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In defense of squatting - the community utility of squatting in a world of algorithmic landlord collusion
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- Title
- In defense of squatting
- Authors
- Tanya Laird
- Word count
- 1390 words
If we're advocating for a better system to help combat corporate landlords, I think we should just go for an actual solution to the problem, instead of just encouraging squatting.
Why not simply have real and progressive vacancy taxes for when a property is up for sale/rent for over a certain period of time. This encourages landowners to meet market demands instead of just sitting on vacant lots for too long.
Centralized vs. Decentralized solutions. My city has a vacancy tax, but the administration is too overloaded to verify vacancies and apply the tax. If people could personally profit from addressing the problem while not burdening the government, it would provide a channel to address the situation without expanding the administration.
Seems like a fast track for a bunch of disputes over who was squatting in a place first and for how long. Who gets to decide which squatter is entitled to a property if they both claim to have been staying there for the same amount of time? Someone still has to verify those vacancies and apply the ownership. This doesn't remove the bureaucracy, it just moves it around.
If you are incentivizing squatting so heavily to the point where hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property is on the line, you are going to get violence from the individuals who are attempting to claim that money if someone tries to muscle in on their claim.
That's the point of a system like adverse possession, that was mentioned in the article. You claim the property by doing all of the normal property-owning things like paying property taxes, living there, maintaining the property, paying the utilities, etc. That paper trail makes answering the question of whose property it should be very easy, and also incentivizes the squatter to be a good neighbor and citizen.
Seems like a pretty big gamble for someone to take, going through all the effort of paying property taxes and utilities for something they don't even own for years, just on the hope that someone won't notice and kick them out.
I don't see the societal benefit of a system that rewards the first person to sneak onto a piece of property at the first sign of vacancy and start to try and take over it. It'd end up being a race to see who gets there first. This will no doubt result in violence against anyone else who tries to lay claim to the property as a squatter, causing more issues than it solves. Adverse possession should be the last possible resort for a completely abandoned property, not the first solution that comes to mind when a landlord doesn't rent out an apartment at a reasonable rate.
The point of it being hard and taking years is that, if the owner is actually attentive and is doing anything with the property, it won't work. And that directly resolves your worry that people would be stabbing each other to claim every property the instant it's vacant; they won't, because it requires a level of inattention far beyond "first sign of vacancy." But it's pretty clear once a property has sat empty for a couple years and the property taxes have gone unpaid (you can look that up at the county office) that you might have a potential candidate for adverse possession.
If the county already has a record of which properties aren't paying their taxes, wouldn't a much better solution to the problem be setting up a system where after a certain period of time and amount of taxes missed, the property is forfeited to the county?
Regardless, the article isn't advocating against people who aren't paying their property taxes, its saying that rental companies who aren't renting out their units (but are still almost certainly paying their taxes) should be the target of squatters. The whole point of this thread is targeting corporate landlords who are jacking up rates and driving up the market prices; not the abandoned corner lot with a falling down house on it.
In most of the US that I'm aware of, owing back taxes to the county and not responding to communications will result in your property being seized long before 7 years has elapsed. The county sells the property to recoup their taxes owed.
Adverse possession is intended for things like ambiguous property boundaries, where one neighbor has been maintaining a section of land for years, paying taxes, etc, but an old survey reveals it is actually part of another plot.
I'm not sure where these folks are getting the idea that it is a solution to the housing crisis. They certainly have never been involved in an actual property dispute.
Wishful thinking I suppose. I get the idea, sticking it to the man is an appealing thought. But I've seen what happens when you give people an inch out in the real world, they always take a mile. Regular people would get screwed over by laws like this, and corporations would simply use their resources to fight it.
I'm doing adverse possession on a 5 acre plot adjacent to 5 I bought out right. Both peices were undeveloped when I started. I paid 21 years of back taxes on my adverse possession and now there's no chance it will go up for auction. I live in a VERY remote place, so its not uncommon here. I have a number of years to go until I can file with the court for the deed, but I have it under good authority that noone will be coming to reclaim it. I've started building on that side of the property and live there, so it's just about letting the clock tick down.
That's a great example and use of adverse possession. Claiming truly abandoned property, paying back taxes, making legitimate and notorious use in good faith. These laws were largely created over time to ensure productive land remained productive, which is exactly what you are accomplishing!
Thanks for sharing!
