France has probably the most fucked up law when it comes to squatting.
Someone gets by effraction in an apartment/house, stay there for 48 hours and they are good to stay forever.
If this is your primary apartment, the local government (préfet) is supposed to issue an order to get the people out. They do not (because plenty of important reasons - important for them of course). Police usually try to negotiate with the squatters.
If there is a small child with the squatters getting them out is not possible at all. Except if you find them a replacement apartment. And they accept it.
If this is not your primary housing, then you are completely screwed. Thee is almost no way to get the people out. We have from time to time in the news information about people who are trying to get their house back for years.
If you try to move them by force, they will sue you and you pay 40,000 € plus prison. They can be sued for up to 12,000€ (and prison - this has never happened)
I love my country, but the brain-dead idiots who passed these laws should be publicly pointed to, with their home address, so that they can kindly invite the squatters to come when hey are on vacation.
If the laws are idiotic, you can always employ people who work outside it.
A team of Romanian/Bulgarian/Polish big guys will take care of your squatter problem for less than 1000 Euros. There's likely people of other nationalities doing this, I wouldn't know, I only dealt with these three and they operate everywhere.
And no deaths or major injuries, of course, that's just bad business.
I think this has the same problem as all non-legal security. I can see entrepreneurial big guys deciding this a good business, and just paying some people a nominal amount to squat, while offering their services to the property owners to "remove them". Eventually, they don't even need the squatters in the loop, just "Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if someone squatted in it."
That's what the government does already with the police / court system / lawmaking.
You pay taxes for protection. In the past they were at least removing squatters. We're at a point where they don't even bother doing their job.
Any use of violence need opposing and competing forces in a market to work.
Judging by the quality of service, it obviously doesn't work when the government has a monopoly of legal violence.
As you mentioned, having people doing it illegally is prone to the creation of a black market.
Black markets need to stay hidden so they'll have lower standards and generally a worse experience for everyone involved.
If there wasn't any control on these "big guys", eventually someone would come up with a way to broadcast these "big guys" reputation. Someone could easily hire some other "big guys" to keep the other ones in check.
The black market can have higher standards because the barrier for entry is much smaller or nothing which creates more competition.
Having a legal and black market operating side by side can mean more quality and variety for the black market. The drug market is a great example where in places a legal market exists the black market can offer better prices, better quality and a variety of strains the commercial growers cannot.
That's a very interesting point of view! I wonder if maybe you're describing a Canadian point of view? I've heard the government screwed up / over-regulated (not sure about the details) distribution of Cannabis in Canada and people still had to use the black market to buy cannabis.
We don't need a black market, we just governments not to get in the way in what they consider legal or not. I think you're advocating for small independent producers vs big monolithic ones (which sounds great, I'm in!). In a world where licenses don't cost half a million, that can be a legal market as well.
> The black market can have higher standards
From my anecdotal European experience this hasn't been the case.
Eg. If I think about cannabis in Netherland, what you can buy in a coffee shop is generally much better than any black market deal you can find in all of Europe. You can get cannabis from Amsterdam in the rest of Europe as well (amongst the dozen fakes) but it will cost much more.
In a black market you have a higher risk of getting scammed, lower quality and no controls.
Online marketplace with reputation systems help a lot but it's still not like buying on Amazon.
The barrier to entry is higher because you have to setup the tools to act anonymously (eg. Tor, cryptocurrencies), you have to worry about stealth and you're running the risk of going to jail.
The quality / price ratio goes down pretty quickly.
Sure, you're not paying taxes and you don't have to do accounting, but I think the negatives are more expensive than that.
That's because Afghanistan isn't a government, the Western world just tries really hard to try to make people think it is or should be for a variety of mostly grifting reasons
If the government comes for you, good luck explaining the officers you don't accept their laws and that you're just defending yourself.
You'll end up in jail, a fugitive or dead - unless you're in GTA.
But the legal system probably wouldn’t treat these types of thugs as nicely as garden-variety squatters, no? Otherwise such gangs would have already taken over France.
I think in order to avoid open conflict from law enforcement, these types will try to avoid residing at the scene of the crime. Instead, they will rely on referrals for repeat business, while keeping things on the down low.
Well, a large percentage of new property owners by now is most likely to be some money laundering organization, pumping there ilicit gains into a new housing bubble. So why should we be concerned with thieves stealing from thieves while a third type of criminals actually uses the value created to contribute to society -for example by raising kids?
Who cares about the old lady stealing sweets from the reception candy dish during a bank robbery on a mafia bank?
