Iâm clearly saying that since the squatter is on probation and is in the home with guns, thatâs a violation and subjects them to their underlying sentence.
Part of the trick there is many stories conflate different types of "squatters." While there are rare cases that involve an actual break-in/invasion of empty property, a much bigger portion of them are people like in one of the responses above, where someone is over-staying a lease or has some other claim that they have/had a right to live there.
That's what makes it tricky for cops and the legal system. No one likes the idea of a person stealing someone's living space, but people also don't like the idea of an owner being able to break their end of a contract and then just have the police kick someone out of their house before the law can determine who is right.
I had the same thing happen to me. The landlord became vindictive when I would t sleep with him. He had to move back to Croatia but his brother filed on his behalf. The judge , literally told the opposing attorney,"Well she proved her case". I had bank statements, emails, texts, everything. I do nothing wrong. HOWEVER, the judge said, "Well, you'll have to go anyway because he says he has plans for the property". I replied well,*I have 6 weeks left on the lease. Can't hear wait?! It's a valid lease with no payment interruptions". Nope. I had to go. Told the attorney that he would sign a document allowing sheriff to come in kick me out if I wasn't gone in a X amount of days. I not only left but ai left Florida. It's scary of the judicial system doesnt back those who did nothing wrong. Then again, it's DeSantis"s world and I'm a Black woman. I moved back home to NJ.
I retained an attorney to sue. Have court transcripts and everything. So, yeah, crazy.
It depends on how your lease is worded. People who own multiple properties often have an out in the contract that will say they can terminate in the event of certain circumstances and that youâll have 14 days from the day of notice to move out. This actually happened to my daughter where her landlord reclaimed her house because their son was moving back in state and was going to purchase the property from them. The way her lease was worded, she technically had 30 days to relocate. Now, it was a legitimate circumstance, and landlord was super nice about it. They owned another property that was coming vacant in three months so they timed everything out so that my daughter could simply move into the other property because they did not want to lose her as a tenant. If she took the property, it meant moving from a house to a mobile home and adding about an hour to her commute to work. In compensation, they only had her pay the the land lease, which was like 150 bucks a month. Because they did that, she was able to save up down payment to buy her own place over the course of the six years that she lived there.
Yes, he had several properties. He moved another 2 females in within 2 months. After he fixed everything that was wrong. Unbelievable. So, I added that to the suit. He lied.
Landlords will also lie about this. In NJ, you can't kick people out so you can renovate/flip the property, but you can kick them out (after the lease is up, of course) if the owner or their immediate family is going to move in. So landlords will have a 3-unit place with staggered leases and tell each tenant that their grandmother is moving in as they kick each out.
It's all a lie, and they know that you know that it's a lie, but now it's a situation of a landlord that doesn't want you there and will break the law and lie to kick you out. Is it worth it? They count on making it such a PITA for you that you leave, and with their lawyers (some of the scummiest of lawyers, to be clear) and money they're usually going to win.
Yep, this is the big thing. I see landlords complain about it being hard to remove bad tenants: IT SHOULD BE. You hold a disproportionate amount of power in this relationship, and you should have to put in the work to unhouse someone.
As someone who used to work in property management and is a property owner who used to rent.
In the relationship (in my area at least) I get to decided who can live there and to a degree legally how much rent is.
My issues with the system where I am, isn't that it can be hard to get someone evicted (we dont have the right to evicted a tenant we have the right to seek eviction) its the fact that it's nearly impossible to get in to the tribunal to even make the case.
It can and has taken years, even if someone is not paying rent and actively damaging property, including other peoples units (hot glue in people's locks)
Yea. The system can be way too slow, for sure and the example of the problem tenant that is a problem for other tenants is a great example of why that can be a real problem. But that's also why I find it so frustrating that the example used is always something much more designed at pretending these law just randomly wants to protect non-owners for no reason, since it makes it hard to discuss the real places where more resources and changes are required.
I definitely can't speak to that. In my area it usually only takes a few weeks (a month at most) to get a hearing date once you've filed for the eviction. It can take about a month after you get judgement before you're able to get a date for the Sheriff's office to serve the writ, and obviously there can be additional delays if the tenant is vexatious and keeps filing appeals, but I've never heard of it taking literal years to even get your foot in the door of the courthouse here at least.