Yup! In fact, when I walked into the tax office to first pay it off they had a table with packets of info on adverse possession. Its that common here.
That's what it's been neutered to in modern times, but the history is a bit of a different story.
I think it has a rather complicated history(PDF) that generally tried to balance land holder rights with agricultural productivity, and to prevent productive land from going unused. The US history(PDF) was also largely focused on development of frontier lands.
In most cases, I don't think the general intent was to facilitate stealthy repossession of homes, which is why a common requirement for a successful claim is that the occupation is "notorious."
That said, as much as I'm dubious that any claims of adverse possession would be successful in these cases, I'm all for screwing over big landlords with many vacant properties, and applaud the headaches this causes them.
I remember a while back there was an initiative where any rental property would need to declare its costing to the city every year. The property rates/taxes would be calculated accordingly, regardless if it was occupied or not. If a landlord misrepresented the rental it could be reported and investigated by the fraud department and they were pretty competent at picking up tampered meters and unlawful construction.
It was in administrative hell for years, but there was the occasional RFP or pitch meeting for a system to manage the rent and occupation registry, complete with public facing interactive maps and integration to the the cities wider systems.
Since then the city elected the former CEO of a cosmetics company as mayor and things have not been great. And it's a bit of a silly situation when they are expected to greenlight systems that would cost your friends a lot of money. Granted it wasn't all rainbows and butterfly's before and there was a lot of mismanagement. But at least I wast driving past flaming trash piles and vacant towers on the way to work.
That would work, if done properly. But these systems often fail; regulatory capture is a thing. All things being equal, I would rather a problem be addressed by a dozen smaller solutions than one big one. Some will work; some won't work. Some will be corrupted; some will remain true to their purpose.
For example, enforcing that vacancy tax isn't as simple as you might think. How do you tell if a home is vacant? Is the city going to send people door to door peeping in windows to see if anyone's home? Does that sound like a thing anyone would tolerate? No. Rather, landlords will likely just have to submit leases. What's to stop landlords from leasing a thousand units to one person for a penny per month each? What's legally stopping one person from renting a thousand apartments simultaneously? What's legally stopping landlords from renting apartments for whatever they want?
Maybe the company's biggest shareholders each agree to lease a few hundreds apartments for ridiculously low rates whenever they need to keep them off the market for awhile. And if this scheme sounds like a stretch, well, it wasn't written by an attorney. An actual attorney could think of a more competent way to do this, I'm sure. But there are likely many legal games to be played in litigating definitions of occupancy.
I counter this argument with the same one but turned around. How do you tell if someone's been squatting in a property for the required amount of time? Is the city going to send people door to door peeping in windows to see someone is squatting? If anything this makes the paperwork issue even worse, because now you have to go through the judicial system to verify each individual case of adverse possession, and you better believe that every single time it happens the true owner of the property is going to tie up the city in a lawsuit claiming they have the legal right to the property; even if they don't.
The answer to your question is found the concept of “burden,” that is, who has the burden of proving the truth. In this case, the burden would lie with the adverse possessor, wheras in the tax scenario, the city has the burden.
No matter who the burden is on, the city still needs to use its resources to verify those claims. They can't just take it at face value that someone isn't trying to cheat the system.
In all jurisdictions of which I am aware, an AP claim would not involve the city at all. It would be a matter before the state court between two parties. The only way the city would be involved is if it was either of those parties, presumed owner or adverse possessor.
I guess I was conflating the city and the judicial system, even though they're not technically related. Still though, simply kicking the can down the road to the next authority isn't going to lessen the amount of bureaucracy needed to deal with the inevitable massive influx of adverse possession claims if the system was changed to be much more favorable to squatters. Every court that I know of has months of backlogs to slog through, and can't really afford to get even more workload dumped on them.
it’s actually recommended that a person attempting adverse possession claim pay property tax on the property while they’re occupying it. Not hard for state government to verify that. Another way you can strengthen an adverse possession claims is by improving the property or even just maintaining it. It’s not hard to show with the building looked like before you got there and what it looks like now.
Maybe we shouldn’t just take for granted the idea that there’s people in our society who can just legal throw legal temper tantrums and get their way by filling frivolous lawsuits designed to obstruct the legal system with impunity. I guess my big problem is when somebody uses Problem B to justify terminating their thoughts about Solution A, they never seem to go back to thinking about how to solve Problem B.
