Around 1,200 homes in metro Atlanta recently have had squatters — or people occupying a property illegally without a landlord-tenant relationship — according to an estimate from the National Rental Home Council trade group. That’s far more than in any other US metro area tracked by the council. And it’s hitting big names in America’s single-family-rental business, including Starwood, Cerberus Capital Management’s FirstKey Homes and Amherst Group — all of which have had dozens of properties with squatters. Landlords say evicting intruders can take half a year or more, due to backlogged court systems and overwhelmed sheriff’s offices.
...
Atlanta has proven fertile ground for the single-family rental industry that sprang up following the US foreclosure crisis. Low home prices helped landlords amass large portfolios, and a growing economy promised rising rents. Today, institutional investors own some 72,000 homes in the area, according to data company SFR Analytics. Institutions own 34,000 homes in Phoenix, the landlords’ second-largest market.
Strong job growth and a pandemic real estate boom, fueled in part by people moving from pricier cities, have sent the area's housing costs soaring. The typical rent across all property types in the Atlanta region rose 34% to $1,897 a month from just before the pandemic until December, compared with a 29% rise nationwide, according to estimates from Zillow.
...
Technology is making it easier for squatters to spot and occupy vacant homes. The advent of self-showings allows would-be tenants to request a viewing and receive a code to enter a property, which can go awry when the information falls into the wrong hands. And fake lease documents are readily available on the internet, said David Howard, CEO of the National Rental Home Council.
“People have figured out how to leverage the technology in such a way that they can get into a house, counterfeit a bogus lease document and then just won’t leave,” he said.
Turning on utilities in a vacant house can be as easy as getting a modem from a local internet service provider, said Urbanski, who cleans as many as 40 squatter homes a month. Many internet providers require little proof of residency, he said. Once squatters get a bill for the online account, they can use that to set up water and power service.
In some cases, people may even be squatting unwittingly, Cruikshank said. Scam artists can gain control of a vacant rental home, list it for rent online and draw up fake lease documents. The duped renter often coughs up thousands of dollars in advance and makes monthly rent payments to the scammer.
Honestly, this sounds like a good thing all around. The big corporate landlords are using big data and algorithms to algorithmically collude with each other and jack up prices. The squatters are...
Honestly, this sounds like a good thing all around. The big corporate landlords are using big data and algorithms to algorithmically collude with each other and jack up prices. The squatters are fighting back, using the same technology to find homes that the big corporate landlords are leaving vacant.
I'm a strong advocate for new housing construction of all forms. I firmly believe that ultimately, the best way to lower rental costs is to increase the supply of housing. However, this assumes a free and open housing market, where supply and demand are free to work. With this new collusion software like Realpage, landlords are often encouraged to leave units vacant for longer than they previously may have. The software will coach them on when, statistically, it's better to leave a unit vacant and hold out for a potentially richer tenant in the future. Sometimes it is worth it to simply let a unit go vacant for a few years rather than dropping the price. The collusion software the landlords are all using makes this a lot easier to predict.
I think we should encourage more squatting. This seems to be a problem more for big corporate landlords than small mom-and-pop ones. A couple using a handful of rentals to pay for their retirement can't afford to let a unit sit empty for months or years. They'll rent a unit out even if it means renting it out for less than they would prefer. But these big corporate landlords have deep enough pockets that they can afford to leave units vacant for long periods of time.
I'm reminded here of the concept of adverse possession. People handwring about adverse possession. Sometimes you'll read articles breathlessly stating, "did you know you could have your land stolen right out from under you?" or similar. But adverse possession is part of the law of many states for a very good reason. Adverse possession exists to encourage people not to waste our finite supply of land.
Adverse possession is the concept found in the laws of many states that allows squatters to obtain ownership of properties under certain conditions. Back in the 1800s, a lot of western US states found that speculators were a major barrier to development. Speculators would buy up plots of wild land out west and simply sit on them. They wouldn't move out there. They wouldn't build anything on the land. They wouldn't farm, mine, or work it in any way. They would just sit on it. They would wait until farmers and other people willing to put in real labor would move out there, improve their land, and by doing so, raise the property value of all the property around them. The speculators made their money entirely off of the sweat and labor of people who actually farmed the land while contributing absolutely nothing. They were leeches holding back the development of entire states.
To combat this, many states adopted adverse possession laws. Adverse possession allows squatters to become landowners, under some very specific circumstances. First, they have to do this for a long time, 7 years is a common length. Second, they have to do so "openly and notoriously." You can't just live in a cave or hide out in the woods behind a rural house. If you want to seize property through adverse possession, you need to be openly operating as the owner of that property would. For instance, if it's a piece of raw land, you would probably have to build a house on that land. If it's a house in a city, you would have to be living there, paying property taxes on the house, have insurance for it, receive mail there, basically everything an owner would do.
Adverse possession is intended to only be applicable in the most egregious cases of absentee landlordism. The principle is, if you care so little about a piece of property, that you don't notice someone openly and brazenly occupying it for SEVEN YEARS, then you probably don't deserve to own that land. You obviously don't need it. If you completely ignore your property for that long, you're not living there. You're not even renting it out. You're just using it for land speculation, the most vile form of property investment.
Now I don't think these Atlanta squatters would qualify for actual adverse possession. But a similar principle applies. These squatters are only becoming more common because the big corporate landlords don't watch their properties as closely as traditional small-scale landlords do. The big corporate landlords are more able to leave homes vacant for months or years, hoping to hold out for higher-paying tenants. Those are vacant units that could be rented out, if the landlords just lowered their prices a bit. But they don't, largely because of esoteric corporate finance reasons that don't apply to small-time retiree landlords.
I see squatting in a similar light. I think squatting is a perfectly natural counter to this kind of irresponsible and greedy behavior these big corporate landlords are demonstrating. Small time landlords are less likely to be able to afford to leave their units vacant for prolonged periods of time. Many don't even list their vacant properties online. If the big corporate landlords want to play these games of collusion and endless rent increases, then hopefully at least squatters can serve as a damper on their greed.
In an ideal world, this would provide enough market pressure on the big corporate landlords to leave the single-family rental market all together, and instead leave that the domain of retirees and small-time landlords. If not that, squatters can at least hopefully lower the profits of big landlords and make them less likely to get into the single-family rental market.
If the landlords are that concerned about squatters, they have options to easily avoid the problem all together. For example, they can raise their rents less often. More reasonable rent increases will mean less people leaving. Next, they can make sure to always have another tenant lined up, even if that means lowering the rent a bit. The big ones have sophisticated enough operations that they could even do it like airlines, with the asking price constantly varying based on the date. Sign a lease a year in advance? Great deal. Sign a lease a month in advance? Crappy deal. Sign up after the previous tenant has already moved out? Amazing deal. If landlords want a unit filled, they can find someone to fill it. The only reason any unit is vacant for any substantial length of time is because the landlords choose to leave it vacant. Finally, there's always the option of just offering a very generous short-term lease to any unit you can't rent out. Have a vacant unit that normally rents for $1500? Offer someone a month-to-month lease for $1200/month. The squatters are only hard to evict because they have a fake year-long lease that doesn't show a short-term end date on it. Your monthly renter has a lease with a reasonable and clear end date on it, and is much more enforceable.
So no, I have zero sympathy for these big corporate landlords. In fact, we should do all we can to encourage more squatters. These properties are only sitting vacant for prolonged periods because of the choices the big corporate landlords have made. No vacant units means no squatters. Avoiding vacant units might require lowering rents or offering amazing deals for units that do become vacant, but that's on the big landlords to decide. Their current practices simply encourage squatting. If they don't want squatters, then they can change their practices. I view squatting very similar to adverse possession. Both are messy but useful processes that encourage landowners to not waste our finite supply of land.
As a practical matter, adverse possession is no longer really law. It’s not technically been reversed, but very few American judges would uphold it. Also the time is more like 25 years in most...
As a practical matter, adverse possession is no longer really law. It’s not technically been reversed, but very few American judges would uphold it.
Also the time is more like 25 years in most states.
Edit: most modern adverse possession claims revolve around easements, as in, my sewer line has been buried under your property for 20 years, you can't remove it now even though you never expressly granted me an easement. And even then, courts usually decide the issue under some other theory, like easement by necessity or some such.
For better or (mostly) worse, modern American jurisprudence tends toward the "inalienable right" to "pursuit of happiness" meaning "god given sacrosanct right to own property."
Edit2: My time estimate is inaccurate as @bloup indicates below.
I read his writing about adverse possession as more about finding a legal rationale with which to push back against market collusion, not an opening to debate the finer historical points of it. It...
I read his writing about adverse possession as more about finding a legal rationale with which to push back against market collusion, not an opening to debate the finer historical points of it.
It does seem like there is or should be a public policy and/or legal obligation to to combat rent-seeking market manipulation so that a proper housing market can’t be manipulated this way.
So, rather than being rather obstructionist by digging up the applicable details of historic use of adverse possession, if you’re conceptually against intervening when there is market capture- or even intervention for the sake of improving housing equity, can you explain why?
If you'd like my actual position on squatting, I made a comment in the other post. My point in responding here is not about history, but rather law. And also about being realistic, and accurate....
If you'd like my actual position on squatting, I made a comment in the other post.
My point in responding here is not about history, but rather law. And also about being realistic, and accurate. Put super-succinctly: I don't think the law supports an adverse possession claim in the case of almost all residential squatters.
