Homeowner arrested after trying to evict squatters from his own property | Hacker News Reader

Homeowner arrested after trying to evict squatters from his own property

nypost.com

> The active-duty officer was told by police they could not evict Simon and that the issue is considered a “civil matter.”

I don't understand. If I person takes over your home while you're there, it's an invasion that the police will respond to. If someone breaks into your home and steals stuff from it, that's robbery that the police will respond to. But if someone simply starts living in your home when you're not there, that's suddenly a "civil matter" that the police can't do anything about?

Just curious - do police officers have access to a system that proves home/property ownership?

The can ask the homeowner to show physical proof of title. Not rocket science.

Not unlike car license when pulled over.

My driver's license has my photo and my home address on it.

This would indicate that you reside there, not that you own the location...

I only care about primary residence, any problems that landlords have can be solved by selling all the extra properties they own.

I'm pretty sure the police could just call the town office, at least in my town, and easily verify who owns a home. I would be surprised if the police do not already have direct access to this information.

The problem is that if the criminal is slightly intelligent, they will present a fake lease and/or some mail they received at the address. At that point, it's the court's problem to assess the evidence and figure out if it's a case of squatters or a self-help eviction by a scummy landlord.

Rentals aren’t centrally registered. They just produce a lease signed by someone who says they have control of the house, doesn’t have to be the property owner, doesn’t have to be notarized. So just print something official and say the landlord signed it. The courts eventually figure it out as fraud anyways, but you have six months rent free, and most prosecutors aren’t going after petty fraud, so it’s mostly a risk free crime unless you accidentally occupy a house owned by the mob.

If they take over you're home while your there it is called a home invasion and in some states there is a castle doctrine. Police or not, you have the right to defend your property as many states consider this kind of invasion to meet the bar for "grave bodily harm" to the owner with or without an actual threat.

The way this works in particular is by taking advantage of squatters rights. These are ostensibly used to protect people from summary eviction and give them a chance to get their lives together before they're kicked out. Usually they're used to help people who can't pay have 30-60-90 days (law depending) to figure something out.

What these people do is break into a home that appears unoccupied. This could be because you're an investor and are screening tenants, you left for vacation, etc. After some number of days (depending on law) the squatter has "rights" to live there and it goes from criminal to civil. Since you did nothing in those days it's assumed you allowed it. It's exploitation by a class of slightly smarter criminal. Exploitation none the less. Yet, there's nothing you can do about it that wouldn't inadvertently effect the people who actually need the laws to make sure they don't come home one afternoon with their stuff on the sidewalk. That's why as a homeowner it is absolutely important you police your own property, make sure it appears occupied, maybe have friends occasionally visit, etc. Even if you have camera evidence it will be assumed you did nothing about it in that timeframe and it will still become civil. Your house will likely be trashed as revenge and suing a bunch of strung out junkies won't get you anywhere.

These laws have also been exploited when good hearted people lend a couch to someone in need. Stay for long enough, and now you have to go to court to evict them.

Really a shitty situation for people. Especially grandma and grandpa renting out a house to supplement their social security.

There is something very simple you can do. If the squatter can't prove a tenancy agreement they're out.

Not necessarily, varies by jurisdiction.

In some jurisdictions, the underlying legal philosophy is "Wait a second... You really didn't know you had human beings living on your property? Every person in this neighborhood has a responsibility to know what's going on in their property. The law is therefore not going to lean heavily into your ownership rights if you've been so irresponsible with your ownership that people can just put down roots without your knowledge."

I wonder if same applies to public property. Let's say someone starts living in court house and stays hidden for long enough. Could they then one day just walk naked in the court room in there and drive people out as it is their house now?

Having been a squatter, in a different economy, different time, long ago (London, 1980s) I have mixed feelings about this. It would suck to own property you have intent for, and finding its been occupied. At an individual level I can totally relate how crap that would be. I did the "crime" and I'm not in denial about its downside risk for property owners.

Most squatted property in the time I was doing it, was owned by large organisations and left empty for a mixture of reasons, despite the severe housing shortage. Nobody I knew was looking to dispossess individual home owners, absentee or not. We broke into housing owned by corporates which was unavailable for ordinary use, had been cut off from power, we got power reconnected and we lived there briefly, until the law courts evicted us. Some friends uplifted their squat into social housing inside the system. Other people did it as a political act, There have been long standing socialised squats in Amsterdam, in Copenhagen. And yes, drug dealing and prostitution is a problem in illegal housing. Also in legal housing.

