Why is the law so powerless against squatters?

Factual Questions
21

The difference is a man’s home is his castle. This make a big difference when it comes to arresting and evicting. Most states probably have very specific laws about eviction (I know Canadian provinces do). The police have to decide who’s telling the truth. It could be a landlord who wants to give his tenants the hoof and lies about their lease. It could be real break and enter squatters. They may have had an arrangement with the previous owner… etc. It’s probably a lot easier to arrest the guy who pried open your door and is snoozing on your couch in a house full of your possessions, than the usual squatter scenario where someone finds there are people who have been living in his property, not his primary residence, for a month or six and now he wants them out.

Cars or babies are easy. A car has title. In the event of a dispute, they police tow the car and the person with the papers and ID can retrieve it (for a fee). In the event of a custody dispute, they call child and family services, who look over who has custody. You can’t tow a house, except in the really low-rent districts.

But in both cases, theft or kidnap charges, and certainly conviction, are not guaranteed if the person claims they were permitted to take said item. People rent property to strangers all the time. Just because the rent is not paid does not make that theft re trespassing - it falls to the Landlord-tenant laws. People don’t usually lend their car or child to someone they have never met. The person caught in those circumstances likely has some ‘splainin’ to do. OTOH, if an irate girlfriend calls the cops and claims her boyfriend stole her car, and he says she lent it for the afternoon, odds are that would be an interesting case, certainly no slam-dunk; but if he’s had it for 5 weeks and is two states away, more likely it will fall on him to explain.

Cops make decisions but they have to be careful that they are certain the facts are straight. Real estate isn’t going anywhere. Let the judge decide.

IIRC “notorious” means the occupation has to be obvious and well known, not hidden; so that if the owner knew and cared about his property, he would easily have known. No sneaking in the back door and leaving the windows boarded - the lights are on at night and you come and go in broad daylight like you own the place and everyone can see this.

IIRC in several states and provinces like in Ontario, any title disputes like adverse possession are replaced by the computerized title registry and that is the sole and authoritative reference for titles. The only exception is if fraud is committed against the registry.

22

What happens if a house, in a suburban residential neighborhood, is foreclosed and sits vacant and getting overgrown with weeds, and a homeless tramp moves in? Who would have any standing to complain, unless the bank is patrolling its foreclosed properties?

Suppose said tramp occupies the home openly, but makes no secret that he is a squatter. Can he go to City Hall and establish an account to pay for municipal utilities, admitting right up front that he is squatting? Can he pay property taxes (if he can afford it)? That, I’ve read, can be one of the big factors in favor of eventually granting title through adverse possession.

If a squatter squats openly, but pays the bills and maintains the house and keeps the landscaping in shape, would the neighbors be likely to accept his presence in their midst?

23

A friend of mine tells the story of back in the good old days before computers. Everything was kept in paper files. A mortgage finance company had a branch in a small town. The price of the metal goes down, the town lays off half the miners, the finance company shuts its doors amid a raft of property abandonments and general chaos and bankruptcy and office staff fired or walking away. My friend has a buddy who owes a mortgage to this office. Who does he pay to? this is when the only recourse would be to mail a cheque to the next province but they have to say who is handling his account now, and nobody does. Literally, they lost his file.

My friend who used to work in a bank tells him - put your mortgage payments into a savings account, keep paying your property taxes and utilities. If nobody comes after you for it in 10 years, go apply for adverse possession. The guy did. Classic case of squatters rights applied in the real world.

24

Unless you leave to go to work and come back to find some strange guy there who says it’s his castle.

Surely the police could take action in such a case? (Otherwise it’s a pretty flimsy castle we all live in.)

25

Well, who are the police going to believe?

In most real-world scenarios, there will probably be abundant evidence that Person A has been living in the property for many years, while Person B has just arrived and the broken window by the back door probably has something to do with his arrival. and the police will encourage person B to leave by pointing out that, if he doesn’t, to avoid a breach of the peace they may need to make an arrest for, oh, say, breaking and entering.

But if there’s a genuine dispute over who’s entitled to occupy the property, that’s a civil dispute, and not a police matter. Until the dispute escalates to the point where there’s a breach of the peace, or an offence like assault. At which point the question of who to arrest will be only peripherally related to the question of who owns the property.