And it matters-if people are going to experiment with occupying land to which they do not hold title in the hopes that they will have a legal avenue to ownership, they should undergo a very serious examination of the law in their jurisdiction with a decent land use/real estate attorney. DO NOT TAKE INTERNET FORUM DISCUSSIONS FOR LEGAL ADVICE. Even so august a forum as tildes.
A bigger issue is that folks on all sides of the spectrum seem to forget that the law, at least in America, is heavily influenced by capitalist thinkers, and strongly favors wealthy, entrenched interests. This happens even without corruption. Most judges I have observed try to "do the right thing," but their version of the right thing is pretty conservative and assumes that people with wealth deserve it and their possession of it deserves protection. Also, they try to follow the law even when they might disagree with the outcome it creates. So even if judges are sympathetic, the law itself is often not. To see a heartbreaking example of this, go sit in district court on creditor judgment day.
I have been in that courtroom. In a major metro area. You’re right, it’s heartbreaking. (Edit: And I believe the kind and patient judge behind the bench was deeply disliking what he was having to...
I have been in that courtroom. In a major metro area. You’re right, it’s heartbreaking.
(Edit: And I believe the kind and patient judge behind the bench was deeply disliking what he was having to do in an effort to try and pursue making some change happen).
But I disagree about the base conservatism inherent in our legal system. I’ve had dinner with a federal judge who is hilariously subversive and if given any legal opportunity to upend the scales on behalf of housing equity… I’ve no doubt he’d take that as far as he could.
Implicit in your comment - whether intentional or not - what I am hearing is “give up on trying to pursue housing equity via legal means” and I kinda reject that outright. Maybe I’m hearing you wrong, but assumption of conservatism as somehow bullet proof because of money… well, it does work that way more than it should in my opinion, but it’s no forgone conclusion either. The tides are turning.
Edit # 2 - I just read your piracy comment and fully agree. So… I’m not sure what to “argue” about now. I kinda feel like another silly liberal arguing semantics. Have a good rest of your day.
Most of us on tildes are in alignment for how a better world might look, as far as I can discern. It's important to debate among ourselves, however, and to get as accurate a view of reality as...
Most of us on tildes are in alignment for how a better world might look, as far as I can discern. It's important to debate among ourselves, however, and to get as accurate a view of reality as possible, and also find some consensus on what to do.
I have a bit of a defeatist view on the law atm, I will admit. The current chief justice of the NC supreme court is on record both that there is no racism in the criminal justice system, and that "We hold the truths to be self-evidence . . .by their creator . . . inalienable rights . . . pursuit of happiness" in the declaration of independence means that the Constitution somehow enshrines the notion that Fundamentalist Evangelical God has given real estate title holders a fundamental right to possess and use that property. Don't go look at the John Locke Foundation unless you are in a very good place spiritually.
This is not to say that those who, in the course of acting justifiably against the law, should not receive vigorous and zealous defense in both court and the PR marketplace. The revolution will not be televised, unless we make it so . . .
This is a good example of why the internet is not a lawyer. I looked up NY for curiosity. Here is the relevant language for the time limit ". . . plaintiff, or his predecessor in interest, was...
This is a good example of why the internet is not a lawyer.
I looked up NY for curiosity. Here is the relevant language for the time limit ". . . plaintiff, or his predecessor in interest, was seized or possessed of the premises within ten years before the commencement of the action." The plaintiff in this case means the person who is suing for ejectment of the adverse possessor. The tricky part is, what "seized or possessed of the premises?" I'll wager half my fortune nearly every judge in America would agree that if the plaintiff has a legitimate title to the property, that it is "seized or possessed" sufficient to satisfy this requirement.
Further complicating matters in NY is the requirement that possession be ". . .under claim of right, open and notorious, continuous, exclusive, and actual." Under claim of right is the really tricky one. "A claim of right means a reasonable basis for the belief that the property belongs to the adverse possessor or property owner, as the case may be." Again, I'll give you a third my fortune if you can find any active judge that will agree with the proposition that a claim of right include a belief that, because the titled owner was not using it, an adverse possessor the legal right to go on and occupy this property. More likely, a judge will require a non-fraudelent paper, like a will or a lease or a deed, that indicates a transfer of property to the adverse possessor.
if you succeed in an adverse possession claim, there is not really any going to court.
This is patently untrue. A claim is a legal entity, and to "succeed" on such necessarily implies litigation of the claim, in a court, before a judge.
IIRC, the claimed legitimate possessor has to bring a prima facie case, after which the burden shifts to the possessor to prove they meet the AP elements.
Edit: I'll invite you to point to some modern decisions in favor of adverse possessors if you doubt my claim that judges strongly disfavor the notion.
Sure. There always will be some squatters. But as the article notes, the corporate landlords seem more vulnerable to this than the smaller outfits. The increase has been caused by the increase in...
Sure. There always will be some squatters. But as the article notes, the corporate landlords seem more vulnerable to this than the smaller outfits. The increase has been caused by the increase in corporate landlordism.
And while bigger landlords are more likely to be able to hold a unit empty waiting out for a rich tenant, smaller landlords can sometimes do the same. Maybe they won't hold a unit open for years, but maybe instead they hold it open for months.
Again, ultimately, if you're a landlord with a vacant unit of any kind, that is by your choice. If you slash the rent enough, you CAN find someone to fill it. Hell, if you're willing to offer a ridiculous discount, you could probably find someone to fill it in just a single day. All empty units are empty by CHOICE. By the choice of the landlord. Often that choice is rational; holding out for a better-paying tenant can be worth it financially. But it's still a choice they make. You chose to leave your unit empty, speculating on being able to get a higher-paying tenant.
The risk of squatting will just be something that all landlords will have to price into their decision about when to cut rental costs in order to get a unit filled. They can run that calculus and decide accordingly. I'm not going to weep for them, as ultimately it will drive down rents by encouraging landlords, big and small, from leaving units vacant.
Many of these squatters aren't taking advantage of empty buildings, they are signing lease agreements and then refusing to pay them, knowing that it's nigh impossible to remove squatters. That's...
Many of these squatters aren't taking advantage of empty buildings, they are signing lease agreements and then refusing to pay them, knowing that it's nigh impossible to remove squatters. That's just theft.
Maybe that's a question of definitions. I consider a squatter someone who doesn't have any actual landlord/tenant relationship. I would just consider the other a delinquent tenant like any other....
Maybe that's a question of definitions. I consider a squatter someone who doesn't have any actual landlord/tenant relationship. I would just consider the other a delinquent tenant like any other. If you sign a lease and agree to pay at a certain price, but then just never make the next rent payment? You're not helping drive down market rents that way.
And I think squatters are legally harder to remove than delinquent tenants. If you have a real lease, then you have a clear legal agreement about what the rent is, when it's due, etc. If someone violates the lease, it's something the court can quickly reference and objectively determine. Squatters? Those are much worse. Imagine you have a unit that you think should rent for $1500/month. It would be bad enough if you rented it to someone for that amount, and then they never made further payments. But at least you can prove they haven't held up their end of the bargain. That would be a mere deadbeat tenant.
A squatter? Oh, they would be so, so much worse. They would show up with a fake deed and claim they own the place. Maybe they filed a fake quitclaim deed down at the county records office. Or maybe they have a fake lease that says you've agreed to rent the property to them for $500/month. When you drag them to court, they add insult to injury by lying and saying they got the low rate from you because you had a romantic affair together. I think of squatters as a category distinct and apart from mere deadbeat tenant. Squatters live a more evolved and transcendent form of assholery. They are deadbeatism elevated to a form of art!
I understood your article to be saying that non owners were setting up the leases. The tenants probably are making payments, but not to the owners. I feel really bad for tenants this happens to.
I understood your article to be saying that non owners were setting up the leases. The tenants probably are making payments, but not to the owners.
There is zero guarantee that squatters will impact corporate landlords any more than individual landlords, maybe only insomuch as there are more corporate ones, but there are many anecdotes of a...
There is zero guarantee that squatters will impact corporate landlords any more than individual landlords, maybe only insomuch as there are more corporate ones, but there are many anecdotes of a new buyer being fucked over by squatters, even when their plan was to occupy the house.
Squatters are defecting and defecting is rarely a solution. Break up the landlord collusion without encouraging friction, before you end up with people straight up harassing or being violent to squatters, and a more robust legal system wouldn't be failing to handle the volume. I'm pretty anti-landlord, but I'd rather that be through increased taxes or higher regulations than to encourage squatting, I don't think that's going to solve anything. Squatters are removing homes from the market just the same, and contributing to the housing prices, if you don't think corporate landlords will just price in their squatting losses across their other properties, which of course they will.
72,000 sounds like a big number when taken out of context, but given that there are about 2.5 million housing units in Atlanta metro, that's 3%. Well, the homeownership rate is 65%, so if we...
72,000 sounds like a big number when taken out of context, but given that there are about 2.5 million housing units in Atlanta metro, that's 3%. Well, the homeownership rate is 65%, so if we subtract that out 72k is about 8% of potential rentals.
So I think you're right. Unless there's a massive bias towards squatting institutional investor owned homes, squatting is a lot more likely to affect non-institutional landlords.
You love to see it. Every nonlocal multi-property slumlord deserves this. And this shouldn't hurt attentive local landlords at all, especially those who cut prices to get a tenant instead of...