But I can't pretend there aren't issues in squatting.

It is surprising sometimes (at least to some people) how quickly "taking the law into your own hands" can become a crime. The whole "stand your ground" thing is really complex because "I acted in self defence" can very quickly turn out to have gone to another place.

You seem to think your actions were virtuous because of ... "evil corporations"? I hope you eventually grew out of your angsty teen "stick it to the man" phase.

I don't think my actions were virtuous at all. They were opportunistic. I observe that it was a crime against a corporate body, not an individual. It certainly cost them money, going to law to recover their empty houses wasn't free.

In no sense did I mean to say "I was virtuous" -Only that it was aimed at solving my problem (and others) at the expense of a body, not a person. You may differ, but many feel crimes against corporates are distinct from crimes against individuals, virtue aside. I don't think corporate personhood is an unalloyed "good"

What's the point of growing up? It seems boring (Peter Pan, probably)

This was almost 40 years ago. Are you the same edgy person you were 40 years ago? I am pretty sure I am not.

I think it is commendable that you have shared something which is often viewed upon negatively by others (as shown here).

Thanks for giving a different viewpoint.

They also say the property was left empty for 'various reasons' amids a housing crisis.

You can argue that the right to have a home prevails over the right to let a property sit empty and rot away. This is the case in the Netherlands, where squatting rights are very limited these days, but where its still necessary to go to court for an eviction where the property owner needs to prove they have plans for the property and want to act on them soon.

There is also a law in Amsterdam that requires that all housing that sits empty for more than 6 months is reported to the city. The city then forces the property owner to make it liveable again and rent it out.

Both examples show that property rights are not absolute in certain parts of the world.

> “They told the police that I was a home invader and that it was their home. And so I ended up being arrested and detained,” Arko said.

The arrest itself was because police believed the squatters at first. The homeowner never actually did anything illegal in this case.

I just don't understand it. Apparently, there were drugs and prostitutes in the home, but the police arrest a decent looking person who says it's his home? Why is that not a situation where they go okay, prove it, and he pulls up paperwork and such? Instead, they just arrest him. It's pretty confusing how you can literally be arrested for being physically threatened with a gun on your own property.

The police can't search the home without a warrant. They just showed up at the door where one person was (presumably) inside, and the other trying to get in.

> Why is that not a situation where they go okay, prove it, and he pulls up paperwork and such

I mean... I own my house and I'm not sure I could do this on the spot. Maybe I have a copy of some paperwork somewhere? But I can understand a police officer not wanting to learn to be a lawyer on the spot.

Maybe they shouldn't arrest people then if they don't have the information required to make that determination. It takes a two minute phone call to the town offices to determine who owns a property.

Actually it's not that easy. Paperwork could be in progress for a sale, for example. Or the squatters can produce a fake lease agreement. None of that would appear in any county or city records. The courts, not the police, look at evidence and hear both sides if someone claims to own or rent a property.

Before jumping to conclusions like this try calling your town office or county assessor to find out if that's something they can actually do, accurately and with current information, over the phone, 24/7. I already know the answer. The police do not act as prosecutors, legal researchers, or judges. The law protects squatters, unfortunately I agree. The police are law enforcers, not arbitrators or title insurance researchers.

It's not what the police do. The police keep the peace and questions of property ownership are figured out later.

In this case, working backwards from the arrest (and discounting most of the presented information as coming from the source of the arrestee and unfiltered by a known yellow journalism rag), I can hypothesize that the officer was presented with a situation where one individual was clearly resident in the property, and the other individual had attempted to force entry, was arguing with the cops about owning the property inhabited by the other individual, and refused to leave. Easiest solution to that problem for the cop is to take the individual who was invading the property and give him some time in the cool-off tank overnight until everything can get resolved.

On average that's the better solution. Imagine if the police were ripping you out of your home just because some lunatic showed up on your doorstep and started ranting that they owned your house. Playing the odds of perceived circumstance is likely to arrive at the best outcome here; the scenario where the angry invader is the legitimate property owner and the person resident in the building is the squatter is the rare scenario.

Isn’t the record of who owns the home on your county assessor’s website. I can pull this info up in 1 minute.

Technically that's the way it should be. Just because one person looks homeless and the other looks like they're headed to the country club itself doesn't indicate one is more trustworthy than the other.