Oddly I have a simplistic view that this is how the Feudal system began. Meaning the populous realized their current government wasn't protecting their property and safety, so they got together and hired some people to do that for them. Over time those men took power for themselves. This theme is played out time and time again in history, if a government can't protect the property of its people it will eventually be replaced. Sadly this may take many decades to occur but the trend is there historically.
I think it arose in the opposite direction. Rulers realized that they didn't have enough centralized power to effectively rule their territory, so they hired lower-level rulers who would get land in exchange for military service.
Part of the motivation was economic: armed horsemen, the dominant military units of the time, were expensive to maintain. The breakdown in the economy in early medieval Europe meant that centralized rulers didn't have money to pay them. They gave them land instead, so they could support themselves in return for military service.
You might say it was a medieval take on the military-industrial complex.
The problem is that the big guys will very soon figure out: hey, squatters good, make business for us! And before you know it, the thugs themselves are doing the squatting. And before you know that, the biggest thugs are doing that because they beat the weaker thugs in the squatting turf war: there are no bigger thugs you can call.
You're not thinking far enough. Squatting property will only pay the bills. Stripping literally everything of value out of the property before using the husk as a pop-up drug lab is the way you make real money
You apparently live one hell of a privileged life in a fully functional country with a good legal system if you're saying such simplistic things. Striving for such nice conditions in all jurisdictions is laudable, but the practical reality is that in much of the world, a normal person subjected to abuse often has to resort to extralegal and sometimes violence recourse. The law is next to useless in these places. I live in one such country and your platitude would have just maintained a status quo of abuse against innocent people in many situations where they had to use or pay for violence by others to solve major problems.
We live a civilized life, because our ancestors banded together, fought, and died to establish a government that was stable. That's not privilege, that's a way of life bought and fucking paid for. It doesn't just happen, and has to be guarded and cultivated. Unless and until similar costs in lives are paid, I honestly don't see a path to civilized life in much of the world.
It keeps getting proved over and over that first world, well off countries can't pay or train or subjugate other cultures into civilized engagement with the world or even their own people. Nation building is an awful joke of a policy, and at some point people have to figure their own shit out.
There are legal and illegal immigration and asylum possibilities all over the world, or you can take up arms against corruption and tyranny. It sucks, but being born doesn't entitle you to anything unless there's a culture and civilization to make good on those entitlements.
There are lots of examples to use as templates. You can have hyper religious militant sharia, or you can have civilization compatible with the rest of the world. If you try for both, the community of nations is not going to let you participate meaningfully. I guess "hermit kingdom" is option 3, if you can get nukes.
Forget sharia, from Russia to Brazil many countries are still struggling with crime and corruption, despite drawing inspiration from existing examples and templates.
To pretend this can be easilly achieved is just folly
Okay, let me put it to you this way, straight from examples right here in the city I live in and many others in my country: You and your neighbors get along in the small residential/commercial community you inhabit. Things are fairly peaceful even though otherwise your country is riddled with corruption, police that are WORSE than useless (they're often highly criminal and/or collude with criminal gangs) and your little community of neighbors is trying to get by and largely watching over their neighborhood.
Then, one day, a small group of thieves starts entering and assaulting stores, trying to extort people and robbing others on the streets, threatening more violence if people don't cooperate better. You try calling police, but they either don't show up at all or only do so late and never investigate anything worth a damn (remember, they collude, and they're likely colluding with your newly arrived local thugs).
So, your neighbors and you organize together and ambush these thugs the next time they come along with their attempts at violence. You catch and badly beat a few of them then toss them out into a public area where an ambulance can pick them up. It sends a clear message, the extortions stop.
Is this ideal? Nope. It's awful, but you want peace for your business, community and family, and what other recourse do you have? Should you and all your neighbors just spew platitudes about ideals of law and order while being assaulted regularly? Or should the whole neighborhood, as you say, apply for overseas asylum and wait months or years for a response (likely negative)? Maybe they should abandon their homes and everything else of their culture to illegally flee, letting the country sink further into chaos?
They mostly won't do these things. because they want a peaceful home that is their real home, and with legal options having been marginalized, communities and groups sometimes really, no-shit-no-other-option have to take matters into their own hands.
Maybe that clears things up about perspective from within a highly functional, lawful country that had decades or centuries before you were born to become like that, letting you simply enjoy it and criticize others who aren't so lucky yet.
