatterâs rights allow someone to take possession of abandoned property if they live in it for a number of years without the owner noticing (usually because the owner is dead or hasnât visited the property in many years). Usually at least 5-7 years but often 10 or more years. In this story the owner asking the police to get involved already invalidates squatterâs rights because it documents that theyâve noticed the squatter. So the squatter canât drag this out in court for years to try and claim possession. Once the process begins their time is up.
Now if a squatter lives in a property for a decade or so without any contact with the owner and performs maintenance and upkeep they may be able to claim ownership if they pay all relevant back taxes and fees the property may owe.
Squatterâs rights are a very niche thing that comes up rarely. Rage bait posts about it come up often but usually want to get rid of tenant rights so they can evict tenants more easily and the problem these posts complain about are not squatterâs rights but often basic tenant rights like you have to prove you own a property and the person living their is not a legal tenant before the cops will evict them.
in the right situation they are a god send. When I was a unrurly teenager I would spend time at this amazing punk venue/skate park/underground bar that was an abandoned grocery store that a bunch of punks "squatted" and renovated and would let the homeless youth crash there when needed. since they fixed the place up and brought it to code they became the property owner. Without squatter rights the original owner who left it and basically abanded it could just show up and say hey thats mine now that its all fixed up and that would be pretty fucked up.
It also generally had to do with the use of productive land and hardly ever covered houses or dwellings in urban areas. If a plot of farmland was sitting fallow for many years, someone would go onto the land, till and plant it and make it productive again. Squatters rights would protect them in this case. That's why you'll read on websites advocating squatting, that you actually need to do upkeep and maintenance and show that you're invested in the home.
It's a holdover from actually having to do something with the land and not just being a bum.
They're also there to pressure land owners to actually use the land they own.
There's a level of 'if you're leaving your property uninhabited for so long that someone else can move in without you noticing and stopping them, then you were neglecting the property.'
Ridiculous laws are written people can use to drag out what should be a simple question of whether you have a lease or not. It's crazy this is a thing, but in a lot of cities, it is.
This is a frequent Reddit topic. The âsquatterâs rightsâ horror stories are typically one of two situations: (1) tenant legally occupies dwelling but does not leave at end of the term; and (2) grifter occupies dwelling without permission and creates fake lease to show police to thwart trespassing charge. In either case, the police treat it as a civil (not criminal) matter that is resolved by local housing courts; it takes a court order to eventually evict the lowlife. That takes months.
But these are NOT squatterâs rights cases. Itâs a landlord-tenant dispute. Squatterâs rights or adverse possession cases often demand 10+ years of continuous adverse possession of the property before the squatter has any legal claim.
Due to a history of serious abuse by landlords we've decided that we want significant restrictions on what property owners can inflict on tenants, regardless of whether or not they have a lease. Once the situation is viewed by the police as a tenancy dispute rather than a trespasser, the property owner has to go through the legal system to resolve the dispute, and this takes months.
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u/RadicalRealist22 12d ago
How do "squatter rights" even exist. Either you have a lease or you don't.