As for your home being your castle, it’s not generally a characteristic of castles that other people come along and defend them for you.

Ownership of property usually involves the right to exclude others from the property. It doesn’t involve the right to have public officials come along to do that for you. They’ll only intervene if there’s a proper matter of police interest at stake - breach of the peace, or worse.

26

I might note that in England, source of the common law setting out the balance of rights between land owners and occupiers, as of late 2012 squatting in residential property is a criminal offence.

27

In London, where the price of property is astronomical (and rising) the local councils own a lot of houses. These are not necessarily the cheaper ones, but may be big 4/5 bed houses on 4/4 floors. If the tennant, who may have lived there a long time, dies, they often find that they will have to spend a great deal of money from their overstretched maintenance budget to bring it up to the required standard. It is cheaper to board it up and forget it.

This literally happened in some cases - the council simply ‘forgot’ that they owned the house. Squatter move in and often trash the place, but sometimes they were replaced by more responsible citizens, who set about restoring it. So long as the council left them to it, they could, after 12 years I think, apply to register title to the house.

Have a look at the second one to see what you would get for £400,000 in a not very prosperous London suburb.

The law has now changed and squatting is illegal.

28

It’s a function of ensuring property is used productively. The right to secure property that you do not directly control is not a natural one. It’s a legal construct used to achieve a particular social end-- giving people motivation to work hard.

But land is a sharply limited resource, and there comes a point where the social good of enforcing property rights intersects with the social good of keeping people housed, building room for social mobility, and ensuring that a community’s limited land is actually used. So the law has a system for returning functionally abandon land to productive use.

29

A lot of our laws look insane on the surface until you start to understand what the world would look like if they could be abused. The entire point is to allow for a trial a determine true ownership, rather than just kicking someone out on the street without due process. I imagine there is an element of mercy in this, in that they don’t want to immediately kick someone out when they have nowhere else to go.

That said, I live in a state that allows broad powers to defend your home against intruders, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

30

Of course. Even at the street cop/patrol level police are supposed to conduct investigations. Just because someone lies and says they live there does not give them the legal right to stay until evicted. A burglar does not have the right to live in a house just because he managed to get through the window. The problem comes when someone has established genuine residency for a long period of time. Titles, leases and other legal paperwork would need to be examined to determine proper residency. In those cases a civil court has to decide. And any judgments will most likely be handled by the Sheriff and not the municipal police. The town drunk does not have a right to live in your house because you forgot to lock the door.

That is the sticky situation. Some banks take action against squatters. Sometimes its hard to find someone who cares. There is an old cop saying, “No victim no crime.” If you don’t have a complainant its mostly impossible to go forward.

Utilities are easy to get hooked up. Around here they don’t ask to see a lease or a mortgage. You just call up the power company and they come and turn it on. That is certainly a tactic that is used.

You mention adverse possession. Around here AP can only come into effect after 20 or 30 years (depending on the type of property). It is rarely a factor in these cases because if no one cares after 20 years its not really an issue. AP is most often brought up in property line disputes rather than squatter cases.

Sometimes squatting is used as a shakedown technique. I know of one suspect in particular who does this. He finds a foreclosed house and takes possession. Turns on the utilities. If the bank finds out and moves to get him removed he settles with them for cash. He gets the money and leaves, the bank avoids a lengthy and costly court battle (NJ is one of the states in which the eviction process is lengthy and painful). This one particular guy has been clever at times and gotten away with it. Other times we have been able to arrest him for trespassing. It depends on the totality of the circumstances in each case.

31

That’s my point; it’s a societal decision about housing policy, not a question of the capability of the police to make a determination.

Houses have titles like cars, and both get rented out, and yet if I keep my Hertz car past the rental period without paying anything, sooner or later, the police will remove me from it. And most children do not have a custody order on file with child services or anywhere else, yet the police make choices about where they belong.

The squatter is likely to be someone the owner has never met, though, too, and the police are capable of assessing that. Yet we treat him differently from the car thief or the kidnapper.