It's really clear. If your home is invaded and there is no rule of law, you ambush and kill the thugs. If that's not feasible, or if the retaliation can't be handled, then you leave for a place where you aren't chattel for a gang of thugs. Because it's no longer your home. If your country won't or can't protect you and your neighbors, it's not your country, so yes, fleeing is the only rational move. They can't extort you if you're not there anymore, and you run the chance of grouping up with enough like minded others that you might be able to return and take back your land with force.
I'm not criticizing the people who find themselves in shitty situations. I'm criticizing your statement that the civilization I am fortunate enough to live in is "privilege." It is a carefully guarded and deliberately constructed civilization designed precisely to defend individuals from mobs and strongmen. That is a right, not a privilege, secured by violence and death and sacrifice.
When there is no rule of law, might makes right. Securing civilization from lawlessness universally starts with blood and death and is a horror show. It's that, or leave for a better place. By staying, you're giving power to the exploiters. Worse, you're giving them the means to abuse and exploit more people, and more generations of people.
There are no good or easy choices in such situations. You kill, you leave, or you perpetuate the hellscape, inflicting it on your local society.
The idea of the state having a monopoly on violence is the foundation of all successful civilizations. The idea being that if there is no monopoly, the right and responsibility to use violence falls to individuals, and when individuals are wielding violence without consequences, rule of law is meaningless.
I mostly agree with the ideas you're expressing, and that they're a vital part of any decent, functional society. My strong disagreement is with criticism of vigilante reactions under dysfunctional circumstances, and with the perhaps unintentionally flippant insistence that people should just leave their home if they live in partly lawless places, or that they can at all easily do this, with families and precious possessions included.
Staying isn't just a casual preference for most people, it's a basic economic necessity and an emotional attachment to the idea of not giving up and ceding one's home to abusive people because things got tough.
People aren't normally thinking in some abstract sense that "I should leave this country and stop giving abusive social elements the means with which to perpetuate themselves". They're more often thinking. "This is my home and where my family is from, why should I flee everything I know instead of fighting back however I need to?".
There are a couple, in particular I imagine violence won't be much help when the law has one of its psychotic episodes and refuses to reflect reality in a sensible way.
So stuff like people being declared dead incorrectly, identity fraud. I'm also reminded of an incident in the Netherlands that lead to the fall of the current (still acting; it's complicated) government, where the tax agency was somehow convinced people had fraudulently received particular subsidies and decide to get the money back plus interest, which it turns out tax agencies are very good at.
Good luck finding anyone to beat up there. You can scare people but you can't intimidate red tape.
The detail you forgot to mention there was the criteria the tax administration used to decide the "people" they fought were fraudulent. And the detail of the documents they destroyed when parliamentarians tried to investigate the issue. There is the law and there is above the law.
No violence, and not breaking the law. The way it works a couple of big loud slobs moves in and starts a 24/7 party. They are squatters too so police cant throw them out, and your problem tenants quickly give up after slipping on vomit , listening to music all night and being unable to use kitchen/bathroom.
I can think of one. What if your problem is that someone with more money than you is paying thugs to commit violence on their behalf?
You'd have to band together with other people like you to stop them. I guess you'd also need some mechanism for restraining the worst impulses of the mob we've just organized, like a governor restrains a steam engine. We could call it a "government." I bet it would be a hit.
I like this statement; at first blush, it appears uncouth and brutish - upon closer inspection however, it reveals the "natural state" of nature itself.
French too, this was attempted ofc, we have documentaries about big guys employed by desperate home owners trying to kick squatters out of their main property they "lost" when going to vacations, and it doesnt work.
They get sued, it often becomes very violent, because to have the balls to seize the property of someone who s in short vacations you need to be quite violent yourself, children are always involved and well meaning outrage artists always point out the poor children being sent back to the streets etc.
I live in Hong Kong now where real estate is "a dream". You can rent anything with just a pile of cash and 30 minutes because if you dont pay rent they know the police just enter, throws everything out and put you in jail awaiting trial.
I d recommend France to try, not sure what we d truly lose.
While it may be a solution to your immediate problem, there can be consequences to developing a "relationship" with those who operate outside the law. (Because now 1) know your identity; 2) know you are to some extent nonchalant about operating within the bounds of the law; 3) know you have money; and 4) now have evidence of your extralegal actions.)
Working to reform suboptimal laws may be difficult, but it is a better investment than handing your money to organized crime.
> better investment than handing your money to organized crime
it is, but this investment is costly, because it takes a lot of time and effort, with no real guarantee of success, and when you are eventually successful, other people could easily free-ride off your investment (since it's a non-excludable outcome).
