The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes
oaklandside.org
oaklandside.org
So even you concede they benefit almost everyone, only they benefit some more. So should we really be dismantling them and descend into anarchy, just to harm a group you dislike? Doesn't seem like a good move.
We must decide which is more important.
> When Jacobs takes on a job, he and his contractors sign temporary leases with the property owner. This move is his secret weapon.
> Jacobs is a big fan of California’s “castle doctrine.” The state law says someone has no duty to retreat in defending themselves against an intruder in their home. They can legally use force, even deadly force, to protect themselves — so long as the force used is proportionate to the threat.
The signing of a lease makes the aggressor look like the aggressee. This strategy seems really shaky to me. I can't help but wonder how well it's been tested in court.
Once someone gets seriously hurt, some of these landlords might end up wishing they had just waited out the regular eviction instead.
1) Domestic violence 2) Harassment 3) Possibly Assault
At the very least I would expect to get booked, even if the charges didn't stick.
If I did this to some random homeless person or gang member, I'd expect basically a high five from the cops and nothing else.
Of course I do not live in CA, I live in AZ. In my state, ranchers have just straight up shot trespassers and nothing happened to them, despite the fact that by the book this would be highly illegal.
The guy doing this has discovered that in order to be convicted someone has to complain, then the police have to care, then a judge has to let it go to trial, a prosecutor has to actually want to competently build a case, and then after all that a jury actually has to convict you. I'm guessing the chance of all those stars aligning when the squatters are people literally spray painting "Kill all Bailiffs" (in one ASAP website screenshot) is next to nill.
I've never lived in AZ, but it sounds like this may have a lot to do with it. ;-)
Personal injury is an area where plaintiffs start out with a huge advantage. Judgments are large and cases are often settled out of court by landlords' insurance companies. Not only would you have no trouble finding a lawyer, they might actively seek you out.
Squatters can't and won't. The whole point is it's time and money consuming to prove they're not tenants and legally evict them, not they they're actually tenants with rights to peaceful enjoyment of the property.
The squatters are very frequently committing criminal fraud, by showing a fake lease to the police to portray themselves as legitimate tenants. Leases aren't recorded like deeds, and landlords' signatures often appear in public records. So it's easy to make a good enough fake that the police will take the squatters' side. I don't know why this article doesn't mention that, but a web search ("fake lease squatter") will show this is routine.
The squatters don't expect to win their dispute in court, just to take advantage of the extended time to trial. Oakland's eviction moratorium lasted for literally years, and they're still working through the backlog. When the case finally reaches court, the squatters will get evicted but the fraud is almost never charged. So from the squatter's perspective, it makes sense to fake the lease.
From a small landlord's perspective, the tradeoff may thus be certain financial ruin waiting for the judicial process vs. a slight chance of ruin if the "nightmare cotentant" approach goes wrong. So it's no surprise the sword guy has business. The risk that his services would be used against a real tenant is partially mitigated by the risk that that tenant would sue. The fake tenants prefer to stay out of court, since the judge (and opposing counsel) will look more carefully at their fake lease than the police did.
Georgia recently created an accelerated judicial review for cases where the landlord is alleging that the lease is fraudulent, separate from default on a non-fraudulent lease. That seems like the right approach to me.
Same reason the article put "empty" in the title to imply they were just sitting around for speculative investing, when there's every indication the houses were intended to be immediately rented out, and are only "empty" because squatters moved in first.
This does a few things. 1) it encourages the owner to rent out empty places, as empty places are no longer simply lost opportunity cost, but actually cost money in what they have to pay in this tax 2) requires people record who is legally living in a place to avoid these issues 3) enables areas to discount this tax for poor / disabled (or other logical reasons that they already have procedures for) for people who live in the area that they want to support.
Truer words have not been spoken!
While that's only ~6% of total housing units, it's still a lot of opportunity for both squatters and these businesses.
Generally though, this situation only feels possible due to compounding systemic failures. In some order: Not building enough housing, income inequality, homeless support, and law enforcement (or lack thereof).
Fixing problems further up the chain solves the problems further down, but is more difficult and probably creates other unintended consequences.
Edit: the solution to which is not allowing squatters disproportionate access to others’ property via unnecessarily long court procedures. Residental agreements should be filed with the county just like land sales are, so a cop can quickly lookup who legally belongs and act accordingly.
You can claim whatever rental rate you want as a basis for your financialization agreements, but you should have to start paying taxes as though you are receiving that number as actual cash rent after some limited grace period.
That would stop most of the shenanigans by private equity in the rental markets.
Subtract this amount out of property taxes owed today so we have 2 taxes that would sum, and can even discount the occupancy tax of the renter based on their needs (old, disabled, poor....)
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vac...
In LA it's mostly because the power company takes like, months to hook up new buildings for no reason.
People unlawfully squat and the official position of the Police is shrug.
Small wonder people are unhappy with the system and there's a market popping up for extra-judicial evictions.
The working homeless are worse at contributing to natalism than the working housed and there are too many Americans for the global aquifer budget to support. A mass fertility reduction can only really happen through a decline in prosperity. Ideally, the American housing policy framework should be exported globally as much as possible, too.
Uhh I think you got it backwards.
The poorer a country is, the higher its fertility rates.
Countries that have already gone through the industrial revolution and demographic transition form a different cluster with an inverted trend line.