Can you explain how this would work in the situation outlined in the article? These corporate landlords aren't dodging property taxes, they're just not renting out their units at reasonable rates leading to many vacant properties.
I think people here are getting way too caught up on if adverse possession is even viable and totally forgetting the original intent of OP to use it to punish greedy corporations.
It’s not about delinquent taxes it’s just about demonstrating that you’re serious about taking stewardship of the property. The government’s not gonna complain about getting double property tax on the property. I would like point out that there is a problem with all this, though. A critical component of adverse possession is that if the title holder shows up and asks you to leave, the clock starts over. And I don’t mean it starts over when you get evicted I mean it starts over the instant they show up and ask you to leave.
Okay, I'm out of my depth with this one, I was assuming the government wouldn't just accept a property tax payment for something they've already received. Is it true they'll just let you pay taxes on something you don't even own, even if those taxes are already paid off? Does it notify the other person that someone is trying to pay their taxes for them?
This whole idea seems really weird to me. I don't understand how anyone could see this as a good solution to corporate landlords abusing the market.
So I have never owned any real estate, and I naïvely assumed that in the United States paying property taxes must work like paying my income taxes in terms of self-assessing your tax burden. Well, it doesn’t seem to be the case. I don’t actually know how this aspect works, and knowing how much adverse possession varies from state to state, I have a feeling it’s not very consistent. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Generally speaking (since states are sometimes quite different from each other), county assessors assess property values. I'm sure there's lot of complex calculations and stuff being done, to take into account depreciation/appreciation, market value, etc. Then once they arrive at a value, they send it to the property owner. From there, the property can either agree and pay it, or disagree and appeal (and probably still have to pay the assessed tax while under appeal). Property taxes, like income taxes, are paid annually.
I imagine the county probably doesn't care who pays the tax. But, a squatter who's attempting to possess adversely, would probably need to find out how much that is. Interestingly, this might be public information. At least in my in my county, I can easily look up property values and taxes paid online. I don't even need an account; just a last name or an address. Now as far as the county receiving double payments; one from the legal owner and another from the squatter...no clue how all that would go down.
Lets bring back full adversarial possession of vacant properties. Make the limit like 5 years. A lot of the USA mandates like 30 years, eliminating most practical use cases.
There's a vacant, decrepit farm near me that's been sitting on the market for decades. Sadly I can't scrounge together $20 million.
There's a ton of vacant commercial properties, some adversarial possession of those could make for some nice apartment conversions.
Yeah the laws have been weakened over the generations. I may have even been mistaken on the 7 year figure, the terms are much longer. Present-day adverse possession is more about serving as a way for properties to have clear title than it is a mechanism to really encourage efficient land use today. So bringing these laws back to their old glory sounds like a great idea. There's only so much land available. We have just one Earth to share. And while we can debate private property rights and proper wealth distributions, one thing most all can agree on is that we should at least make sure land is being used efficiently. And while we can debate the meaning of efficiency, "no use at all" is surely the least-useful purpose land that isn't part of a nature preserve can be put to.
We can also debate the meaning of "no use at all." If I have a house on plot of rural land, and I live there but let the land go wild, am I using that land? That's a complicated question and not one we would all agree on. Trying to define what constitutes an acceptably intensive use for land is difficult and very subjective.
That's why adverse possession laws, as traditionally designed, were so useful. You didn't need to have some judge try to decide if a piece of land was being "efficiently used." You simply waited until some enterprising fellow occupied the land. If no one ever said anything after some number of years, the land was theirs.
If you care so little for your property that you don't notice some rando openly occupying it for five years? Yes, you probably should lose your property. You clearly don't need it, have no use for it, and are just using it for land speculation. We're not even going to ban you from speculating that land will go up in value; we just want to make sure the property is being put to some sort of beneficial use.
Yes, but judges still had to be involved.
There’s also another caveat for the just-minded to consider. This same principle was also applied to the lands of the first nations, giving their “unoccupied” lands over to the European folks who were possessing it. They never consented to those rules, and were pretty happy with the relationship they had with the land. Too bad for them I guess they were decimated by disease and exceptionally destructive warfare.
Why post this as it's own topic when it's a verbatim copy of your reply to the original topic??
Either way, my response there still stands. Squatting won't lower rent, it'll encourage rental increases on the people not defecting. Expecting landlords to capitulate to defectors is failing to understand game theory as well.