So what a "rational" actor would do is wait for someone else to expend their resources doing this, while they themselves pay to gangs/organized crime to obtain their own property back in the mean time.
The citizen seized the the monopoly on violence to the state under the condition that justice is upheld. If that condition is violated, the contract between state and individual is broken.
Cover your delicate ears, it's a real world out there.
While I don't agree with the idea in the comment.c this person is speaking from experience (supposedly). They should be allowed to share it, and their viewpoint
it's not the point of covering delicate ears. it's just not proper. substitute the eastern european nationalities the parent refers to for the term 'black' and tell me how does it ring to you :)
"Le préfet rend sa décision dans un délai de 48 heures, à partir de la réception de la demande." which roughly translate to "The prefect renders his decision within 48 hours of receiving the request."
We have a family house that was squatted on the coast during last winter. We asked the squatters to leave (while redacting a letter to the prefect) and they too believed the "48 hour" stuff. The police did not however, and made them leave quite quickly (less than a week).
The 48 hours are a generally applied rule for the squatters to be differentiated from, say, burglars. Because otherwise someone forcibly coming into your house while you are there could not be arrested at all.
The ones you mention is for the preéfet to statute about the expulsion.
> We have a family house that was squatted on the coast during last winter
I honestly pity you. I know of two families whose house was squatted and it took months for them to get back their house (in a terrible state); They never got anything from the quatters (nor from the insurance in one case).
Le Figaro is notoriously bad at sorting facts from right-wing rumors. That squatter theme is a recurrent subject to scare their typical landlord readership. Find primary sources for that.
At 30 days they gain rights as a tenant. There was a case years ago of someone with an AirBnB I believe where they stayed longer than 30 days and then refused to leave claiming they had established the place as their residence.
Sounds perfect. Nobody should own more than one residence. Another family taking over is the best outcome for the community. Absentee landlords really need to be given the boot.
I don't understand your point at all. What's an absentee landlord in your book? A landlord who doesn't live in the place they are renting out? I would assume that's - all of them?
Clearly that's not what the GP means, because there would be no dilemma with someone living in a property held by a landlord for more than 30 days if the absentee landlord can just live next door.
Buying more real estate than you use is hoarding. There is only so much liveable land. Out of all the things capitalism can apply to this is morally the worst.
Except people don’t live on land. They live in homes. There’s plenty of empty land. But to house people you need to make the deep capital investment of building housing on that land. Capital accumulation requires capitalists.
They live on both. There's a reason why cali/vancouver are so popular, it's because of their easy weather.
Plus, the home you're buying is on land that's next to a bunch of utilities which are there because generations have worked towards them. Should you be able to hoard all of this (hospital, public transport, etc) just because you're "investing in housing" (which in most part is just sitting on empty houses to sell it to other people that need these utilities)?
This is why vacant home ownership should be taxed to oblivion: you're profiting off something that isn't yours. The only reason the home is appreciating is because the land you're on is gaining value because it's either:
- Most livable land
- Has utilities
- Has people living there that make the city attractive
And owning a home participate in none of this without taxes. Not only that, your incentives are aligned with preventing people from building more houses so yours appreciate, which is a net negative for the city.
We rented a house from friends (well, really their father's estate who had died the year prior, it was put up in a school auction) outside Nice a few years back. They had a caretaker go by the house a few days before we were to arrive only to find evidence someone was living there. It was supposed to be vacant. The squatters were (very luckily) not there at the time and they called the police right away. The police said make sure they can't get back in or else you will be in court for 2 years trying to get them out. They hired a company to sit guard 24/7 and locked up the house and sold it as quickly as they could. When they first told us we were like oh it's ok we will stay there if you got them out! I am glad they insisted that was a bad idea and found us a new house, the squatters tried to get back into the house a few times because it turns out they had hidden some drugs there. The good news is that my friend and his brother came over to sort out the mess and we were able to hang out for a few days! Great town except for all the squatting :)
This reminded me of a funny (in a sense) video that got viral a while ago here in Spain, where someone had squatted on the apartment of some romanian dude. He was talking to the camera with a hammer on his hand: "spanish law says this or that, well we are going to solve this with romanian law, which says that you do not screw with me"...
Blows the door lock away with the hammer and proceeds into the premise. I would love to know what happened afterwards, but I can imagine.
The problem in France is that we have a completely surrealist approach to property.
