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304 sats \ 7 replies \ @kepford 26 Mar \ on: Squatters Rights? libertarian
When things like this get news coverage all of a sudden (I don't think they are that rare) I am suspicious. I don't have a theory but I am suspicious.
Story time. The first home my wife and I purchased was a duplex. It was livable but in rough shape. We had grand plans of living in one side and remodeling the other side and using it as income to pay the mortgage. Lets just say, I am very glad we ditched this idea right before the housing collapse. We broke even :)
As novices we didn't realize that the people who were renting one side of the duplex were lying about moving out. They had no plans of moving out. They had been renting from the previous owner and we didn't know they had stopped paying rent. I consulted some people that had experience with renting apartments and they explained to long drawn out process for evicting people that refuse to pay. I also learned that this family did this to many other people in the community. They lived on "disability" and basically moved from rental to rental, rent free for many months. It was a major disaster. They did massive damage to the house that took me months and thousands of dollars to repair but we got them out. I didn't involve the police. I found them another place to live as well as appliances, and got some friends to move them out. They lied to me many times and came up with many excuses but using the system was the least efficient way to accomplish my goal. Learned many lessons from this experience. I could write much more about what these people did but you can probably guess.
I'm sure this will live you both forever! We also had a crazy experience renting a house. The guy turned out to be a con artist. In the end the police did evict him but not for us, because they wanted him for offences. They were going to bail him back to our home and told us we weren't allowed to change the locks whilst they had him in custody. I begged them not to bail him back to the address. He was very posh and well-to-do as well! It's a loooong story, as I'm sure yours is! We were only in our 20s at the time (kids really) but it's affected a lot of our decisions and we probably could've made money on renting properties since then but just couldn't entertain the thought!
I'm also suspicious about the media coverage. Perhaps they want to put people off owning property. I heard some of the big asset managers have been buying-up-big single family homes. And maybe they want to frame it that we don't have property ownership rights. Who knows?? 🤷🏼♀️
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Also in Spain the squatters are gaming the system in a similar way to your tenants but basically extorting money from people. They know that, rather than spend 5 years (which it can take!) trying to evict them, the owners pay them a few thousand to leave. Of course, they then go do the same thing to someone else and on it goes... These people are claiming poverty. They must be freakin rolling in the wonga 🤑💰
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That's it, you have to start finding ways to fuck with them. But with squatters or non-paying tenants you are often screwed over to a point you can hardly go near the house. Or they have big dogs or big men or whatever... Some of them are really dangerous fuckers!
I knew there were messy eviction problems and we do need functional courts to adjudicate them.
Allowing people to break into someone's residence and occupy it, is qualitatively different. I'm sure things like this have always happened here and there, but I doubt home invaders were as protected by the cops and the courts in the past.
Alaska passed a very misguided law back in the 70's that prohibited evicting tenants in the winter. It was eventually reversed, because people were sneaking onto private residences the night before winter started and setting up camp sites.
Also, I'm totally with you about being suspicious of stories that all of a sudden capture everyone's attention.
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Yeah, I don't doubt it is getting worse for the reasons Stossel outlines. As poverty increases we are gonna see this getting worse. And when I say poverty I mean the cost of living increasing. The money being debased. More theft and violence are in our futures. I believe it will get much worse before it gets better.
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