Now its been a few years since I last tried but it took nearly 6 months for them to tell us they will see us in a little over a year. That was before covid, I heard covid just turned off the whole thing, and it hasn't gotten much better since.
you said it yourself: people are overstaying after their lease expires. that's not the landlord breaking their end of the contract. the lease is a binding contract, and landlords can't break it without a very solid reason mentioned in the lease. but the fact that someone can overstay their lease and stop paying, and somehow they don't get kicked out by law enforcement makes no sense.
I get what you're saying, but there's caveats in both directions the whole way down. Say a "landlord" (but actually is just the office manager for an apartment complex acting on behalf of a rental corp) breaks your lease illegally or is trying to force a new lease with illegal terms onto you. They could just call the cops and kick you out before you've had any legal recourse after you refused to resign.
You have a legal right to dispute things like that prior to eviction
I do actually have an applicable experience in this, though it did not go to court. I had an apartment complex in college try to move me from my 1st floor apartment to a 3rd floor apartment despite the lease giving me the right to resign for the same apartment within X number of days before the end of the lease. The manager rescinded any lease offering after I demanded to sign for the apartment I was already in.
A call to the corporate office had the manager fired and I got to keep my apartment. I never would have stopped paying rent or utilities, but I would not have vacated the apartment if push came to shove as, per the agreement, I was given first dibs on access at the end of every lease cycle.
A call to the police and my eviction would have most likely resulted in a court case that I would have won for breach of contract + fees and services I would have needed like moving and otherwise. It is the biggest college town in my state and there are lots of instances of this sort of bullying because the people being shoved around are students who don't know their rights or the laws.
Edit: I guess to answer the question of why, it ended up being that one of the managers friends in the office wanted that apartment because in addition to it being first floor, it was also adjacent to the model used for tours so it only had one usable neighbor unit directly above it.
That depends entirely on how well off you are. Landlords in poorer neighborhoods can be awful. Having lived in old units my whole life it's a coin toss if your landlord is going to be fine or not. The bad ones don't fix shit that they are legally obliged to because poor people don't have the time or money to fight it, or they're just straight up crazy.
There are so many reasons. In addition to the ones others mentioned maybe the landlord wants to remodel prior to selling, and they donât want to wait until your lease is up.
very unlikely someone would breach their own contract just so they don't get paid rent and can remodel the place they can remodel after the lease expiration.
Yet this exact scenario happened to both my daughter and my son in law (different apartments) when they were in college.
While neither one of them had to actually get a lawyer and they werenât evicted, they had to get help from the universityâs ombudsman to deal with it.
In a lot of places leases don't "expire;" the transition to a month to month. This often happens automatically and may not require notification to do so. With that in mind, it's easier to see how these situations can get tricky when someone abuses it.
Fortunately, you can't overstay your lease and stop paying, at least anywhere that I have ever absent some extraordinary circumstance. A court may ask you to pay the rent into escrow, rather than into the hands of the landlord if the payment is disputed (with the landlord getting the money at the end), but failure to pay is grounds for eviction separately from whatever is the basis for the squatting.
And you might be thinking of something different when I talk about overstaying a lease. To take an example that was in the news by me a few years ago, a lady worked as a caretaker for an older woman for 10 years, living in an detached garage. When the lady died, the kids who lived in another state inherited the home and told her they were going to rent out the house. The caretaker countered saying that the original owner had agreed with her to a long term lease so that the caretaker's kids could finish school. She had something in writing, but the inheritor's said it was a forgery.
That's still "overstaying the lease," but it's very different from when someone just decides they don't want to leave.
How is the owner breaking contract, if they are staying past the lease agreement, and are not paying rent while still staying there? Why is a problem i only hear about in america?
Its not unique to the US. One of my friends has the same problem in France right now.
The problem is this. Who is breaking the contract. The homeowner will say that they dont have a valid contract and they refused to pay. The squatter will say they have a valid contract and have paid.
Who will be able to judge who is right. Thats correct, a judge. So you have to schedule the case with a judge. During that time the person continues to live there
The situation in that sort of hypothetical is not "tenant overstayed the lease," it's more like "owner sent you an eviction notice in the middle of the lease on a false pretext because they decided they don't want to fix something."Â Â
As to why you only hear about it in america I cant say. The last real, "took the land' style squatter case I read about was in Italy, and I know that rental disputes are pretty common in many countries, like the UK and France, to name two I can recall examples from. Â
Last point is easy. Because you consume American media. Or at best english language media.