If you want to get back to your house, police is going to stop you because you are entering by effraction when someone is lawfully permitted to stay in a place that belongs to someone else.
These squatters will sue you. They have the right to live somewhere, so your place is as good as anything else.
They have children, so they have more rights than you for your house.
They can destroy everything, and you should be happy to get back a ruin.
Like I said, I truly love my country but this is one of the few things that drive me completely crazy and where I understand violence of people getting back their house (like the Romanian dude)
I would imagine the intent of this "surrealist approach" is to disincentivize the commodification of housing (as a form of political pressure against consolidation of large real estate portfolios)
>From reading other points in the thread it seems like owning a home for investment in France is an extremely risky proposition.
The amount of people owning property and the size of the real estate market says otherwise. Squatting is just one of those things with an over-sized media footprint.
>Right until the moment it hits you. Have you had been squatted? No? So how can you have an opinion on the impact to someone?
I'm not talking about personal impact, I'm talking about social and economic impact. Just go look at the numbers for squatting in France. It's statistically irrelevant.
By your logic we should all be very concerned about things that nearly never happen. That's not a sane way of living.
By the same token people should only be able to discuss things that have personally happened to them. Which is nonsense.
With this approach we should not invest whatsoever in rare diseases. Or help disabled people because they are less useful for "social and economic impact".
Just look at the number of rare diseases, or disabled people. They are statistically irrelevant. Screw them.
That "commoditization of housing" is a growing buzzword that doesn't make sense on face value. Commoditization is to make it fungible and easy to exchange. Housing developments, apartments, and condos go with interchangeable ones. Since the industrial revolution at least housing has been born commoditized as a norm. Economies of scale are king.
If what the talking point is just trying to sinisterize "private ownership of real estate" that still doesn't make sense as an approach. It just gets squatters and promotes violence through greviances unresolvable through the legal system like how prohibition leads to drug gang fights.
Bet police response would be fairly different for the modern nobility, especially since they can claim the are state secrets involved and get a whole lot of different branches involved with the issue.
Yes you are. You are responsible for the safety of the property; including inside. In other words if the "new tenants" get electrocuted because installation was not according to the code, you have a problem.
So just disconnect utilities then. I don't want them to drown in my bathroom or be electrocuted. I also want to replace locks so burglars don't rob them
You cannot disconnect utilities. You have to stop the contract with the providers and risk the fact that your new friends will be dissapointed not to have power anymore. So they will complain to the power company and tell that their children will die. And the power will be back, you paying for it.
Or they will simply steal it from someone else.
Or, ultimately, pass a contract with the power company.
As for the locks, changing them is the first thing they do.
There is even a web site "how to squat for dummies" (the title is different) where they explain in simple words what to do to have a successful squatting.
One cannot perform of procure a paternity test. Only a judge can order it. This is exactly what I said.
So the judge can simply say no and the (legal) father is now on the hook. And furthermore, the legal system will manufacture a criminal if the legal father decides to test his own DNA with the one of his alleged (for whom he is financially responsible) child.
I’m curious how a law seeking to prohibit anyone from attempting to prove their own innocence could even be taken seriously by any judge or lawyer with a successful education from a legitimate formal legal institution.
Preventing someone from attempting to prove their own innocence is similar to the witch trials of old and a grotesque violation of human rights. Any sovereign legal system preventing defending ones innocence through modern forensic means, has little grounds to protest if as a result their legal system is openly mocked and ignored by other countries that do support defending self innocence.
The fact that a supposed modern nation with elected officials elections should have a miscarriage of justice this grotesque seems akin to a theocracy or monarchy that decides at arbitrary the outcomes of legal proceedings without any actual consistent basis for ensuring justice is upheld.
The government once they found that they would have to pay a very large sum to take care of every child out there whose legal father decided to no longer pay once he found out the child is not his (and/or just to spare the child from all the drama, once the court says yes you're not the biological father but you're still on the hook).
I think it was after a survey on cheating and promiscuity, but I'm not sure of this since this was just something I heard of from other people and I can't find much from a quick search on the internet.
The reasoning is that the priorities of the child come before the priorities of the father, so in order to protect the stability of the family you are not allowed to know.
As to who supports this, a lot of women seems to be in support of it (they have nothing to gain from opposing it) and all the people who seem to 'think of the children'.
Some politicians claim to be against allowing the paternity test on the ground that it is against the values of the republic since it's an aknowlegment of the importance of relations blood, genetics, and race(ism), but these are the words of politicians so they don't mean much.
