Comment by konfusinomicon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by konfusinomicon | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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