You love to see it. Every nonlocal multi-property slumlord deserves this. And this shouldn't hurt attentive local landlords at all, especially those who cut prices to get a tenant instead of sitting for months at a ridiculous price.
As long as landlords are incentivised to maximise profit, instead of simply providing a fundamental human right with modest margins to compensate their time and repair costs, we need tools like this to fight back. Much like healthcare, electricity, running water, and food, a functional society should strive to provide housing to all, even if it's not generating the maximum profit. Consider it a sunk cost to subsidise poor paying jobs until we figure out UBI.
I have little sympathy when viewings organised online and carried out independently go awry. If you take someone's information remotely, and then unlock a house for them to walk themself around,...
I have little sympathy when viewings organised online and carried out independently go awry. If you take someone's information remotely, and then unlock a house for them to walk themself around, you're saving a lot of time and effort for yourself, sure. But you're absolutely opening yourself up to this kind of abuse and I can't help but feel that that's WHY you pay (either paying an agent or paying yourself in time/travel/opportunity cost) to chaperone someone around. You can't just cut costs forever and expect no liabilities to arise.
It's somewhat distressing to me to hear people say that breaking laws is justified in the way you suggest. I want to live in a society where I can trust people not to defraud me, such that I can...
It's somewhat distressing to me to hear people say that breaking laws is justified in the way you suggest. I want to live in a society where I can trust people not to defraud me, such that I can trust them to participate in expected and kind ways. I want to know my neighbors will not take advantage of me, even if I make myself somewhat vulnerable, such as by not locking my car, or leaving my kids bike in the driveway, etc.
I'm realistic, mind you, I understand the world is not perfect and people do bad stuff, and so I protect myself. But it should not be unreasonable that I can trust people to behave appropriately unsupervised. I do assume the practical risk that they might, but they are not justified simply because I am trusting.
This is of course different in the context of oppression. If I am shutting people out based on who they are (as opposed to their actions), and/or because of my unfair privilege, they are morally justified to push back. This is what Rosa Parks did, and we're all better off because of it.
When certain laws begin to show a pattern of being broken, there are often reasons. Almost any example you could name out of civil rights (including and especially all the way to actual slavery)...
When certain laws begin to show a pattern of being broken, there are often reasons. Almost any example you could name out of civil rights (including and especially all the way to actual slavery) is an excellent, if highly charged, example.
An attitude that stipulates that a law is the law, period, done, no discussion, is the exact kind of thing that leads to the law being broken. Especially these days, where ordinary citizens are heavily disadvantaged from having their interests and needs encapsulated into law compared to the desires of the wealthy (including corporations) having their needs codified legally.
There's a reason we have juries. If it's just a matter of "the law's the law", then why have a jury? Judge is enough. "Oh, you did walk out of the store with the goods you didn't pay for. Guilty of theft, six months in jail, take'em away."
But what if the guy had been fired by that store, for stupid reasons. And the store owner had been spreading lies and actively interfering with the man's ability to obtain other work. And what he stole was food, for his starving family.
Suddenly it's not so black and white. That's an emotionally charged example, but it's the same for any crime. You sit a jury because the citizens of the society might not agree with a black-and-white reading of the law. Juries, people, might not agree that just because someone is sitting in a vacant property that this act meets a definition of a crime that deserves jail. They might not vote to convict.
That's their right under the jury system, however much it pisses off lawyers and judges and prosecutors (who hate jury nullification since it takes away power they see as theirs).
A lot of entities, most of them from the Capital class, have turned basic housing into a profit center. Not a modest profit center. A lucrative one. Where do those profits come from? The accounts of labor, from ordinary people who just need a place to stay. That's money those people won't have to buy food or anything else. Money that's being taken to enrich Capital.
It's one thing, maybe, to shrug it off when it's Manhattan or downtown San Francisco or some place like that. After all, just because someone wants to live in a dense, space limited city center doesn't necessarily mean they have any right to expect it to be affordable.
But landlords across the country (countries, actually, since Canada, the UK, and elsewhere, are seeing this trend as well), are locking up large segments of the available housing space. In increasing amounts, people are finding it harder and harder to find affordable housing, anywhere, due to landlords forcing through increases. And in many cases, they're purposefully letting spaces sit vacant in defiance of the vaunted "rules of the free market" that supposedly describe how prices are tied to demand.
It's vacant, but people want it. That should be demand. But buyers can't afford it, so that should indicate the price will drop, because there's clearly excess Supply. Yet it doesn't. Because landlords (corporate or otherwise) are waiting buyers out. They have a place to live, the little people don't. Sooner or later, someone caves and pays the inflated price.
I wouldn't vote to convict a squatter. Nope. I hope the squatting syndrome becomes more prevalent. Anything that might be one more piece of weight on the scale against this horrific trend of pricing people out of having a life. Not a good life, not a luxurious live; just fucking life.
I did note, in the article, the landlords were upset the courts and sheriffs were "too swamped" to attend to the landlord complaints in a timely fashion.
Gee ... so a lot of people are doings things that landlords want the state to deal with. Landlords. Corporate landlords in many cases. Corporations that, in the manner of corporations, often look for ways to minimize their taxes paid. What funds State activities, like courts and sheriffs? Could it be taxes? Which are going unpaid? Money that's not being made available to the state due to corporate shenanigans ranging from fraud to buying laws to plain ordinary (legal but scummy) accounting maneuvers?
Sounds like their complaint is at least partially of their own making.
These landlords could more closely control their properties. If they're going to sit on them until they find a buyer willing to fork over the demands, they could dramatically reduce the incidence of squatting by controlling the properties. Monitoring them. Having live actual people, who are on payroll, control access. Not this remote stuff that minimizes landlord costs.
Cutting labor out. Increasing Capital profit margins. The same Capital that's upset the state won't enforce, for free, Capital's needs.
Capital can go spit for all I care. If they're so upset about people squatting, they have options. Some of them involve lowering the price to get paying tenants in. And if they're going to insist on not doing that, they could at least hire caretakers and supers and those sorts of functions to monitor and maintain the properties to prevent anyone from having the chance to settle in uninvited.
Oh, but that would cost money. Can't have that. The state should take over that burden, and enforce our right to keep gouging.
Funny how it's always the little people that have to move on, move over, and move out. Never Capital.
So, I recognize this as a rant, and certainly I can relate to many of the sentiments. I feel compelled to comment on one part though, mostly for other readers' sake, but also so you can have a...
So, I recognize this as a rant, and certainly I can relate to many of the sentiments. I feel compelled to comment on one part though, mostly for other readers' sake, but also so you can have a little more understanding about issues.
First, in most states, a lot of trials don't have juries, for better or worse.
Second, "facts" and "law" are two different things in court. Juries don't decide the law, they decide answers to very carefully worded factual questions. I don't know much about jury nullification, but I suspect there's multiple procedures to limit its effect.
One is jury selection. If a trial attorney can get you to admit you have a bias, you'll be excused as a juror. Up to a certain limit, if they even feel like you may have a bias, you'll be excused as a juror.
On the point of cutting labor out. Who, outside of certain sociopaths, really wants a rental security job? That is one tedious job, AI can do it better. Let's solve that one with UBI rather than soul-sucking job creation programs.
I see what you're saying, I really do, and I'd like to live there too. However, the social contract has been repeatedly trampled to my deficit. I have very little chance of ever owning my own...
I see what you're saying, I really do, and I'd like to live there too.
However, the social contract has been repeatedly trampled to my deficit. I have very little chance of ever owning my own home, even though I'm well qualified (disappearing industry) and have done always kept my side of the social bargain.
There is zero incentive for me to continue upholding a deal that unfairly enriches those who are already wealthy amd powerful at my own great expense. I will not be a useful cog in someone else's machine and render the expected thanks for being chewed up and spat out.
The leaders of my country and those of its allies play fast and loose with the laws, are openly and legally corrupt within a system that is rugged against me. Damn straight I've started taking what isn't mine and what the system will never willingly grant me.
Sorry, we live under a failed system and I'm just a number on someone else's spreadsheet. It's nothing personal, just the response of an animal backed into a corner.
Parent did (sort of but not really). I'm just highlighting how lawbreaking is intrinsic to progress. Squatters are (intentionally or not) highlighting a major problem in the US, and tbh can't...
Parent did (sort of but not really). I'm just highlighting how lawbreaking is intrinsic to progress.
Squatters are (intentionally or not) highlighting a major problem in the US, and tbh can't blame them when the alternative is being criminalized for being homeless.
IMO squatting is no worse a crime than landlording, and is definitely less-bad than creating artificial scarcity via choosing to keep properties vacant.
That is actually an insane position. I'm pretty against SFH landlording, as I think that ownership should be the most big standard and free from rent seeking, but how do you think landlording for...
That is actually an insane position. I'm pretty against SFH landlording, as I think that ownership should be the most big standard and free from rent seeking, but how do you think landlording for apartment buildings is a crime????
I suppose crime is a bit hyperbolic, 'immoral' would be better. Because landlording is fundamentally about ownership. At its core, landlording is about building assets off of somebody else, almost...
I suppose crime is a bit hyperbolic, 'immoral' would be better. Because landlording is fundamentally about ownership. At its core, landlording is about building assets off of somebody else, almost purely because you had more assets to begin with.
In the case of shared dwellings, building should be owned collectively by the tenants (or failing that, a democratic government), finances should be transparent, and rent determined democratically.