Where are you from? It is a disgusting country because <some fucked up case I will take as the rule>.
This specific case was met with outrage in France, despite the fact that the law was applied correctly (whether a law that allows to judge actions depending on your mental state is correct is another story).
I don't understand how this can possibly work. If someone can break into your house, occupy it, and gain the right to stay, can't you just do the same? Then you have two occupants in the house. What the heck kind of law or arbitration gets to determine who is allowed to occupy the beds in the house and use the kitchen?
They can't stay if you catch them fast enough. If you want to pull the same scam to get it back, you need to convince them to be gone long enough for you to live there a couple days, unnoticed.
So when the cops show up how is it not a he said she said situation? If I “break in” to my house, they call the cops on me as a “burglar” how does the cop know how long either party has been present?
One tactic is for them to have a "deed of sale" on hand. They show it to the cops and the cops tell you to get out, and settle it in court. Never mind that real property isn't transferred quite like that, or that you have state id that matches the address. The cops just take the "deed" at face value and kick you out.
So you also pull a "deed of sale" from your backpocket and tell the cop that those guys are fraudster because you also have matching state id, while they do not.
On the other hand, as a burglar if you are caught, couldn't you simply claim you have been there over 48 hours and are a legal squatter. Most residential properties won't have CCTV, so it's your word vs theirs.
> I love my country, but the brain-dead idiots who passed these laws should be publicly pointed to, with their home address, so that they can kindly invite the squatters to come when hey are on vacation.
I mean unironically the people affected by it should do this.
The people affected by it can't do that because they can't live in 2 homes at once. That's the point. Essentially the law says you have no right to 2 homes.
In particular, the fact that the authorities must reply in 48h was shown as a progress. The problem is that if they do not reply, it is equivalent to a denial of right (your request to evict the squatters has been automatically rejected)
My grandfather had squatters like this, he basically used a gang that specializes in evictions. They burst into the home in the middle of the night, forcibly removed everyone and their belongings from the premises, and threatened the family with violence if they attempted any legal proceedings.
Yeah, well, gotta do what you gotta do. When the laws are completely fucked, you take matters in your own hands. Citizens of ex-communist countries know a thing or two about it.
Spoke with a ex-prosecutor now Judge. They couldn't possibly fight mafia there, but drug laws were extremely harsh. Basically cops just planted drugs and it was an instant slamdunk case.
I'm from France and I used to go to a lot of squats, and what you say is not true. I don't live in squats but I know a girl who does. She was rejected by her parents because she is lesbian.
Even in uninhabited houses, when the police comes, every squatters are out immediately. Even if they have no rights to do it, and the law is supposed to "protect" squatters.
I witnessed police throwing tear gas and smoke grenade to get squatters out. And when they are out, the police acts as if nothing happened.
We have a different experience. As I wrote elsewhere, i know of two cases where it took months to get the squatters out - and what was left was a ruin. The cases in the news you see from time to time agree.
Squatting is simply stealing. Sorry but I have exactly zero compassion for people who come to my apartment, that I bought with hard earned money, and fuck it up. This is one of these cases where violence is the normal reaction.
I hope that people who support squatters give out their salary and live under a bridge - this would be a true alignement with their beliefs. Otherwise this just hypocrisy ("people should be able to live where they want, except in my house")
Sounds like a way around this is to rig up some kind of high/low pitch directional sound system that prevents them from sleeping and goes through ear protectors. All you have to do is put it in the wall and set it to make its noise after a random duration between 5-100 mins has passed. If you added some accelerometer detection, it could even stop when it detects someone making any considerable noise near it. If they try to rip it out you can have them arrested for vandalism of private property.
Interesting idea, but I suspect that jurisdictions soft on squatters are almost certainly soft on vandalism and theft of contents caused by said occupants. Once the owner reclaims their property, it's then an uphill battle to prove and pursue damages against people who are long gone.
Before an owner takes any action, they had best know what type of squatters they are dealing with. Some would be likely to set fire to the place on the way out (or not leave; perishing amongst the smoke and flames) if they are subjected to enough anguish.
How is it assault for the owner of the property to install a contained sound system in a building that they legally own?
All that would need to do is provide the squatters some written notice informing them that this building was selected for testing a non harmful experimental rodent deterrence prototype the purpose of which is to minimize the presence of known plague vectors. (High/low frequency devices are often used for this and similar purposes). By notifying the “residents” in advance, it establishes that they are made aware that the owner of the property, although not actively seeking the removal of their presence from the premises at this current time has given them fair warning that these devices will be installed and made operational at the provided date and they are not actually being asked to leave. The legitimate justification behind the use of the property for this purpose is to afford maintenance and safety upkeep on said property by minimizing financial losses incurred while income from the property through other means is not possible due to it being forcibly prevented from generating income due to the presence of the squatters.