That's a bit hyperbolic. Drugs are an illegal substance to possess and at least two people have fatally overdosed in this home. Information is information.

And it shouldn't "technically" be the way that it should be that a property homeowner is forcefully removed from their property.

To be clear, the police were fucking stupid in this situation, but that's not the context here. They were literally arguing that appearance should dictate police response.

That's not exactly what I said. I can see the argument about appearance discrepancies, and I concede that, but note that I didn't argue that solely. Nonetheless, information is information and there are likelihoods associated with that information. You have druggies and prostitutes with guns inside a home (that is extremely likely to be unkept) and a person claiming that they are the property owner and that the people inside are illegal squatters. I'm not sure how all of that funnels into an arrest of the property owner, which is what I was getting at.

Police have to make calls in the moment all the time, and they don't always make the best ones.

In this case, occupancy was 99% of the perceived law. One person was clearly established as resident in the property, the other one had just jumped a fence.

(Also, keep in mind that we're hearing the "drugs and prostitutes" claim from the property owner. This is the New York Post... They aren't going to fact check that claim).

Squatters rights are completely insane and irrational in some places. in a large upstate NY city that rhymes with smahchester, an acquaintance of mine's mother died early in the era of covid. his crackhead brother traded this information for a fix and the dealer moved in uninvited. because of the eviction moratorium there was nothing he could do legally to remove the guy. attempts to brute force the eviction were met with potentially deadly force. after time it was no longer worth it to pay the property taxes and as such the house went into foreclosure and eventually was auctioned off. the real slap in the face was that the squatter won the auction. mind you this was in a not so nice area but still it illustrates how strange the law is around squatting can be. stealing a man's house is on the level of destroying his career. there should be laws protecting property owners, not the other way around. I suppose there is a bit of nuance to squatting that should be considered and may be valid, but those times are not the ones you hear about

Hired goons are a thing and probably well worth the price to keep squatters away from your property.

Very illegal. You want to turn a civil matter into a criminal one, that’s how you do it.

If the squatter leaves to buy food and the locks get changed, it sounds like that would also be a civil matter.

So is breaking into someone's house, but that doesn't seem to he an issue for the courts.

When the court system fails you, I believe you have a right to take matters into your own hands. The court system is created so that we don't start feuds, harm people above and beyond what's reasonable response to their action, prevent abuses. It's here to protect us so that we don't have to violently protect ourselves. When it fails to do so, what choice do you have? The court is an institution of civilization, when it fails we go back to the natural way.

Yes, very illegal also, if you can show it in time, best approach is to call 911 and say your house has been broken into. If the door is smashed or something, it will be obvious.

But ya, we are approach “lawless enough that the law doesn’t help protect you against squatters” and “lawful enough that the law makes it very hard for you to act on your own against squatters.” Remember, you have financial things to lose, these people squatting generally don’t (besides their freedom, and they usually get out of any time).

"The landowning class tired of squatters and so created an extrajudicial vigilante crew to beat up those who don't own property" isn't the virtuous solution you think it is.

Nor is it safe for the goon squad. If squaters start responding to such behavior by shooting on site anybody who tries to break into the building, the law will protect them because threat of bodily harm is more important than abuse of property ownership. And it should be.

Ownership of real estate implies responsibilities to the community who are inextricably tied to the geographic proximity to that real estate. Don't own more than you can maintain. Don't own more than you can use. If you have entire groups of people coming into your property and setting up shop for months at a time without your knowledge, maybe you own too much.

(Incidentally, that ethos applies to more than just squatting. The Catholic church in Philadelphia got fined a pile of money because they abandoned a church and failed to either sell it or pay the money to maintain it. It ended up with a water main break in the basement that nobody detected because nobody was on the property, and the water poured openly into the sewer system for months. The city find them for every drop of water that got wasted in that open pipe because that pipe was their responsibility; it was in their property).

Many of us are worried just about going on vacation. Will I come home to an empty safe home after a two week trip abroad? Because it isn’t guaranteed anymore.

Is that an issue people are seeing regularly? This story does not indicate it is.

Yes, it is pretty common now (although, I guess it depends on your definition of common!):

https://www.quora.com/I-just-arrived-home-from-a-beautiful-v...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLegsj31Pp8

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/07/03/squatters-...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/maryland-resident-squatters-bedro...