Course, I'm one of those dirty anarcho-communists who thinks that outside of personal dwellings, it should be communally-owned.
You can just say that from the start ;) Not that I agree, but have you heard of a Harberger tax? You should check out "Radical markets" and iirc the excerpt "Private property is another word for...
You can just say that from the start ;)
Not that I agree, but have you heard of a Harberger tax? You should check out "Radical markets" and iirc the excerpt "Private property is another word for monopoly"
It's interesting from a thought experiment perspective, but I'm a big believer in incrementalism.
I agree that it's not very prudent, but this is still blaming the victim. It's sort of like saying that if you don't lock your bike, you deserve for it to get stolen. The penalty for this is in...
I agree that it's not very prudent, but this is still blaming the victim. It's sort of like saying that if you don't lock your bike, you deserve for it to get stolen. The penalty for this is in some sense the "natural" one, but it seems rather harsh? Lots of horrendous things happen in the natural world. "Natural" is not justice. We want justice, right?
There are advantages to living in a high-trust society (like, say, Japan). In an ideal world, you could leave your door unlocked and nothing would happen. I did once meet someone who felt so safe in their neighborhood that they didn't lock their doors, though it was quite a few years ago now.
In my mind, this is somewhat akin to media piracy. It's even more morally justified, because it relates to a basic human need for shelter. My premise is that, when market distortions take...
In my mind, this is somewhat akin to media piracy. It's even more morally justified, because it relates to a basic human need for shelter.
My premise is that, when market distortions take something unfairly beyond the reach of a significant number of people, maybe any people, those people are justified to use unsanctioned (by mainstream, or legal, culture) means to go after what they are missing.
So in the case of piracy, distribution companies are rent seeking by playing greedy with rights to products they did not generate. Their market position has questionable legitimacy, and their leveraging of that position to extract higher prices is an unjust distortion. In practical terms, rather than an efficient marketing and distribution scheme (what netflix once was), players have divided and merged and acquired and divested and segregated, drastically and unfairly inflating the price of content (and also deflating the compensation to the creatives who actually made the stuff). Distribution is an important part of content, but not the most. Distributors deserve compensation, too, but not when all they are adding is confusion. So, I think most people are morally justified in circumventing those distribution mechanisms.
Similarly, housing in many markets is the result of unfair market distortions. Many factors bring these on-zoning, tax structure, missing regulations, runaway speculative impulses, to name but a few. The result though is a drastic and unfair price inflation, limiting people's access to a basic need in the name of profit growth. People are then morally justified to circumvent the "distribution mechanism" of housing, using self help to obtain suitable shelter. You don't want squatters? Get more efficient and more fair in housing provisions.
Although I largely agree with your post, I don't think there is much moral/ethical philosophizing necessary. In normal economics there is a space (generally the left side of a graph of...
Although I largely agree with your post, I don't think there is much moral/ethical philosophizing necessary. In normal economics there is a space (generally the left side of a graph of supply/demand curves) where demand is higher than supply. Kinder economists will call it something along the lines of "space for a grey market" while less kind (or more realistic) economists will call it something like "the crime zone." As landlords shift their supply curve right, that crime zone only gets larger and, unlike razor blades at Target, housing just kinda sits out in the open. Squatting in this case is just normal economic activity.
All that being said, fuck corporatist landlords.
Phrasing this in terms of "basic human need for shelter" is sweeping some important distinctions under the rug. We're not talking about someone stealing a tent. It's also kind of odd that people...
Phrasing this in terms of "basic human need for shelter" is sweeping some important distinctions under the rug. We're not talking about someone stealing a tent.
It's also kind of odd that people so quickly take sides while knowing so little about the circumstances. Who are these squatters? The article doesn't say anything about them.
People being so quick to judge is disheartening. It seems there's little interest in justice around here.
The question of justice for who is interesting. In law school my torts professor was a man who had represented big insurance. He was genuinely distressed when he explained to the class that...
The question of justice for who is interesting.
In law school my torts professor was a man who had represented big insurance. He was genuinely distressed when he explained to the class that neighbors will lie to support false stories by neighbors during an insurance investigation. Most of us in class were like 'yes, what's your point? Why are you surprised that little people want to stick it to the Man?'
While I don't doubt some squatters are just assholes who are destroying the property they are illegally occupying, remember that we live in a society where the opposite (good, hard-working people...
While I don't doubt some squatters are just assholes who are destroying the property they are illegally occupying, remember that we live in a society where the opposite (good, hard-working people being made homeless through simple bad luck) is far more common. Surely if the focus is on justice one of these is the bigger problem. Obviously we should solve both, but one of these is a problem for people with multiple homes and one of these is a problem for people who have nothing.
I guess it's just talking online so it doesn't really matter, but still, I would trust someone who wants to hear the details about a specific case over someone who judges without knowing anything...
I guess it's just talking online so it doesn't really matter, but still, I would trust someone who wants to hear the details about a specific case over someone who judges without knowing anything about it.
"Which is more common" is an excuse to not care about the details and such carelessness is not justice, in my mind.
This is what it looks like when the social contract begins to break down. A society (the citizens making it up, residing within it) agrees to live to certain standards because they have faith in...
This is what it looks like when the social contract begins to break down.
A society (the citizens making it up, residing within it) agrees to live to certain standards because they have faith in the social contract. That there are basic protections, expectations, and deliverables they can access. That they can even enjoy. Be supported by.
The ability to go out, work hard, be paid fairly, and have a basic ordinary life is pretty standard if you run around the world and try to elicit definitions from most people. "Fairly* usually adds up to something that equates to "able to have some shelter with basic needs met, and do more than just work/sleep/repeat."
Those standards have been destroyed. People are being driven into the ground. People who are willing to work aren't able to achieve that "fair" they expect. They work hard, but are paid less, receive abuse, their needs are increasingly not met, and their concerns are ignored by the societal leaders (government) we expect to enforce the standards of the social contract.
People react by withdrawing. If everyone has their needs met, if everyone believes in the social contract, it's far more likely they'll cooperate with society. That they'll say "hey, you can't do that" or "authorities, he (the bad guy) ran that way." Anything like that. They do those things less, and consider thinking of doing them folly, when they lack faith in society.
There's a scene in the first Cruise Jack Reacher film. He's in a car, being chased by police cruisers. He hops out of the car, which he leaves to roll down the street, and calmly walks over to a group of bystanders at a bus stop.
No one, not a single person in that crowd, objects. Or makes a fuss. He just joins the crowd, standing there just as they are, blending in. Cops come barreling by, sirens blaring, and no one waves or shouts or points Reacher out. One guy even gives Reacher his hat, with the clear unspoken intention Reacher should put it on and be less likely to be noticed by the cops.
The bus arrives, everyone (including Reacher) boards, and still no one points him out to the cops as the police buzz around the empty car Reacher had abandoned. Which is now a block or so away, having bumped into a police roadblock. They all just depart on the bus, cops none the wiser.
That's the social contract no longer being upheld by the citizens. The authorities would be aghast. Horrified. Angered. Why don't the citizens act to support the rule of law?
Because, increasingly, fewer people believe law will act to support them.
And it's not just that the characters in the film (story) didn't point "the bad guy" out to the cops. Audiences loved it. If there was some groundswell of people rising up in anger that some major motion picture would have the gall to showcase citizens openly defying the cops, I never found it. Hollywood, in fact, used to have actual rules studios adhered to, that preached movies weren't allowed to showcase criminals or criminal behavior in a good light. And that cops and government should be shown in a good one.
Where are those rules now? They're gone. Have been for a while. Why? Because they're considered antiquated. Quaint. Out-of-touch. You're more likely to find people calling a story unbelievable if you try to cast a cop as a good guy, than if you cast the cop as corrupt.
Rule of law, social contracts, work both ways. If everyone can rely on them, and receive a fair basic shake in life, then everyone is more likely to participate in ways that uphold that contract. When people start to not receive that fair shake, they start to withdraw. They start to become uncooperative.
There's two ways this can be addressed. One is via authoritarianism, where government and police and anyone else "in charge" cracks down, uses force (the Power of the State) to enforce compliance.
The other is by repairing the social contract. That's much harder though. That requires actual change. That isn't as appealing to the people who've corrupted the social contract in the first place.
And yet people are surprised we seem to be drifting towards authoritarianism. We're headed in that direction because people in power often love power, and are becoming concerned their power doesn't seem to mean as much as it used to. This isn't just government, it's the wealthy (who have grown used to their control over government giving them nearly the same level of power).
Which just further fractures the social contract. Continuing the slide, the divide.
I think this is too binary. Although belief in justice has in some cases decayed, I don't believe it's entirely gone. After all, don't people complain about injustice all the time? And they often...
I think this is too binary. Although belief in justice has in some cases decayed, I don't believe it's entirely gone.
After all, don't people complain about injustice all the time? And they often expect the government to do something about it.
"After all, don't people complain about injustice all the time? And they often expect the government to do something about it." It seems like you're mixing people's belief in justice as a concept...
"After all, don't people complain about injustice all the time? And they often expect the government to do something about it."
It seems like you're mixing people's belief in justice as a concept with their belief that that concept is actually manifested in reality. Because the prior is almost universal among human beings whereas the latter is almost entirely dependent on an individual's own experiences. So you believing it is manifested has very little bearing on whether they have actually experienced it.
"It's inconsistent, but it's there."