Perhaps the rebuttal to this approach are zoning laws favoring the sole use of the property as purely no residential.
Another unrelated risk that the squatters open them self up to is for the owner to contact multiple strict by reputation inspection agency that is likely to find some reason why the area should be not approved for renting to individuals due to safety reasons while those flaws are amended. During this and before the owner could establish communication with several repair companies seeking quotes on the repairs needed to meet the livable standards again but document that the repairs are not currently possible due to the potential financial legal liability of performing construction while the building is physically occupied. If a building inspection agency classifies the building as unsafe for residents then anyone choosing to stay there with children would be technically liable for child endangerment and would be at risk of being reported to the French equivalent of the child protective services.
If you stare at the playing field long enough there are always legal checkmate moves in every game no matter how inconsistent or ridiculous, even the French legal system. There appears to be a pattern of justice miscarriage in the French legal system possibly calling into question whether or not any other nation should ever honor any French extradition request as long as they hold laws as silly as this and preventing someone from seeking to prove with modern forensic science whether or not they are innocent of the accusation of genetic paternal responsibility.
The flowers in their “bouquet of evidence” are less than fragrant.
So what's your option if somebody squats your first and only house/apartment you own? Rent another place? Do you still need to pay property taxes in the property you can no longer use?
EDIT: what makes this particularly ridiculous is the timeframe you mentioned: 48 hours. I mean it would be a totally different thing if we were talking about squatting places abandoned for years. Yes you can make an argument about private property etc, but it's a different planet: if somebody squats my only house in which in paying a mortgage, that can easily put me in financial jeopardy. What should I do? Stop paying my mortgage? Squat another house myself?
You still have to pay taxes on property, as well as all the utilities you have a contract for.
You are also completely responsible for the safety of the house. If something happens to someone (inside the house to the squatters, or outside to a bypasser), you as the owner will be responsible.
The law protects squatters in their freedom to live where they see fit.
The law also theoretically protects the owners. The problem is that there are so many exceptions (children, ...) and requirements (negotiating with the squatters, ...) that what you get after months (some were apparently luckier) is usually a ruin and you are expected to be ecstatic about the fact that you got your house back.
The people who support this situation are despicable. Especially because I do not see them giving their house away and living under a bridge to live their dream of complete freedom.
When we will have meetings for the next election, I will ask the candidates about their opinion on squatters, and if they support them in any way, their home address so that can hop in, burn it to the ground and expect them to clap because freedom and equality.
EDIT to your EDIT: the problem is with houses people own as their primary ones (and come back from vacation to an occupied house), and the ones they use occasionally(week-ends, vacation, or rent).
If there is a building that is abandoned I do not see much problems outside of insalubrity and health/security risks.
Who pays for electricity, water, phone and internet? The squatters or the flat owner? How do they a contract in without proof of rental? Property taxes?
Does the policy goes to the house if there is "anonymous" tips of drugs, child abuse?
Will they be able to sleep with heavy/trash metal music directed to their windows 24/7 at
realistic concert levels :-)
Right! The implication of the parent is that property tax bureaus all across France are constantly being screwed around with? Surely a law in France that undermines the taxation system would be changed quickly? Unless there is some mechanism to force the owners to pay tax for a house being squatted in?
If the ownership of the property is in dispute there is no clear landlord. That’s the gist of having squatters being able to stay in the place for years on end battling a court case. Otherwise the judiciary in France is behaving inexplicably.
I didn't know this word -- apparently it's an older English (but still current) French word for what we usually call "burglary" or "breaking and entering" in English now. I might say "Someone breaks into an apartment/house..." in this context.
"breaking" is an unusual usage as well. It's the use of any force -- not literally breaking something. Pushing a door open would count as the use of force. Think more like "breaking a seal", rather than breaking a window.
I've a hard time slamming poor people demanding a ransom for a rich mans holiday home left largely unoccupied throughout the year in a country with fifteen percent unemployment
You trying to get in is violence and they will call the police to protect them. And the police will protect them as the lawful inhabitants of your house.
You yourself distinguished in your first post between squatters occupying someone's primary residence vs a rental or otherwise unoccupied property. Here you are eliding that distinction in order to make an emotional argument. There is no need to be so angry about the existence of other points of view besides your own.