Put another way, we could treat squatting as a crime, like we treat other intrusions, and empower the police to remove them like we do with car thieves or home invaders. In that situation, the putative squatter would of course have the option of going to civil court and either establishing his right to occupy or to seek damages for wrongful eviction; this just reverses the default assumption about occupancy.

More generally, saying that squatting is a civil matter and not a crime is just question-begging. Most crimes are also civil wrongs; that doesn’t stop them from being crimes or being redressable by the police.

32

Do you think if you’re an hour late returning a rental car the police will put out an APB? Do you think the police come and take children from one parent because another parent says the children belong with them? What happens if you lend your neighbor your lawnmower and call the police and tell them it was stolen? Sometimes theft is an obvious matter, other times it’s beyond the ability of the police to determine. It’s not a societal decision about housing policy, it’s a societal decision about what constitutes theft, and in the case of squatters, they haven’t physically removed anything, it’s clearly not theft without much more evidence than the owner’s say so.

33

But we do not give owners an absolute right to evict people who live in their residence. If you are renting a house, the landlord can’t just call up the cops and say, “I own such and such property on 99th St, here’s my title, I need you to arrest everyone there and toss their crap out on the street.”

Landlords can’t evict tenants or have them arrested for trespassing just because they’ve changed their mind about renting the property. A lease is a binding contract, the tenant can’t be evicted or arrested at the whim of the landlord.

That’s the difference between borrowing a car and renting a house. I don’t think we want to live in a world where a renter can come home one day and find that the landlord has dumped all his possessions in the street, and there’s nothing they can do about it. So we have laws about how and when people can be evicted from houses, and it isn’t just on the landowner’s say-so.

34

Actually, as pointed out by Musicat it’s the opposite. It’s called “adverse possession.” They can claim it only if the owner HAS tried to do something about it.

One big difference is that a car can be driven away and hidden, but a house can’t. It makes sense for police to impound the vehicle until the matter is sorted out legally. There’s no need to impound a house.

I heard a great story on the NPR show “This American Life” about a guy (in FL, IIRC) who knew how to abuse the legal system to occupy property he didn’t own. As I recall, the property had been his or his parents’, but had been lost for some legal reason, and the property had sold once or twice. The protagonist in the story buys the property and moves in. But this guy keeps pestering them about being in “his” house, and files a number of legal forms with the city clerk. The protagonist calls the police about the guy who’s harassing them, but when they arrive, the offender shows the police what looks like a perfectly reasonable legal document from the city, and so the police leave, calling it a civil issue.

Legal battles went on for years and involved other properties and other homeowners. Eventually the guy was sent to prison for filing false documents to receive money from FEMA or something.

The system doesn’t always work the way we’d like it to! Sometimes there are sensible fixes, but other times, the cure would be worse than the disease.

35

Yes, but the police often will also impound the car thief as well as the car. They’re not just sorting things out; they’re making a normative judgment about ownership. The same is true in the case of a home invasion.

But a home invader, or Loach’s town drunk example, or even a date who you invited in who now won’t leave, haven’t necessarily taken anything either, and yet we expect the police to eject them without a court battle. And the evidence as to the home invader and the squatter is the same; the only basis for removing them is the owner’s say-so that they are not permitted on the premises. What other evidence of absence of permission could there be? It’s just that as to the squatter, we require the owner to plead that lack of permission to a judge, while as to the date who won’t leave, we consider it sufficient to make that argument to the police officer.

36

Presumably by the time the police arrive a squatter has been living there and made the place into his home. And of course he will tell the police that the owner gave him permission to be there. At that point what evidence do the police have that he doesn’t have a right to be there? People allow others to occupy their homes all the time for various reasons, simple occupation doesn’t indicate a crime. It’s the signs of occupation that the police will look for. A guy wearing a striped hat and a mask, carrying a big bag with a $ on the side is obviously a burglar, not an occupant. A guy who has his clothes in the house and has been eating and sleeping there looks like a tenant.

37

That’s not what adverse means. It simply means you are in possession of the land without title. In fact, IIRC / IANAL, if the owner has been pursuing legal action to get you out before the 10/20/30 year deadline, that puts an end to your claim to own the title. Adverse possession essentially means the real owner has abandoned the property so you are there by default. If they are fighting you, it is not abandoned.