The inconsistency is the problem. It's not really justice if only a handful of people can actually get it. That's just power. And you might just be in a position where you have enough of it to protect yourself legally, and so for you it feels like justice.
I feel a certain amount of schadenfreude. I don't love squatters but I also don't appreciate private equity buying up local economies. These consultants with their spreadsheets need to realize...
I feel a certain amount of schadenfreude.
I don't love squatters but I also don't appreciate private equity buying up local economies.
These consultants with their spreadsheets need to realize that real estate is local and specific and requires hands on management to make it work.
The people making home ownership unaffordable are NIMBYs. Housing supply is constrained and prices are rising fast enough that homes are a good investment. Developers would love to build more...
The people making home ownership unaffordable are NIMBYs. Housing supply is constrained and prices are rising fast enough that homes are a good investment. Developers would love to build more houses and make a profit if they legally could. Blame your neighbors and everyone opposed to any and all supply-side solutions. Everything else is just a product of housing being underbuilt in anglophone countries due to stupid regulations.
I would add some caveats to your general point. Most cities that are desirable to tourists have not built adequate replacement housing for units repurposed through Airbnb. There is a company with...
I would add some caveats to your general point.
Most cities that are desirable to tourists have not built adequate replacement housing for units repurposed through Airbnb.
There is a company with an algorithm currently being sued for antitrust. It is alleged that the company encourages landlords to keep units off the market rather than reduce rents
Yep I'm familiar with the effect of Airbnb and RealPage on property markets. Fundamentally, both of those are still supply issues. For Airbnb, I think there are legitimate reasons to restrict...
Yep I'm familiar with the effect of Airbnb and RealPage on property markets. Fundamentally, both of those are still supply issues.
For Airbnb, I think there are legitimate reasons to restrict short-term rentals related to noise complaints etc, but I don't see it as much of an impact on supply. Realistically, how many people are actually buying up homea just to do Airbnb? All the numbers I can find are miniscule. We could instead fix regulations that restrict hotel construction to get far more temporary housing built-up. Or we could even let people build ADU and tiny homes on their land to support short-term rentals if they wanted.
On RealPage, I think it's a perfect example of what I mean by housing is almost always a supply issue. The majority of building owners weren't colluding, but a sizeable plurality of big institutional owners were illegally price coordinating through "an algorithm". This is a structural issue enabled by the fact that only the biggest corporate tenants can deal with the burdensome regulations and financing required by most cities to get mid-rises and high-rises built.
If it was easy for a local family-owned construction company to build up more supply, they'd obviously do it to undercut the overpriced units on the market. Unfortunately, the existing building owners don't have to worry about competition because local NIMBYs always give them a monopoly.
I'm thinking of communities like South lake Tahoe where build able land is scarce and expensive. Service workers need places to live but demand for cheaper rentals for tourists is high and exceeds...
I'm thinking of communities like South lake Tahoe where build able land is scarce and expensive. Service workers need places to live but demand for cheaper rentals for tourists is high and exceeds available supply
If the land is scarce and expensive, then buildings need to be taller to bring the cost per home down. From everything I can find, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has proposed a major upzone to...
If the land is scarce and expensive, then buildings need to be taller to bring the cost per home down. From everything I can find, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has proposed a major upzone to increase supply and decrease prices, but there has been constant pushback and lawsuits from NIMBYs like "environmental" groups and concerned neighbours.
From the article:
...
...
Honestly, this sounds like a good thing all around. The big corporate landlords are using big data and algorithms to algorithmically collude with each other and jack up prices. The squatters are fighting back, using the same technology to find homes that the big corporate landlords are leaving vacant.
I'm a strong advocate for new housing construction of all forms. I firmly believe that ultimately, the best way to lower rental costs is to increase the supply of housing. However, this assumes a free and open housing market, where supply and demand are free to work. With this new collusion software like Realpage, landlords are often encouraged to leave units vacant for longer than they previously may have. The software will coach them on when, statistically, it's better to leave a unit vacant and hold out for a potentially richer tenant in the future. Sometimes it is worth it to simply let a unit go vacant for a few years rather than dropping the price. The collusion software the landlords are all using makes this a lot easier to predict.
I think we should encourage more squatting. This seems to be a problem more for big corporate landlords than small mom-and-pop ones. A couple using a handful of rentals to pay for their retirement can't afford to let a unit sit empty for months or years. They'll rent a unit out even if it means renting it out for less than they would prefer. But these big corporate landlords have deep enough pockets that they can afford to leave units vacant for long periods of time.
I'm reminded here of the concept of adverse possession. People handwring about adverse possession. Sometimes you'll read articles breathlessly stating, "did you know you could have your land stolen right out from under you?" or similar. But adverse possession is part of the law of many states for a very good reason. Adverse possession exists to encourage people not to waste our finite supply of land.
Adverse possession is the concept found in the laws of many states that allows squatters to obtain ownership of properties under certain conditions. Back in the 1800s, a lot of western US states found that speculators were a major barrier to development. Speculators would buy up plots of wild land out west and simply sit on them. They wouldn't move out there. They wouldn't build anything on the land. They wouldn't farm, mine, or work it in any way. They would just sit on it. They would wait until farmers and other people willing to put in real labor would move out there, improve their land, and by doing so, raise the property value of all the property around them. The speculators made their money entirely off of the sweat and labor of people who actually farmed the land while contributing absolutely nothing. They were leeches holding back the development of entire states.
To combat this, many states adopted adverse possession laws. Adverse possession allows squatters to become landowners, under some very specific circumstances. First, they have to do this for a long time, 7 years is a common length. Second, they have to do so "openly and notoriously." You can't just live in a cave or hide out in the woods behind a rural house. If you want to seize property through adverse possession, you need to be openly operating as the owner of that property would. For instance, if it's a piece of raw land, you would probably have to build a house on that land. If it's a house in a city, you would have to be living there, paying property taxes on the house, have insurance for it, receive mail there, basically everything an owner would do.
Adverse possession is intended to only be applicable in the most egregious cases of absentee landlordism. The principle is, if you care so little about a piece of property, that you don't notice someone openly and brazenly occupying it for SEVEN YEARS, then you probably don't deserve to own that land. You obviously don't need it. If you completely ignore your property for that long, you're not living there. You're not even renting it out. You're just using it for land speculation, the most vile form of property investment.
Now I don't think these Atlanta squatters would qualify for actual adverse possession. But a similar principle applies. These squatters are only becoming more common because the big corporate landlords don't watch their properties as closely as traditional small-scale landlords do. The big corporate landlords are more able to leave homes vacant for months or years, hoping to hold out for higher-paying tenants. Those are vacant units that could be rented out, if the landlords just lowered their prices a bit. But they don't, largely because of esoteric corporate finance reasons that don't apply to small-time retiree landlords.
I see squatting in a similar light. I think squatting is a perfectly natural counter to this kind of irresponsible and greedy behavior these big corporate landlords are demonstrating. Small time landlords are less likely to be able to afford to leave their units vacant for prolonged periods of time. Many don't even list their vacant properties online. If the big corporate landlords want to play these games of collusion and endless rent increases, then hopefully at least squatters can serve as a damper on their greed.
In an ideal world, this would provide enough market pressure on the big corporate landlords to leave the single-family rental market all together, and instead leave that the domain of retirees and small-time landlords. If not that, squatters can at least hopefully lower the profits of big landlords and make them less likely to get into the single-family rental market.
If the landlords are that concerned about squatters, they have options to easily avoid the problem all together. For example, they can raise their rents less often. More reasonable rent increases will mean less people leaving. Next, they can make sure to always have another tenant lined up, even if that means lowering the rent a bit. The big ones have sophisticated enough operations that they could even do it like airlines, with the asking price constantly varying based on the date. Sign a lease a year in advance? Great deal. Sign a lease a month in advance? Crappy deal. Sign up after the previous tenant has already moved out? Amazing deal. If landlords want a unit filled, they can find someone to fill it. The only reason any unit is vacant for any substantial length of time is because the landlords choose to leave it vacant. Finally, there's always the option of just offering a very generous short-term lease to any unit you can't rent out. Have a vacant unit that normally rents for $1500? Offer someone a month-to-month lease for $1200/month. The squatters are only hard to evict because they have a fake year-long lease that doesn't show a short-term end date on it. Your monthly renter has a lease with a reasonable and clear end date on it, and is much more enforceable.
So no, I have zero sympathy for these big corporate landlords. In fact, we should do all we can to encourage more squatters. These properties are only sitting vacant for prolonged periods because of the choices the big corporate landlords have made. No vacant units means no squatters. Avoiding vacant units might require lowering rents or offering amazing deals for units that do become vacant, but that's on the big landlords to decide. Their current practices simply encourage squatting. If they don't want squatters, then they can change their practices. I view squatting very similar to adverse possession. Both are messy but useful processes that encourage landowners to not waste our finite supply of land.
As a practical matter, adverse possession is no longer really law. It’s not technically been reversed, but very few American judges would uphold it.
Also the time is more like 25 years in most states.
Edit: most modern adverse possession claims revolve around easements, as in, my sewer line has been buried under your property for 20 years, you can't remove it now even though you never expressly granted me an easement. And even then, courts usually decide the issue under some other theory, like easement by necessity or some such.
For better or (mostly) worse, modern American jurisprudence tends toward the "inalienable right" to "pursuit of happiness" meaning "god given sacrosanct right to own property."
