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Renters (squatters) rights: tenants (landlord) are jerks
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Encourages the sale or at least the use of un, or under, utilised land/buildings; discourages land banking; can be an influence that resists urban decay. Take your pick.
Squatting has little to do with tenancy though. Generally former tenants or tenants in arrears are specifically excluded from squatting laws.
Generally because squatter's rights are used to formalise arrangements that already satisfactorily exist de facto, and to which nobody has objected yet. They're a legal fudge that generally seems to work.
There generally are processes where the state can take possession of land and property for development or other reasons. I don't see that there's a conflict between the existence of the two, particularly.
I don't get why you are using the word thieves here. They are by definition operating under the law.
Anyway, these laws are on the books because real estate isn't like any other business. When you own real estate you are holding a monopoly (with all the power that implies) so the state has an interest in how you use it. We don't want people to use real estate to store wealth and waste it's practical use and we don't want disinterested owner to hurt other landowners.
Why do we use private parties instead of the state? Well mostly we don't but when we do it is because that is what has worked the best in the past, not just recent past but going back hundreds of years.
The first is pretty easy. A court order is needed to actually sort out who is in the right and avoid violence. Whatever your rights to a property they aren't worth someone's life and asking a normal police officer to sort out real estate law is kind of silly.
As to the second, cities have to pay a premium to use eminent domain and then pay for the fees to sell it so that doesn't really work. Also, that would give owners an incentive to not use their property and have the city buy it. They could develop it themselves but that tie up a lot of resources. It's more efficient to let some disinterested parties lose their titles and give the rest an incentive to productively use their land.
It's difficult to be absolute about this kind of thing because there is a continuum of circumstances between "you broke into my property, get out" and "I've been living here for years with nobody objecting". It ties into the whole thing about it generally not being in the public interest to turf people out of the place where they live without some kind of due process.
The point at which you start to tip from trespass (which is a civil matter in the UK, not a criminal one. I don't know what the situation is in the US) into squatter's rights seems to be to be about the point that someone can reasonably argue to be living in the place in question.
The trouble with dragging the value of the property into the equation is that what somewhere is worth to different people is more nuanced than a simple calculation of pounds and pence.
Two adjacent residential lots with single family homes, facing the same street, sharing a property line. Family that owns house A sells and moves on, and the lot passes into ownership of a developer who wants to level it and build condos. Developer in the course of the purchase acquires the most recent (though 30 years old) county survey records, which indicate the actual property line is approximately four feet closer to house B than understood by previous homeowners and demarcated by various structures (a fence, a garden, a garage, and approximately one lateral half of house B's driveway.)
Developer apparently needs this space in order to make the property a commercially viable development; owner of house B needs his driveway. And so the two enter legal dispute over who has the proper title to the approximately 400 square feet of real estate. Long story short house B owner wins: state requirement for adverse possession is 10 years, easily met by the owner of house B during his ownership and never contested by the (former) owner of house A.
The question raised by a case like this is what's more important: the survey record in the county stacks or the actual accepted use of the property? We don't know how the discrepancy came to exist; maybe some previous owners of the homes made arrangements privately, maybe one guy just built a garage where he wanted, or maybe it's simply a clerical error by the surveyor.
We are familiar with the saying that "possession is nine tenths of the law." Most of the time in pop culture it's used ironically, but what it's actually expressing is that our conception of property is really just a way of ordering the daily conduct of society. I say "this [thing] is mine" not because I have some kind of absolute moral claim to it necessarily, but because society functions most easily when we have a clear understanding of how to treat and interact with each other. If the law and the clear, unchallenged understanding are in conflict then (generally speaking) the law should be what bends.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Except the government IS intervening - they are saying that by showing poor stewardship of the land, they are revoking your title to it.
Yeah. Claims to private property are all backed by the government anyway - what is private property in the absence of government? An abstract right some people might posit, at most. Really, anything to do with property at all involves government and unspoken societal contracts. It's just that unless the government has some specific relation to that property, as an entity, it's happy to have its hands off. Adverse possession kicks in when two parties disagree on who owns something, and the government tells them who legally owns what, since again, ownership is basically defined and enforced by the government, social contracts, and our ideas of what natural rights are.
Some form of due process is needed in matters of eviction, and I'm of the opinion that if it's a family's primary residence, the current norms seem fair. It's true landlords could raise the deposit held (to a maximum by proscription in some jurisdictions), all terms in a contract are subject to market conditions. Another known is all assets are taxed (this being one of the primary sources of revenues for all states) and the property tax particulars have a heavy influence on the ratios of renters to owners (as well as the particular of a given milieu). Generally, ownership is preferred over tenancy in most states, and this is obviously reflected in their laws. Some jurisdictions (NYC in particular) have strong renters protection due to the particulars of their milieu. Classically, a given areas real estate market will have a heavy indicative effect of the overall health of the economy of a particular state, with the negative factors in real estate indicating an obviously bleak broader market outlook. Having owners has classically been a hedge against this, as it forms a sense of 'community', and eases other issues of governance such as residency, census, taxation, etc.
you seem to be continuing to reason from this position where you believe some person is going to break into a building, thrown down a sleeping bag in the corner or something and after going unnoticed for a month, have some kind of claim of ownership or other protection. That just is not how it works.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
You can also protect your property by making use of it. Why should the city/state be concerned about it if you don't bother using it? Why should they use resources to protect something detrimental to their interests?