It has happened in Seattle already, enough for me to be worried about it. Everyone should think about it before leaving on vacation, since it is a real thing that you need to protect yourself against. Even if you rent, someone could break in to your place, change the locks, and then have a scrawled out fraudulent lease document. You would eventually get your place back, but being homeless for 3-6 months sucks. This just isn't a rich house speculator problem (though they are more at risk, of course).

It still sounds like a "well-heeled enough to disappear for weeks" problem though. A person doing that should be making arrangements for their property to be checked up on regularly; squatters are a problem, but so are water line breaks, gas leaks, etc. Leaving a property abandoned long enough for someone to move into it is creating a hazard for the neighborhood in general.

You should be able to leave your house for two weeks and not come home to it being taken over. You don't have to leave it abandoned long enough, just long enough to get unlucky. I've had a few attempted break ins already, usually when I'm home so I can discourage them by turning on a light or yelling out the window (the police don't care, so no help there). I had a van pull up to my house a couple of days ago with a ladder (lots of windows on second floors open now) that booked it when they realized I was home.

I do live in a neighborhood with a large unhoused neighbor population, who are well aware of squatter rights and looking for opportunities, so its not just a "well-heeled" problem for us. Frankly, if you tolerate this kind of behavior against rich people, it is eventually going to effect you as well (they just get bolder and bolder).

> You should be able to leave your house for two weeks and not come home to it being taken over.

I just can't agree that's fundamentally true, unless you have in-home monitoring set up. Swizzle that to "You should be able to leave your house for two weeks without a water main break flooding it" or "You should be able to leave your house for two weeks without a gas leak blowing it up."

Real estate ownership implies obligation. It's one of the reasons so many people choose to just skip out on that entirely and rent their residence.

> Frankly, if you tolerate this kind of behavior against rich people, it is eventually going to effect you as well

Frankly, if I tolerate leaving people unhoused long enough and in large enough numbers that it effects me, it should effect me. Those are probably fellow citizens and fellow neighbors, and if not, they're still fellow human beings. Adequate housing is a human right as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The only difference between a liberal and a neocon is one mugging. You can smugly say “everyone has a right to sieze the housing they need”, until it turns into a right to your housing.

I agree. And if my attitude on this topic changes, I will be in the wrong when it does.

Down that train of thought is "taxation is theft," and it's not a good place to be.

(Cards on the table, I've come from the other side of the story: absentee landlord with undeveloped property sitting next to a relative's home, and the neverending fight to keep the dead trees on that property from crushing said home in a storm. The process to get a property that is owned by someone five states over who is holding it to be sold for 2x the market value and hasn't seen the property in fifteen years declared a nuisance property is atrociously long.

Owning property implies an obligation to the place where it is owned. The law should have more teeth to enforce those obligations.)

I get absentee landlords as a problem. I would totally not feel comfortable buying property like that, I put off buying a home after 2008 because I wanted to live abroad and didn't want the headache of owning something I couldn't take care of directly (I still kick myself for this, since I could have save $500k or so). The squatter problem is only one, but where I live property owners are held to a lot of crazy standards (don't let the half dead tree crush your neighbors house, but don't cut down the tree either, because we really love trees here!), there are just so many headaches in owning property remotely like that the hard way.

But I see that as no excuse to take my property away if I'm doing everything right. And the squatters can't tell who is absent and who is just on vacation. We have to deal with this problem seriously.

"Hired goons" - upgrade to "Security." They can keep on eye on your place and notify the police if it appears someone is residing who shouldn't be there. As has been mentioned elsewhere, squatting laws only come into effect after so many days (where I live it's 30). It's not like you went away for a weekend trip, come back to squatters in your house, and you're now screwed. Doesn't work that way at all.

Edit - confirmed with wife, who's a property manager. The key, at least in our state, is a property must be vacant before squatter rights applies, otherwise it's trespassing. Squatting then is a bigger concern for vacation homes, beach homes, and the like. What is considered vacant? Well, that varies by locale! Literally, YMMV.

In this case, there are two wrinkles in the story that make it not representative of the average situation:

* COVID created an extremely unusual circumstance around residency law, one that we are not likely to see again in our lifetimes pending another virulent pandemic

* The house (unless I misunderstood a detail of your story) wasn't stolen from its rightful owner... The rightful owner died. It's flow through the probate process was disrupted. But people have all kinds of opinions about how we will property in this country and you can definitely turn your head and squint and say "The only crime committed here is a dead woman's will was not respected, and a living person other than the one she would have chosen ended up with the house."

Still, it does suck that the house went up to auction because fundamentally the people with the most claim to it can no longer afford to pay the state to maintain the right to that claim.