Edit2: My time estimate is inaccurate as @bloup indicates below.
I read his writing about adverse possession as more about finding a legal rationale with which to push back against market collusion, not an opening to debate the finer historical points of it.
It does seem like there is or should be a public policy and/or legal obligation to to combat rent-seeking market manipulation so that a proper housing market can’t be manipulated this way.
So, rather than being rather obstructionist by digging up the applicable details of historic use of adverse possession, if you’re conceptually against intervening when there is market capture- or even intervention for the sake of improving housing equity, can you explain why?
If you'd like my actual position on squatting, I made a comment in the other post.
My point in responding here is not about history, but rather law. And also about being realistic, and accurate. Put super-succinctly: I don't think the law supports an adverse possession claim in the case of almost all residential squatters.
And it matters-if people are going to experiment with occupying land to which they do not hold title in the hopes that they will have a legal avenue to ownership, they should undergo a very serious examination of the law in their jurisdiction with a decent land use/real estate attorney. DO NOT TAKE INTERNET FORUM DISCUSSIONS FOR LEGAL ADVICE. Even so august a forum as tildes.
A bigger issue is that folks on all sides of the spectrum seem to forget that the law, at least in America, is heavily influenced by capitalist thinkers, and strongly favors wealthy, entrenched interests. This happens even without corruption. Most judges I have observed try to "do the right thing," but their version of the right thing is pretty conservative and assumes that people with wealth deserve it and their possession of it deserves protection. Also, they try to follow the law even when they might disagree with the outcome it creates. So even if judges are sympathetic, the law itself is often not. To see a heartbreaking example of this, go sit in district court on creditor judgment day.
I have been in that courtroom. In a major metro area. You’re right, it’s heartbreaking.
(Edit: And I believe the kind and patient judge behind the bench was deeply disliking what he was having to do in an effort to try and pursue making some change happen).
But I disagree about the base conservatism inherent in our legal system. I’ve had dinner with a federal judge who is hilariously subversive and if given any legal opportunity to upend the scales on behalf of housing equity… I’ve no doubt he’d take that as far as he could.
Implicit in your comment - whether intentional or not - what I am hearing is “give up on trying to pursue housing equity via legal means” and I kinda reject that outright. Maybe I’m hearing you wrong, but assumption of conservatism as somehow bullet proof because of money… well, it does work that way more than it should in my opinion, but it’s no forgone conclusion either. The tides are turning.
Edit # 2 - I just read your piracy comment and fully agree. So… I’m not sure what to “argue” about now. I kinda feel like another silly liberal arguing semantics. Have a good rest of your day.
Most of us on tildes are in alignment for how a better world might look, as far as I can discern. It's important to debate among ourselves, however, and to get as accurate a view of reality as possible, and also find some consensus on what to do.
I have a bit of a defeatist view on the law atm, I will admit. The current chief justice of the NC supreme court is on record both that there is no racism in the criminal justice system, and that "We hold the truths to be self-evidence . . .by their creator . . . inalienable rights . . . pursuit of happiness" in the declaration of independence means that the Constitution somehow enshrines the notion that Fundamentalist Evangelical God has given real estate title holders a fundamental right to possess and use that property. Don't go look at the John Locke Foundation unless you are in a very good place spiritually.
This is not to say that those who, in the course of acting justifiably against the law, should not receive vigorous and zealous defense in both court and the PR marketplace. The revolution will not be televised, unless we make it so . . .
This is a good example of why the internet is not a lawyer.
I looked up NY for curiosity. Here is the relevant language for the time limit ". . . plaintiff, or his predecessor in interest, was seized or possessed of the premises within ten years before the commencement of the action." The plaintiff in this case means the person who is suing for ejectment of the adverse possessor. The tricky part is, what "seized or possessed of the premises?" I'll wager half my fortune nearly every judge in America would agree that if the plaintiff has a legitimate title to the property, that it is "seized or possessed" sufficient to satisfy this requirement.
Further complicating matters in NY is the requirement that possession be ". . .under claim of right, open and notorious, continuous, exclusive, and actual." Under claim of right is the really tricky one. "A claim of right means a reasonable basis for the belief that the property belongs to the adverse possessor or property owner, as the case may be." Again, I'll give you a third my fortune if you can find any active judge that will agree with the proposition that a claim of right include a belief that, because the titled owner was not using it, an adverse possessor the legal right to go on and occupy this property. More likely, a judge will require a non-fraudelent paper, like a will or a lease or a deed, that indicates a transfer of property to the adverse possessor.
This is patently untrue. A claim is a legal entity, and to "succeed" on such necessarily implies litigation of the claim, in a court, before a judge.
IIRC, the claimed legitimate possessor has to bring a prima facie case, after which the burden shifts to the possessor to prove they meet the AP elements.
Edit: I'll invite you to point to some modern decisions in favor of adverse possessors if you doubt my claim that judges strongly disfavor the notion.
The headline is about “Wall Street Landlords,” but the article also gives examples of small landlords who have had this problem.
Sure. There always will be some squatters. But as the article notes, the corporate landlords seem more vulnerable to this than the smaller outfits. The increase has been caused by the increase in corporate landlordism.
And while bigger landlords are more likely to be able to hold a unit empty waiting out for a rich tenant, smaller landlords can sometimes do the same. Maybe they won't hold a unit open for years, but maybe instead they hold it open for months.
Again, ultimately, if you're a landlord with a vacant unit of any kind, that is by your choice. If you slash the rent enough, you CAN find someone to fill it. Hell, if you're willing to offer a ridiculous discount, you could probably find someone to fill it in just a single day. All empty units are empty by CHOICE. By the choice of the landlord. Often that choice is rational; holding out for a better-paying tenant can be worth it financially. But it's still a choice they make. You chose to leave your unit empty, speculating on being able to get a higher-paying tenant.
The risk of squatting will just be something that all landlords will have to price into their decision about when to cut rental costs in order to get a unit filled. They can run that calculus and decide accordingly. I'm not going to weep for them, as ultimately it will drive down rents by encouraging landlords, big and small, from leaving units vacant.
Many of these squatters aren't taking advantage of empty buildings, they are signing lease agreements and then refusing to pay them, knowing that it's nigh impossible to remove squatters. That's just theft.
Maybe that's a question of definitions. I consider a squatter someone who doesn't have any actual landlord/tenant relationship. I would just consider the other a delinquent tenant like any other. If you sign a lease and agree to pay at a certain price, but then just never make the next rent payment? You're not helping drive down market rents that way.
And I think squatters are legally harder to remove than delinquent tenants. If you have a real lease, then you have a clear legal agreement about what the rent is, when it's due, etc. If someone violates the lease, it's something the court can quickly reference and objectively determine. Squatters? Those are much worse. Imagine you have a unit that you think should rent for $1500/month. It would be bad enough if you rented it to someone for that amount, and then they never made further payments. But at least you can prove they haven't held up their end of the bargain. That would be a mere deadbeat tenant.
A squatter? Oh, they would be so, so much worse. They would show up with a fake deed and claim they own the place. Maybe they filed a fake quitclaim deed down at the county records office. Or maybe they have a fake lease that says you've agreed to rent the property to them for $500/month. When you drag them to court, they add insult to injury by lying and saying they got the low rate from you because you had a romantic affair together. I think of squatters as a category distinct and apart from mere deadbeat tenant. Squatters live a more evolved and transcendent form of assholery. They are deadbeatism elevated to a form of art!
Probably it depends on the jurisdiction. In the US I bet laws favour landlords.
In Canada though, renters hold all the power.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/landlord-tenant-eviction-delays-1.6638367
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/niagara-landlord-unpaid-rent-1.6869973
These are just a handful of cases, but there are dozens of other news articles, and probably thousands of cases that don’t make the news.
I understood your article to be saying that non owners were setting up the leases. The tenants probably are making payments, but not to the owners.
I feel really bad for tenants this happens to.
There is zero guarantee that squatters will impact corporate landlords any more than individual landlords, maybe only insomuch as there are more corporate ones, but there are many anecdotes of a new buyer being fucked over by squatters, even when their plan was to occupy the house.
Squatters are defecting and defecting is rarely a solution. Break up the landlord collusion without encouraging friction, before you end up with people straight up harassing or being violent to squatters, and a more robust legal system wouldn't be failing to handle the volume. I'm pretty anti-landlord, but I'd rather that be through increased taxes or higher regulations than to encourage squatting, I don't think that's going to solve anything. Squatters are removing homes from the market just the same, and contributing to the housing prices, if you don't think corporate landlords will just price in their squatting losses across their other properties, which of course they will.
72,000 sounds like a big number when taken out of context, but given that there are about 2.5 million housing units in Atlanta metro, that's 3%. Well, the homeownership rate is 65%, so if we subtract that out 72k is about 8% of potential rentals.
So I think you're right. Unless there's a massive bias towards squatting institutional investor owned homes, squatting is a lot more likely to affect non-institutional landlords.
Completely agree. Full support/solidarity with squatters.
You love to see it. Every nonlocal multi-property slumlord deserves this. And this shouldn't hurt attentive local landlords at all, especially those who cut prices to get a tenant instead of sitting for months at a ridiculous price.
As long as landlords are incentivised to maximise profit, instead of simply providing a fundamental human right with modest margins to compensate their time and repair costs, we need tools like this to fight back. Much like healthcare, electricity, running water, and food, a functional society should strive to provide housing to all, even if it's not generating the maximum profit. Consider it a sunk cost to subsidise poor paying jobs until we figure out UBI.