“Hostile” means you are acting like exclusive owner, it’s not that everyone bunks there and you decided to be the one to claim ownership. I.e. you are hostile to anyone else trying to practice the same “ownership” rights. “Notorious” means everyone knows, it’s publicly visible that you occupy, it’s no sneaking around. If the real owner had come by or talked to your neighbours he would have known.

In such cases in the news, typically, it is not the guy who broke in while you were out shopping. It is someone who has been there for a while; it’s not about holding you off with one tactic or another. Squatters rights resulting in title is because the original owner did not know or care that you were using their property for a decade or two - they had effectively forgotten or abandoned it. The guys in the news are just taking advantage of the incredibly slow and confused court system to get a year’s free rent. they know they’ll have to leave sooner or later. They don’t care.

If someone wants to forge documents and make false representations to stave off eviction, then it’s still fraud. You come up against a shyster, you must address that.

If you complain your car was stolen, and the guy produces a bill of sale… (“I was going to transfer the ownership papers this afternoon”) then either he’s committing fraud and forgery, or you are lying to police. Either way, the police are unlikely to simply take his/your car and give it back to you. Best case they impound it and you retrieve it with the proper paperwork.

Similarly, children have default custody and at some points, explicit court-ordered custody. If a dispute arises, the first thing to happen is Child and Family Services will jump in to take the child, and then examine how they child stopped being looked after by the custodial parent. there are situations where a mother may ask their friend “can you look after Junior while I spend a month in rehab and then take a trip around the world?” If that happens, I sure hope Mama gave the person something more than a verbal agreement.

If the guy’s squatting and the cops show up, he’ll have some song and dance. “I have a verbal agreement for a lease” or some such. If he’s stupid enough to say “I have no legal right to be here” then he’ll be out on his ear. These guys are not stupid. they know what to say to put off the cops and stop any eviction - basically turn it into a months-long landlord-tenant hearing.

38

Suppose you find yourself in one of these ambiguous situations where the police will not remove the squatter and you are faced with a lengthy and possibly expensive court battle to reclaim possession of your home. Can you - or you with the help of a few burly friends - just march in, grab the squatter and his stuff and toss them out, with a warning that physical violence will ensue if he returns?

It would seem to me that whether the law could touch you for doing that would depend on whether you ultimately prevail in the civil dispute over the house (assuming the squatter tries that route - which one would assume he would not, seeing as he has no chance of winning and can’t live in the home anyway). Because if it turns out it’s your home, then I would think you’re entitled to physically evict someone who invades your home, like any other breaking and entering thief. So you should be safe (unless the squatter has a bunch of burly friends of his own).

Is this correct?

How much are the banks typically will to pay for this?

39

Although history is replete with stories of things that fall through the legal cracks, a bank-owned property that isn’t bringing in any revenue is going to be sold rather quickly, even faster than typical property sales. It won’t be on the market long as the bank just wants it off the books and will accept cash for a fraction of its value. In my neighborhood we have real estate prokers who specialize in such sales, and the average time on the market, unless there is a cloud on the title, is about 90 days.

You can establish a utility account without proof of property ownership. Just pay the bills and nobody cares.

Property tax bills are sent to the owner of record. If no payment is made after a while (3 years in my county), the property is sold by the government for taxes.

Unless he boasts about it, how would they know? Do you check on the legality of all of your neighbors?

Adverse possession, in the cases I have heard about, is often the result of vacant land owned by an absentee owner far away. Someone moves onto the land by farming it, building on it, or using it in some manner, perhaps innocently, and the true owner never knows since he doesn’t ever come by to check. He keeps up the payments – mortgage, taxes, whatever; vacant land doesn’t cost much to maintain. Then, typically, he dies and the heirs start checking on his possessions and legal matters, or he decides to build on his retirement nest-egg property and the adverse possession is uncovered. It might be too late for the true owner by then.

40

I don’t think a later decision helps you. You are aware that the squatter’s right to be there is unsettled at the time of your actions. You would be better off I think taking that action before the police or anyone else was notified and claim you found a trespasser on your property. I think a lawyer could give a more suitable answer.