My understanding of CA tenancy law is that it's so tilted in favor of the tenant, that if someone just claims to be one, the police have to shrug.
> Small wonder people are unhappy with the system and there's a market popping up for extra-judicial evictions
Well-intentioned laws, upon contact with the real world, often end up with undesirable secondary and tertiary consequences such as this.
Would probably be much cleaner all around if in such cases the law dictated possession back to the property owner with ~ treble damages/attorney's fees/statutory damages/reversion of possession in the cases where the alleged squatter was lawfully occupying. Basically enough to entice a lawyer to take the case on contingency and make it unequivocally in the favor of a hypothetically wronged tenant, while not allowing squatters to abuse the existing legal process.
Oh so after a ~week long prompt investigation, the police, now well informed, act decisively? Strange then how the landlord in the story would rather pay $12,500 to this swordsman than wait one or two weeks.
I gave my hypothetical to point out your "on the spot" was a strawman, and here you strawman again. Nobody demanded "immediate", and after the police verified that you are the lawful owner, and that there is no tenancy contract notarized/registered with the state, the squatters should be kicked out. But this is as ridiculous as the police refusing to remove someone from, say, your server farm, because that someone claims he's your employee and allowed to be there/actually he's the owner, prove he's not in a protracted civil procedure, during which time he dismantles your servers and sells them for parts. A year later when you get your judgment and can finally kick him out, a second squatter appears and you have to start all over again.
Trespassing and theft are criminal matters, and the police should treat them as such, even if the thief/trespasser says "actually, I'm not stealing/trespassing, this is mine/I live here".
They'll remove trespassers but these squatters will usually claim that they have a rental agreement, or that they've lived there long enough that there is a de facto agreement.
Do gangs really do this, or is it just renaming the activities of homeless individuals as organized crime? Because most of the homeless individuals in Oakland are the working homeless.
No, it doesn't. It extensively quotes its primary interview subject, who at one point makes a (fairly vague) insinuation along those lines. His words were "more like organized crime", and they're rendered in the article within quotation marks.
> Do gangs really do this, or is it just renaming the activities of homeless individuals as organized crime?
My guess would be the latter.
Once they break in they ask just bellow of what hiring a lawyer and doing the legal process would cost. Or worse they rent illegally the home in the secondary black market.
The reason it works is because kicking them legally can take months or years plus lawyers and proceedings cost. It also drops the value of the surroundings if they are not kicked fast enough.
Now theres an entire sector around it.
The antagonist looks great on paper and gets keys before actually paying the deposit. Then shielded by that slim residence he proceeds to wreak havoc on the property to lower values to snap it up for a song.
Everybody pitch in and get some melee experience. Let the civil disobedience commence.
If this guy gets away with it, the homeowner likely would too, unless he's got some sort of special payoff scheme to the police.
I think any property owner could do the same, but it's just a risk that they don't want to take. Who wants to get up close to a (potential) knife wielding meth addict?
The sword guy makes it tenant vs. tenant, so neither party has that formal advantage. Of course the police know the game, but they're generally happy with the workaround.
As a red stater, I really can’t understand the last statement. If someone is in a bad spot, there are numerous ways some shelter can be offered. The homeless person may have to put up with some shelter rules ( or maybe friend or relatives rules ), but shelter is available.
To say someone is entitled to shelter in someone else’s house just isn’t credible to me.
It's a pretty complicated issue, and the legal patchwork of state versus county versus city laws can make it really difficult to untangle. I think that given the system we have, everyone in it is pretty much behaving rationally, if in their own best interests. I understand why the squatters would choose a squat over a shelter.
Given that all the property is claimed, I don’t see what the distinction is. If there existed a ton of unclaimed coastal California property, there wouldn’t be a problem.
So the more interesting and actionable question then is who has the right to live in coastal California?
The obvious answer is that, if people do have the right to shelter, it is the state / county / city's obligation to make some form of shelter available. And I get that there are "shelters" available, but from what I understand they are effectively not available to a vast number of unhoused people far a wide variety of reasons. Failure to maintain appropriate shelters is effective a constructive refusal.
I liked the concept of the tiny home villages that LA experimented with, but it looks like they did a poor job, or cost cutting got too severe, and ultimately they fell short.
If people are “entitled” to shelter, shouldn’t they be entitled to food, even more so? In that case, if a hungry person were to knock on your door and demand something from your pantry, how could they be denied?
Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Huma...) declares: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control".
UDHR is mostly aspirational - it is just a declaration with no enforcement mechanism (although there are a whole series of more binding treaties on specific issues under UDHR). The existence of UDHR does reveal what the international consensus is.
However, it is worth mentioning that positive rights are nominally obligations on the state - i.e. if people's positive rights aren't being met, it is a failure of the state in the same way as if the state infringes on their negative rights. It does not imply that every private individual needs to arbitrarily solve those failures as in your example.
So to answer your original question, according to widely accepted declarations of human rights, people are entitled to live in a society where they have the opportunity to obtain food and shelter (people who are able can be made to work for that food and shelter, but still have a right to food and shelter if they are disabled or unemployed for reasons outside their control).
Badass hero.
That way, people who can't compete in the Californian housing market will stop being babied and finally be allowed to get the message and then redirect their energy on migrating to somewhere with cheaper rent like Idaho or Guatemala.
Obviously you should believe him without question. What motive could he possibility have to lie?