I have little sympathy when viewings organised online and carried out independently go awry. If you take someone's information remotely, and then unlock a house for them to walk themself around, you're saving a lot of time and effort for yourself, sure. But you're absolutely opening yourself up to this kind of abuse and I can't help but feel that that's WHY you pay (either paying an agent or paying yourself in time/travel/opportunity cost) to chaperone someone around. You can't just cut costs forever and expect no liabilities to arise.
It's somewhat distressing to me to hear people say that breaking laws is justified in the way you suggest. I want to live in a society where I can trust people not to defraud me, such that I can trust them to participate in expected and kind ways. I want to know my neighbors will not take advantage of me, even if I make myself somewhat vulnerable, such as by not locking my car, or leaving my kids bike in the driveway, etc.
I'm realistic, mind you, I understand the world is not perfect and people do bad stuff, and so I protect myself. But it should not be unreasonable that I can trust people to behave appropriately unsupervised. I do assume the practical risk that they might, but they are not justified simply because I am trusting.
This is of course different in the context of oppression. If I am shutting people out based on who they are (as opposed to their actions), and/or because of my unfair privilege, they are morally justified to push back. This is what Rosa Parks did, and we're all better off because of it.
When certain laws begin to show a pattern of being broken, there are often reasons. Almost any example you could name out of civil rights (including and especially all the way to actual slavery) is an excellent, if highly charged, example.
An attitude that stipulates that a law is the law, period, done, no discussion, is the exact kind of thing that leads to the law being broken. Especially these days, where ordinary citizens are heavily disadvantaged from having their interests and needs encapsulated into law compared to the desires of the wealthy (including corporations) having their needs codified legally.
There's a reason we have juries. If it's just a matter of "the law's the law", then why have a jury? Judge is enough. "Oh, you did walk out of the store with the goods you didn't pay for. Guilty of theft, six months in jail, take'em away."
But what if the guy had been fired by that store, for stupid reasons. And the store owner had been spreading lies and actively interfering with the man's ability to obtain other work. And what he stole was food, for his starving family.
Suddenly it's not so black and white. That's an emotionally charged example, but it's the same for any crime. You sit a jury because the citizens of the society might not agree with a black-and-white reading of the law. Juries, people, might not agree that just because someone is sitting in a vacant property that this act meets a definition of a crime that deserves jail. They might not vote to convict.
That's their right under the jury system, however much it pisses off lawyers and judges and prosecutors (who hate jury nullification since it takes away power they see as theirs).
A lot of entities, most of them from the Capital class, have turned basic housing into a profit center. Not a modest profit center. A lucrative one. Where do those profits come from? The accounts of labor, from ordinary people who just need a place to stay. That's money those people won't have to buy food or anything else. Money that's being taken to enrich Capital.
It's one thing, maybe, to shrug it off when it's Manhattan or downtown San Francisco or some place like that. After all, just because someone wants to live in a dense, space limited city center doesn't necessarily mean they have any right to expect it to be affordable.
But landlords across the country (countries, actually, since Canada, the UK, and elsewhere, are seeing this trend as well), are locking up large segments of the available housing space. In increasing amounts, people are finding it harder and harder to find affordable housing, anywhere, due to landlords forcing through increases. And in many cases, they're purposefully letting spaces sit vacant in defiance of the vaunted "rules of the free market" that supposedly describe how prices are tied to demand.
It's vacant, but people want it. That should be demand. But buyers can't afford it, so that should indicate the price will drop, because there's clearly excess Supply. Yet it doesn't. Because landlords (corporate or otherwise) are waiting buyers out. They have a place to live, the little people don't. Sooner or later, someone caves and pays the inflated price.
I wouldn't vote to convict a squatter. Nope. I hope the squatting syndrome becomes more prevalent. Anything that might be one more piece of weight on the scale against this horrific trend of pricing people out of having a life. Not a good life, not a luxurious live; just fucking life.
I did note, in the article, the landlords were upset the courts and sheriffs were "too swamped" to attend to the landlord complaints in a timely fashion.
Gee ... so a lot of people are doings things that landlords want the state to deal with. Landlords. Corporate landlords in many cases. Corporations that, in the manner of corporations, often look for ways to minimize their taxes paid. What funds State activities, like courts and sheriffs? Could it be taxes? Which are going unpaid? Money that's not being made available to the state due to corporate shenanigans ranging from fraud to buying laws to plain ordinary (legal but scummy) accounting maneuvers?
Sounds like their complaint is at least partially of their own making.
These landlords could more closely control their properties. If they're going to sit on them until they find a buyer willing to fork over the demands, they could dramatically reduce the incidence of squatting by controlling the properties. Monitoring them. Having live actual people, who are on payroll, control access. Not this remote stuff that minimizes landlord costs.
Cutting labor out. Increasing Capital profit margins. The same Capital that's upset the state won't enforce, for free, Capital's needs.
Capital can go spit for all I care. If they're so upset about people squatting, they have options. Some of them involve lowering the price to get paying tenants in. And if they're going to insist on not doing that, they could at least hire caretakers and supers and those sorts of functions to monitor and maintain the properties to prevent anyone from having the chance to settle in uninvited.
Oh, but that would cost money. Can't have that. The state should take over that burden, and enforce our right to keep gouging.
Funny how it's always the little people that have to move on, move over, and move out. Never Capital.
So, I recognize this as a rant, and certainly I can relate to many of the sentiments. I feel compelled to comment on one part though, mostly for other readers' sake, but also so you can have a little more understanding about issues.
First, in most states, a lot of trials don't have juries, for better or worse.
Second, "facts" and "law" are two different things in court. Juries don't decide the law, they decide answers to very carefully worded factual questions. I don't know much about jury nullification, but I suspect there's multiple procedures to limit its effect.
One is jury selection. If a trial attorney can get you to admit you have a bias, you'll be excused as a juror. Up to a certain limit, if they even feel like you may have a bias, you'll be excused as a juror.
On the point of cutting labor out. Who, outside of certain sociopaths, really wants a rental security job? That is one tedious job, AI can do it better. Let's solve that one with UBI rather than soul-sucking job creation programs.
I see what you're saying, I really do, and I'd like to live there too.
However, the social contract has been repeatedly trampled to my deficit. I have very little chance of ever owning my own home, even though I'm well qualified (disappearing industry) and have done always kept my side of the social bargain.
There is zero incentive for me to continue upholding a deal that unfairly enriches those who are already wealthy amd powerful at my own great expense. I will not be a useful cog in someone else's machine and render the expected thanks for being chewed up and spat out.
The leaders of my country and those of its allies play fast and loose with the laws, are openly and legally corrupt within a system that is rugged against me. Damn straight I've started taking what isn't mine and what the system will never willingly grant me.
Sorry, we live under a failed system and I'm just a number on someone else's spreadsheet. It's nothing personal, just the response of an animal backed into a corner.
Rosa Parks was a criminal after all.
To initiate genuine change in laws, first you must be willing to be branded a criminal.
Seriously comparing squatters to Rosa Parks???! Not exactly a compelling position
Parent did (sort of but not really). I'm just highlighting how lawbreaking is intrinsic to progress.
Squatters are (intentionally or not) highlighting a major problem in the US, and tbh can't blame them when the alternative is being criminalized for being homeless.
IMO squatting is no worse a crime than landlording, and is definitely less-bad than creating artificial scarcity via choosing to keep properties vacant.
That is actually an insane position. I'm pretty against SFH landlording, as I think that ownership should be the most big standard and free from rent seeking, but how do you think landlording for apartment buildings is a crime????
I suppose crime is a bit hyperbolic, 'immoral' would be better. Because landlording is fundamentally about ownership. At its core, landlording is about building assets off of somebody else, almost purely because you had more assets to begin with.
In the case of shared dwellings, building should be owned collectively by the tenants (or failing that, a democratic government), finances should be transparent, and rent determined democratically.
Course, I'm one of those dirty anarcho-communists who thinks that outside of personal dwellings, it should be communally-owned.
You can just say that from the start ;)
Not that I agree, but have you heard of a Harberger tax? You should check out "Radical markets" and iirc the excerpt "Private property is another word for monopoly"
It's interesting from a thought experiment perspective, but I'm a big believer in incrementalism.
Would you prefer Robinhood?
I agree that it's not very prudent, but this is still blaming the victim. It's sort of like saying that if you don't lock your bike, you deserve for it to get stolen. The penalty for this is in some sense the "natural" one, but it seems rather harsh? Lots of horrendous things happen in the natural world. "Natural" is not justice. We want justice, right?
There are advantages to living in a high-trust society (like, say, Japan). In an ideal world, you could leave your door unlocked and nothing would happen. I did once meet someone who felt so safe in their neighborhood that they didn't lock their doors, though it was quite a few years ago now.
I don't see how we get there, though.
In my mind, this is somewhat akin to media piracy. It's even more morally justified, because it relates to a basic human need for shelter.
My premise is that, when market distortions take something unfairly beyond the reach of a significant number of people, maybe any people, those people are justified to use unsanctioned (by mainstream, or legal, culture) means to go after what they are missing.
