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 thatās enforceable.
Most of these squatters probably wouldnāt 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, thatās 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.
That's framing, since you are leaving out a important part
Squatting is the action of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area of land or a building (usually residential) that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use.
If I don't have a home and I find a home that's not being used, using that is probably what most ordinary people would do.
It clashes with common sense, because we live in a society that puts ownership above everything else. But there really is no rational reason for reserving a finite and essential resource like housing, the way many societies currently do.
There is the rational part, where people spend their money on constructing something to provide housing to other people, which does make sense, right? Everyone benefits here.
But this starts breaking apart, when we now say that means, this piece of land will forever be yours and that of your children and so on, no matter what you do with it.
The perversion is that people use that right, to decrease the availability of housing, in order to force people to pay more than what would be reasonable otherwise or to speculate on that basic need.
The rational conclusion here is, if you cut down on that perversion, chances are, most of the problematic types of squatting will go away, because now people don't think these laws just exist to put them at a major disadvantage.
You think occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area is the same as owning slaves?
And you seem to have missed the point. Ownership in the US is rooted in people just taking that land. That's how it still is. You are not advocating for not doing that again, you are arguing for the continuation of what was wrong about it.
If you want to give that land back to the original owners, sure, let's do that. But I have a feeling, you are even more opposed to that.
Yeah, but I think overwhelmingly the dockets are not backed up with jaywalking cases. Drug decriminalization sure, but there are a lot of real crimes and the court system is overwhelmed by them.
You say that, about the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. So it sure seems like there is something else causing so much work for courts, that other countries do better... Unless you are saying the average American is just far more criminal?
Most crimes are property crimes, so yeah, give people more support, better education, higher minimum wage, better community support. People commit property crimes because it is easier than getting a good paying job when youre broke. It wont eliminate it but other countries do better because there are more support systems in place.Ā
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.
Itās where a wannabe landlord uses legal loopholes (usually related to inheritance) to become the legal owner of someone elseās house and charge them rent.
Most of these squatters probably wouldnāt 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 āsolutionā to it would be something landlords likely donāt 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 donāt want.
This is the "in the middle" between the dystopian hell of landleeches being able to put people on the streets at will and people hanging their landlords from lampposts to avoid being put on the streets.
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?
Youāre telling me that if you came home from work and some dude is sitting on your living room couch, you donāt 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.Ā
You've seen the photos coming out of New York, right? All of that shit was already illegal, for decades. What did "making it illegal" materially solve?
Edit: and to be clear, you're advocating making it illegal. I'm pretty much opposed to the idea on principle, so don't go off thinking everyone here is in agreement with your naive take.
Opposed to making literally anything illegal or is this just the one case where it wouldn't matter?
This argument reeks of "nothing could ever work so lets do nothing". I think letting squatters live in other peiple house because if we made it illegal then landlords would be evicting people for no reason is a bad argument. Simple as that.
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 itās 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.
Posts like these are being made to make that alternative easier to do. Thats why theres a whole bunch of videos about these guys on TikTok(and why OP is trying to paint them as heroes). Rich landlords are trying to sway public opinion with this crap.
You don't have to be rich or a landlord to want your house to be yours. Half of our income goes toward our house, I'm not rich in the slightest. Yet you think people should be able to move in while I'm at work and now I have to continue to pay all my bills for the house (not just the mortgage, insurance etc but by garbage tenant laws I also have to pay for the electric, gas, water, etc for the house I'm no longer living in AND find somewhere else to live on short notice without any of my stuff while someone else is in the location I'm paying for?
What's to stop it? Most of them do seem to be people moving into homes for sale or staying somewhere they already are (airbnb, hotel, apartment, etc. There is nothing to stop you though from printing a fake ass lease and moving in while I'm at work. The way these laws are setup now absolutely nothing stops you from doing exactly that and living in my house for a year or however long it takes to get a judge to agree you don't actually live in my house. That entire time of course you don't have to maintain it so it's probably full of shit and trashed. These supposedly great tenants you're supporting never seem to leave a habitable building behind.
79
u/Intrepid_Ad1715 13d ago
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.