I mean, if you find a car that has been abandoned and go through the right process, you can get the state to recognize your claim on the vehicle.
You seriously do not seem to have a grasp on just what the current laws are. Squatters have to put years and large sums of money into a property in order to claim ownership, there are various steps the current owners can take to stop them if they put a mind to it.
Yeah the squatters in this context aren't a bunch of vagrants who claim ownership because they threw a couple of mattresses down. They have to truly live there and act like owners (like fixing and improving stuff and general upkeep).
Like, just check wikipedia. It's really hard to meet the requirements and the owner has to basically not try and do anything about it while being aware of it. Hell, some courts require you to pay property taxes!
It's not just duration, it's actual and proper use while the owner does nothing.
When has this ever happened?
Getting an eviction notice is not really a big deal. The whole idea is to make sure that everyone follows proper procedure and that no one gets hurt.
Say someone is squatting in an apartment in Space land where you have absolute property rights. How does it go down? Do you pick them up by the scruff of the neck and throw them in the street? What about their personal property? Who pays to move it and where? Even garbage disposal costs money. How do you prove that you didn't rent it out on a verbal contract? How does a normal police officer sort all of this out?
The answer is, of course, that we go to court and if they are really squatters they will either lose or more likely not show up in the first place for fear of criminal charges and court costs. Again, a week of getting an eviction notice is a pain but it is in no way worth someone getting hurt or wrongly evicted from their lawful home.
I found this story in a google search, which seems to be a somewhat similar situation and there's a couple more similar ones if you google "squatters in the news". The problem I see in all these stories is not adverse possession which generally takes 10+ years, but that the owners has to go to court to get the eviction order and that takes time. I don't really see how you get around this obstacle though without opening it up for abuse.
The government does enforce property rights. I don't know where you're getting the idea that they don't.
What you seem to be getting at is that you're annoyed the government doesn't actively defend your property, and that the police won't necessarily act on your word alone in a civil dispute.
Exactly.
Also, even in that article the family in the house wasn't to do with squatting or adverse possession, but because they filed for bankruptcy and claimed to own the home. Before that they had just two days to get out.
They already protect property rights. You're asking them to actively do the reporting and checking for you. It's like expecting the police to search for your stolen car when you haven't reported it stolen.
You seem to live in some bizarre situation where you think the only way you can get squatters out of your property is by using force. It isn't. In fact, the squatters rights stuff is precisely for the purpose of preventing force. You can't forcefully kick people out of your land after some time, you have to get an eviction notice. Did you even check the wiki on adverse possession I linked?
They are, for a huge amount of time.
You are complaining about a thing which simply does not exist outside of your imagination. Your concerns have merit, which is why the laws we have were written with them in mind!
This is one example, you are arguing that we should rectify a thing which simply doesn't happen. Add to that your rejection of the concept of natural rights, which fyi would mean you have no right to property, literally the basis of the entirety of the American legal system (life, liberty, property hooooooooooo).
I had these same concerns about squatters when I was a kid and worried someone would set up a camp on our farm. Then I went to high school and took a civics course and realized those concerns were unfounded.
It's very difficult for a squatter to get any actual net gain from a fraudulent domain, outside of a possible few days with a roof over their head.. Clearly, throwing every person desperate enough to invade an abandoned domicile for shelter into the street will alleviate our issues, lower crime, and strengthen respect for personal property!
As someone who has been evicted,
It took close to a year of my scumbag ex-roommate not paying rent (and pocketing the half I gave him) for the landlord to get us into housing court. That's pretty fucked up, imo.
Nope, not even a little. I would say that the majority of residential land use is without a contract. I personally don't use them unless its a HUD thing. No reason to when everything that I would put in a contract is already covered under state law.
Lots of times a live in girl/boyfriend name isn't on the lease. In dispute should one party be able to just call the police and throw the other's possessions into the street? Or what if the renter has lost their copy of the lease (or is in month to month) if everything has been in cash how would the police officer know who to believe? Again you are putting a minor inconvenience to the owner that almost never happens ahead of a million ways that your law could go bad based on what? Some absolute view of property rights.
1) Can you cite this?
2) If (1), can you also show that this is also the general case rather than unique to NYC?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
All you've done is payed money for the property.
Obv you're scum for not being a homeowner. Squatter!
Generally, yeah.
In Florida if someone lives in and get mail delivered somewhere for 30 days, you have to serve them with an eviction notice.
This may let undesirable people stay in a place longer than you want them to, but it also protects lawful tenants as well so I'm not too bothered by it.
Someone calls the cops, saying there is a trespasser. Cop turns up. On one hand he has someone claiming that they own this property and the person in it is trespassing. On the other hand he has someone who appears to live in the property claiming they have a right to be there for any one of a number of potentially valid reasons.
A police officer is not equipped, or trained, to evaluate either claim. Especially at the front door of a building with people yelling.