So in the case of piracy, distribution companies are rent seeking by playing greedy with rights to products they did not generate. Their market position has questionable legitimacy, and their leveraging of that position to extract higher prices is an unjust distortion. In practical terms, rather than an efficient marketing and distribution scheme (what netflix once was), players have divided and merged and acquired and divested and segregated, drastically and unfairly inflating the price of content (and also deflating the compensation to the creatives who actually made the stuff). Distribution is an important part of content, but not the most. Distributors deserve compensation, too, but not when all they are adding is confusion. So, I think most people are morally justified in circumventing those distribution mechanisms.
Similarly, housing in many markets is the result of unfair market distortions. Many factors bring these on-zoning, tax structure, missing regulations, runaway speculative impulses, to name but a few. The result though is a drastic and unfair price inflation, limiting people's access to a basic need in the name of profit growth. People are then morally justified to circumvent the "distribution mechanism" of housing, using self help to obtain suitable shelter. You don't want squatters? Get more efficient and more fair in housing provisions.
Although I largely agree with your post, I don't think there is much moral/ethical philosophizing necessary. In normal economics there is a space (generally the left side of a graph of supply/demand curves) where demand is higher than supply. Kinder economists will call it something along the lines of "space for a grey market" while less kind (or more realistic) economists will call it something like "the crime zone." As landlords shift their supply curve right, that crime zone only gets larger and, unlike razor blades at Target, housing just kinda sits out in the open. Squatting in this case is just normal economic activity.
All that being said, fuck corporatist landlords.
Phrasing this in terms of "basic human need for shelter" is sweeping some important distinctions under the rug. We're not talking about someone stealing a tent.
It's also kind of odd that people so quickly take sides while knowing so little about the circumstances. Who are these squatters? The article doesn't say anything about them.
People being so quick to judge is disheartening. It seems there's little interest in justice around here.
The question of justice for who is interesting.
In law school my torts professor was a man who had represented big insurance. He was genuinely distressed when he explained to the class that neighbors will lie to support false stories by neighbors during an insurance investigation. Most of us in class were like 'yes, what's your point? Why are you surprised that little people want to stick it to the Man?'
While I don't doubt some squatters are just assholes who are destroying the property they are illegally occupying, remember that we live in a society where the opposite (good, hard-working people being made homeless through simple bad luck) is far more common. Surely if the focus is on justice one of these is the bigger problem. Obviously we should solve both, but one of these is a problem for people with multiple homes and one of these is a problem for people who have nothing.
I guess it's just talking online so it doesn't really matter, but still, I would trust someone who wants to hear the details about a specific case over someone who judges without knowing anything about it.
"Which is more common" is an excuse to not care about the details and such carelessness is not justice, in my mind.
This is what it looks like when the social contract begins to break down.
A society (the citizens making it up, residing within it) agrees to live to certain standards because they have faith in the social contract. That there are basic protections, expectations, and deliverables they can access. That they can even enjoy. Be supported by.
The ability to go out, work hard, be paid fairly, and have a basic ordinary life is pretty standard if you run around the world and try to elicit definitions from most people. "Fairly* usually adds up to something that equates to "able to have some shelter with basic needs met, and do more than just work/sleep/repeat."
Those standards have been destroyed. People are being driven into the ground. People who are willing to work aren't able to achieve that "fair" they expect. They work hard, but are paid less, receive abuse, their needs are increasingly not met, and their concerns are ignored by the societal leaders (government) we expect to enforce the standards of the social contract.
People react by withdrawing. If everyone has their needs met, if everyone believes in the social contract, it's far more likely they'll cooperate with society. That they'll say "hey, you can't do that" or "authorities, he (the bad guy) ran that way." Anything like that. They do those things less, and consider thinking of doing them folly, when they lack faith in society.
There's a scene in the first Cruise Jack Reacher film. He's in a car, being chased by police cruisers. He hops out of the car, which he leaves to roll down the street, and calmly walks over to a group of bystanders at a bus stop.
No one, not a single person in that crowd, objects. Or makes a fuss. He just joins the crowd, standing there just as they are, blending in. Cops come barreling by, sirens blaring, and no one waves or shouts or points Reacher out. One guy even gives Reacher his hat, with the clear unspoken intention Reacher should put it on and be less likely to be noticed by the cops.
The bus arrives, everyone (including Reacher) boards, and still no one points him out to the cops as the police buzz around the empty car Reacher had abandoned. Which is now a block or so away, having bumped into a police roadblock. They all just depart on the bus, cops none the wiser.
That's the social contract no longer being upheld by the citizens. The authorities would be aghast. Horrified. Angered. Why don't the citizens act to support the rule of law?
Because, increasingly, fewer people believe law will act to support them.
And it's not just that the characters in the film (story) didn't point "the bad guy" out to the cops. Audiences loved it. If there was some groundswell of people rising up in anger that some major motion picture would have the gall to showcase citizens openly defying the cops, I never found it. Hollywood, in fact, used to have actual rules studios adhered to, that preached movies weren't allowed to showcase criminals or criminal behavior in a good light. And that cops and government should be shown in a good one.
Where are those rules now? They're gone. Have been for a while. Why? Because they're considered antiquated. Quaint. Out-of-touch. You're more likely to find people calling a story unbelievable if you try to cast a cop as a good guy, than if you cast the cop as corrupt.
Rule of law, social contracts, work both ways. If everyone can rely on them, and receive a fair basic shake in life, then everyone is more likely to participate in ways that uphold that contract. When people start to not receive that fair shake, they start to withdraw. They start to become uncooperative.
There's two ways this can be addressed. One is via authoritarianism, where government and police and anyone else "in charge" cracks down, uses force (the Power of the State) to enforce compliance.
The other is by repairing the social contract. That's much harder though. That requires actual change. That isn't as appealing to the people who've corrupted the social contract in the first place.
And yet people are surprised we seem to be drifting towards authoritarianism. We're headed in that direction because people in power often love power, and are becoming concerned their power doesn't seem to mean as much as it used to. This isn't just government, it's the wealthy (who have grown used to their control over government giving them nearly the same level of power).
Which just further fractures the social contract. Continuing the slide, the divide.
I think this is too binary. Although belief in justice has in some cases decayed, I don't believe it's entirely gone.
After all, don't people complain about injustice all the time? And they often expect the government to do something about it.
It's inconsistent, but it's there.
"After all, don't people complain about injustice all the time? And they often expect the government to do something about it."
It seems like you're mixing people's belief in justice as a concept with their belief that that concept is actually manifested in reality. Because the prior is almost universal among human beings whereas the latter is almost entirely dependent on an individual's own experiences. So you believing it is manifested has very little bearing on whether they have actually experienced it.
"It's inconsistent, but it's there."
The inconsistency is the problem. It's not really justice if only a handful of people can actually get it. That's just power. And you might just be in a position where you have enough of it to protect yourself legally, and so for you it feels like justice.
I feel a certain amount of schadenfreude.
I don't love squatters but I also don't appreciate private equity buying up local economies.
These consultants with their spreadsheets need to realize that real estate is local and specific and requires hands on management to make it work.
Oh no, the people that are making home ownership unobtainable for me are being vexed.
The people making home ownership unaffordable are NIMBYs. Housing supply is constrained and prices are rising fast enough that homes are a good investment. Developers would love to build more houses and make a profit if they legally could. Blame your neighbors and everyone opposed to any and all supply-side solutions. Everything else is just a product of housing being underbuilt in anglophone countries due to stupid regulations.
https://econofact.org/the-housing-shortage-and-the-policies-to-address-it
Edit: spelling
I would add some caveats to your general point.
Most cities that are desirable to tourists have not built adequate replacement housing for units repurposed through Airbnb.
There is a company with an algorithm currently being sued for antitrust. It is alleged that the company encourages landlords to keep units off the market rather than reduce rents
You could also say that they haven't built an adequate number of cheap motels. (Which are pretty hard to find these days. Even Motel 6 is expensive.)
Yep I'm familiar with the effect of Airbnb and RealPage on property markets. Fundamentally, both of those are still supply issues.
For Airbnb, I think there are legitimate reasons to restrict short-term rentals related to noise complaints etc, but I don't see it as much of an impact on supply. Realistically, how many people are actually buying up homea just to do Airbnb? All the numbers I can find are miniscule. We could instead fix regulations that restrict hotel construction to get far more temporary housing built-up. Or we could even let people build ADU and tiny homes on their land to support short-term rentals if they wanted.
On RealPage, I think it's a perfect example of what I mean by housing is almost always a supply issue. The majority of building owners weren't colluding, but a sizeable plurality of big institutional owners were illegally price coordinating through "an algorithm". This is a structural issue enabled by the fact that only the biggest corporate tenants can deal with the burdensome regulations and financing required by most cities to get mid-rises and high-rises built.
If it was easy for a local family-owned construction company to build up more supply, they'd obviously do it to undercut the overpriced units on the market. Unfortunately, the existing building owners don't have to worry about competition because local NIMBYs always give them a monopoly.
I'm thinking of communities like South lake Tahoe where build able land is scarce and expensive. Service workers need places to live but demand for cheaper rentals for tourists is high and exceeds available supply
If the land is scarce and expensive, then buildings need to be taller to bring the cost per home down. From everything I can find, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has proposed a major upzone to increase supply and decrease prices, but there has been constant pushback and lawsuits from NIMBYs like "environmental" groups and concerned neighbours.
https://www.2news.com/news/grassroots-environmental-organization-sues-tahoe-regional-planning-agency/article_4ac81cc4-bbf6-11ee-b790-735d64dff7e4.html