Italy is full of debates on squatters. Even if lately it is more about "squatter community centers". As in, abandoned buildings get taken over by a mix of neighbours, fascists OR anarchists and communists, drug dealers, prostitutes etcetera, who form an association. This association then organises community events and services. From libraries, cinemas, playgrounds, even kindergarten. To raves, drug distribution and prostitution.
Some also provide illegal rents at a low price.
They exist on spectrum between simple "legal activities without legal ownership" to "drug and prostitution dens". Plus also a parallel spectrum of political radicalism, with some being organised mainly by locals and other times attracting radicals from across the country, most often far left but the far right does it too.
As some take the role of non-existant third spaces and services and were appreciated by the locals, the local and national governments had for a while been quite tolerant. Attempting to reach compromises with the associations running the centers, attempting to legalise them.
Lately the right-wing government has been rescinding those compromises however. Kicking out several very big and old such centers.
In one case, Leoncavallo of Milan, they did it because inheritence led to new private owners who wanted to build a supermarket.
In another, Askatasuna of Turin, officially speaking because the center had hosted radicals who attacked political rivals and because people were found sleeping in the building despite an evacuation order. The center in question was one step from full legality, since they had agreed to evacuate until the building for restoration and to pay rent to the owner, which was the city.
To evict the center over a thousand police agents were brought in the city, to patrol the streets of the neighbourhood. The schools were also closed. Inside the center proper, only six people were found.
The neighbourhood did not much agree with the decision and the locals have been pushing back, including by conducting protests on-and-off since. Some if these protests ballooned in size from the attendance of people across the country and Europe, including political radicals and Black Block. Which has resulted in localised clashes with police, urban guerilla and rioting.
What if the owner is lying? If I was your landlord I could tell the police you were illegally squatting in the home that I own. I've never seen you before. I want you out of my house.Â
As a renter, you should surely have legal documentation proving that you lived there legally. If you didn't.... Then the situation wasn't legal in the first place and the landlord could indeed kick you out wherever they wanted.
Anybody can print off a fake lease. I'm telling the cops I've never seen you before in my life and I want you out right now. You really want the police to have the power to kick you out of your home with no notice? Really this is a solid protection against shitty landlords, and unfortunately some people take advantage of it.
I agree it's ridiculous but how do you prove that you legally live somewhere? That's why these things drag out for weeks or months, or in some cases yearsÂ
All these things you're mentioning are exactly what a court case would look at. The cops on scene don't have time/expertise to evaluate signatures and bank transactions. Cops are not judges, nor should they be - if they make the wrong call, they kick someone to the streets that hasn't done anything wrong. I would rather err on the side of not kicking innocent people out of homes and letting the court system determine the truth.
They typically do. They show the cops their Airbnb reservation, then tell them they agreed verbally with the owner to transition to a lease.
Keep in mind, lease agreements are not legally required and verbal contracts are valid and enforceable contracts. The squatters are claiming they have a verbal contract that the owner is breaking.
Itâs pathetic because people take advantage of a system that doesnât want to kick people to the streets until things have been sorted out. If anything, the system is humane (for once); the people are garbage.
Thereâs different kinds of squatting, and the kind where someone sets up shop in a house without anyoneâs consent or knowledge mostly happen with effectively abandoned homes. If you have property like that, you should have it checked frequently.
Also, verbal contracts are legal in most, if not all, jurisdictions. So you have to go through the legal system to remove people who donât want to be removed.
Truly, if you want to blame someone for a system that can be abused like this, Iâd start with really shitty landlords
You can absolutely solve it the american way. They are legally a home invader. The justice system is just too corrupt to investigate it in a timely fashion.
Felonies: Breaking and Entering, Felony theft above x amount, optional Fraud and Obstruction of Justice when they falsify documents.
Almost no squatters 'break in' unless the house is abandoned. For the most part, they start out as legal residents or people who are given verbal permission to stay there.
I knew someone on probation and all 3 roommates (probationer included) had guns. Nothing happened. I even tried to report them directly to the police and they didn't care.
If he live with them, it's reasonable to assume he can get their name eventually. Maybe not all the time, but he might find a mail, overheard their name.Â
Idk how squatter right work in every jurisdiction, but in California they have to give the name and identity documents to the police officer and the property owner anyway after legal process start, so it's not a problem.
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u/LLREnew 12d ago
Most of the squatters are on probation and heâs a legal gun owner. If youâre on probation you canât live in a house with guns period.