It's rough being a landlord. A lot of laws are stacked against you.

The easiest way to avoid them is to not be one.

The problem with that is it can happen to a random homeowner on vacation, not just landlords.

You don't face months long legal battles over that.

These examples were otherwise vacant homes.

Landlords have fewer rights than home owners.

Yes, the laws have the unintended(?) consequence of creating a moat around large corporate property ownership.

I certainly sympathize with landlords, because they put up with a lot of drama and legal trouble and really intricate interpersonal troubles. But let's not forget that the laws are also stacked against tenants. There are supposedly rights, but the first power a landlord has against the tenant is not knowing those rights. Likewise, the landlord is able to do everything by the book, right up to the brink of legality, like clockwork on a rigid schedule. You will receive your 48-hour notice 5 minutes after the office closes on a Friday.

Eviction processes can be really arduous for both sides, but they can also be swift and painful for the tenant.

I have found that there are basically no attorneys who take on tenants' rights issues, particularly for low-income/affordable housing situation, because there is no money. There are plenty of them who take landlords' rights very seriously! If you are a landlord, odds are that you've got an in-house attorney or a good one on retainer who can advise you every step of the way.

I speak for my jurisdiction only, and I don't pretend to know or espouse a global perspective on this stuff. It's different everywhere.

> It's rough being a landlord.

Yeah… if it wasn’t for all that money, I don’t know why anyone would do it.

Wouldn't you just SWAT these clowns out of your property?

The cops show up investigating the anonymous call, discover the drugs, prostitute, guns, who knows what else. Arrests are made, home reclaimed.

Doesn't the home become a crime scene or something? Can't stuff be confiscated?

I don't think you just walk back in and chill as the perps are being led away...

I don't think you just walk back in and chill in any case of this scenario upon getting rid of such vermin. The place is likely trashed, your possessions are likely fucked up.

It sounds like six months were burned on getting an eviction authorization. So the competition here is six months.

Can the cops get over with their "crime scene" needs within six months? If so, this looks like a winner to me. At least in this option they're immediately removed and go straight to jail. Not six months more of this free-loading bullshit at your expense.

> “I didn’t walk in on a family eating dinner. I walked in on weapons, a prostitute, a bunch of dogs in the back, my fence broken down,” he told a reporter.

How did he know that there was a prostitute?

The law benefits squatters in otherwise empty homes because evicting them means making them homeless.

As much as it sucks to lose access to your property the other side is losing access to a home which is way worse.

The problem is, this can make a random homeowner homeless. The article mentions a service member who comes home to find someone living in her primary residence, not a rental property. That person is now homeless because of this. It could also happen to a person on vacation.

That particular home was being rented out before they returned home, that sounds 100% like a legal matter. I don't think the vacation scenario is equivalent unless it's a multi-month vacation.

Shoot the asshole who was in your house and say it was a home invasion.

I 100% support this. It's just like any other infestation of vermin, you need to use any means necessary.

No, the article says that it was her real estate agent that discovered the squatter and that the house had previously been rented.

Your confusion is understandable. The framing of both situations in the article is "homeowner returned to discover squatters" but even their own facts don't line up with that narrative.

I suspect both situations are probably much more mundane tenant disputes and the article is pushing an agenda.

Ah, I see that on rereading, my mistake.

Frankly I don't really give a fuck about them becoming homeless.

Oh good -- a lot of comments where HN armchair lawyers and civil rights experts get to argue how the world should work in their opinion versus how the world actually works and debate the imperfections and injustices. Bonus for posting an issue that will give commenters a chance to air their libertarian bona fides.

If we only had all property ownership and rental records "on the blockchain" by now the police could just consult that and know for sure who owned a property or had a legitimate lease. If everyone had to carry and produce identification for the police they could check that against the title or lease agreement... well maybe we need biometrics and so on to protect against fake documents or false names, but I'm sure all of this is solvable with the right technology. Why don't we have an API that can tell the police who owns or rents what properties? What kind of world do we live in where human beings get to mess everything up like this?

You’re arguing against an imaginary enemy. The only person who brought any of that up is you lol.

Really? Did you read any of the comments describing how the police could and should check who owns the property?

Link the ones mentioning a blockchain/API/biometrics then?

I think you missed the sarcasm. Do you remember when one of the proposed legitimate uses for blockchain was recording all property deeds and records? I was making fun of that.

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