My personal opinion is good on the guy, if hes smart enough to find a way to legally obtain a house like this then more power to him. Mrs Lowrie is just pissed she didnt get the same opportunity.
It seems weird to me that anyone would cheer him on. Within reasonable limits, a shorter time based hurdle to adverse possession claim is more homeowner-friendly. Texas is on the lower side at 10 years. The only possible outcome to a spate of bad-faith adverse possession claims is for the state to jack the limit up to 20 or 30 years.
† More commonplace application of adverse possession: I build a new garage, but somehow get the property line wrong and impinge on my neighbor. Nobody notices. Later, I sell my house to you. A couple years after that, my old neighbor sues you.
But I'm not sure that the doctrine doesn't also have a historical purpose of inviting people to make productive use of abandoned/derelict property. Especially in pre-20th-century legal treatises, that seems to be taken for granted as one of the reasons for the adverse-possession doctrine, and in the American West it was frequently used that way, as people took over farms or ranches that had been abandoned by the landowner, e.g. because he moved away without disposing of it, or died with heirs who never showed up to take possession.
The Homestead Act of 1862 was even more or less a formalization of one particular kind of squatting, on government land, which previously had been done under the adverse-possession doctrine (with the U.S. losing title for not making use of the property).
Throughout the Americas, the same logic that one can claim ownership of unused land underpins most land titles - e.g. the original entitlement of most of Texas was made on the basis that the land was underused. One need only look at the sovereign land grants which most title histories in the US begin with.
As it happens, the organized might (the government) has decided to maintain and enforce a regulated market in real estate, largely to everyone's benefit.
Furthermore, the articles author pointed out that original owner was foreclosed on and promptly went mia and company which owned the mortgage went under. Its that either of those 2 parties or even a third party will assert their rights over the property, but until that occurs he is the legal owner as he legally filed as such. His neighbors can moan about it all they please, but they have no standing in the case whatsoever. Example: Someone defrauded Southwest Airlines: me having nothing to do with the case cannot bring fraud charges against whoever did; I have no standing in the case. I could have been standing right next to the guy that did it, as he did it, but I still have no standing in the case.
Thirdly, who's misfortune is he taking advantage of? The homeowners? No, they didn't pay their bills and left, the title went to the mortgage company. The Mortgage company? No, they went under. Whoever working there had long since lost their jobs and most likely found new employment before this guy applied to legally own the property. You want to make this guy out to be a bad guy because he doesn't use things the way "normal" people do and he got ahead for it. You are boring and lack any relevant imagination.
In this case, he looked into what the legal status of a home is when the mortgage paying owner abandons it, and the mortgage company ceases to exist. Answer: nobody owns it, and whoever files paperwork and actually starts living there gets it. Go figure.
To those saying "pay the $300,000!": to whom? The homeowner? he gave up ownership by moving out and abandoning the mortgage payments. The mortgage company actually owns the house until it's paid off, but if the company goes defunct then nobody owns it. There is nobody to pay!
Meanwhile, this is a terrible outcome for the neighborhood. Many people on HN are no doubt failing to find ways to shed tears for mortgage companies, but during the 10+ (note carefully that "plus" sign) years this guy's BS claim to the house takes to resolve itself, the house is out of the market; it can't be sold to anyone, at any price. It must instead be occupied by someone who has virtually no incentive to maintain or improve it.
I don't see why the neighborhood cares at all, or why anyone should care what the neighbors think.
My brother owns rent houses; from the stories he tells, he would disagree even about renters, let alone squatters.
And recall the quote attributed to Lawrence Summers: In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car. [1]
It's funny, my brother did that just last week. It was extremely muddy from when he got it stuck in the middle of a pasture.
Man, I'm sure glad Lawrence Summers doesn't go to Burning Man. But if he did, it sounds like his entire worldview would be destroyed.
Then again I am a bit older, arguably a bit wiser, and I haven't even considered cleaning a rental car since then.
There must be some aspect to this that you all know about but I'm missing.
Care to quantify that? No indication was made in the article that this guy is (for example) stacking junk cars in the front yard with a forklift, throwing all-night keggers, practicing his drum solos at 3:00am or setting up a meth lab in an unused bedroom. So how, exactly, is the neighborhood impacted? Hell, if he mows the yard that's a net gain...
But if it actually takes them more than ten years to figure out that someone else is living in their house, even when this has hit the national news, just how well can they be maintaining the property? You'd think they would notice the problem the first time they cut the grass.
Speaking of, good job assuming that this guy "owning" it is somehow not keeping it up. Stereotypes will get you far. I can't way to read what you say when it turns out this guy is not only poor, but black or muslim so you can think even less of him.
Why don't you do it?
A company goes defunct when their debt obligations grow bigger than what the company is worth. It is said that "liabilities are bigger than asserts" on the balance sheet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_sheet
So if the company can not pay its debt, the company is given to its debtors.
So THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE WHO OWNS the house, those that expended the money for the house to be built and own the debt. Odds are that the $300.000 is worth $100.000 in the open market today(if they want to recoup the investment) and they will loose money but it is not $0 or $16.
Given this litany of errors, you ought not be offering the rest of us "lessons from Econom[ics] 101" and posting sentences in all capital letters.
Now then, I believe that in Texas law, and in the common law in general, you cannot abandon title to land. However, that is not the case for many other assets; if a company abandons some chattel property, before or after entering bankruptcy, the bankruptcy trustee does not gain the right to sell that property.
Also, under civil law, which is in effect over much of the world (although not in Texas), title to land can indeed be abandoned.