No, both are equally despicable. The distinction was to show that ain France you are more or less screwed depending in the house.
I am glad that you don not get emotional when you are robbed of your property, good for you. Well, except if you were never robbed - which can explain this.
Is that idiotic? Kicking a Family out of a home when they have a small child should be difficult by default. I understand this can be abused, but wouldn’t you rather the law protect the vulnerable rather than the multiple property owner? (I mean no disrespect by that, I think it’s fine to own multiple properties, but to play victim here seems a little bit much)
Do you give away all the money you earn (equivalent to the case of someone breaking into your primary house), or what is left (case of a secondary house).
> If this is not your primary housing, then you are completely screwed
BOOM!
That's where the law is chefs kiss... perfection. Nobody should own more than one home. Someone else taking over the secondary residence is the best outcome for the community.
There always seem to be some sympathy in Barcelona for those poor people who can't afford apartments, but there is plenty of really affordable apartments on a train-ride's distance and they are extending the metro every year into new areas.
Okupa's in Barcelona are now run by professional organizations, taking over a property and then subrenting to mostly latin americans who couldn't care less.
They also happily engage in stealing electricity from their neighbors and shortcutting the water meters raising the bills for everybody else (Utilities are really expensive in Barcelona).
Add to that that the mayor of Barcelona comes from the Okupa movement herself and she couldn't care less about people's retirement assets as they would never vote for her.
There are real-estate investors buying apartments from old ladies who lost their extra pension income due to okupa's for cheap and then sending private services to expel the okupa's.
There aren't plenty of affordable housing when you have large swaths of the population with unstable and low income.
The spanish legal and economic setup is just bad. In fact I'd bet that most social spending done by Spain is basically useless, in that it helps basically nothing on social mobiity or capitalization of anyone depeding on them.
My region, which I consider sloppy/clumsy at organizing anything, typically does a better job than the central state or other regions.
My sister who lives in Ibiza requeted this new "basic income" for the pandemic, it only got a couple of months, and then got tangled into some administrative BS, and fined afterwards. So she has no income, and the rest of us (basically me, a low income worker and my dad, a pensionist) have to provide for her.
Going for a year of holiday on the spanish governments' expense (paro) is definitely a thing.
It is extremely common for employees to ask to be fired so they can get unemployment benefits (paro) and travel for a year.
But, after living there for 6 years I left because the reason these things are not taken care of is because the electorate sees them as perks. Spain has a huge cultural problem when it comes to work ethics and paying their fair share of taxes.
Haven't seen that much unless is people that's been working non stop for lots of years because:
- You don't get 'by default' a year of benefits, you need to work at least for three years to 'accumulate' 360 days of benefits
- The benefits are not that useful if you live in a bug city, given the rent prices. Max benefits are 70% of your base salary, with a limit of around 1000€. After 180 days it goes down to 50%.
- After that, when you work again, you're probably going to pay a lot of taxes in the first year, to adjust the low taxes (IRPF) you were paying while on benefits.
I'm pretty sure there are some cheap dwellings somewhere in Ibiza. Given the OP described circumstances, I don't think she's living in the portrayed pool villas with sea-view of Ibiza.
> Another of Javier's scams is to change the locks of empty apartments, then sell the keys for 1,000 or 1,200 euros to impoverished people who struggle to pay a market rent - a group that has grown in size since the start of the pandemic.
These are not squatters but criminals scamming people trying to find housing. And bad policies that allow for too many empty apartments that nobody notices that have been occupied meanwhile rent and housing prices are high.
It amazes me that the law would allow someone to simply claim someone else's dwelling as their own. I understand on one side we must have tenant protections, but the definition of a tenant should be updated to one that is legally entitled to be within the dwelling by the say of the owner. Because in many American states, it is a perfect formula for extortion.
Clearly there is potential on both ends for abuse. To me this story highlights that there are a surprising number of unoccupied/rarely occupied apartments and homes. To me it's surprising that it wouldn't be in the interests of the owners to be renting them instead of leaving them empty (obviously that's a bit different when we're talking about a cottage on the beach or in the mountains, but why leave a flat in town empty?) My instinct is there must be a combination of perverse incentives that makes having paying tenants actually less appealing than letting dust gather. In a better world the flats wouldn't be empty to be squatted in by crooks or desperate people?
It's not surprising at all when you understand that these laws and regulations are so stringent that they cause massive costs to landlord who want to rent, so much so that it is almost financial suicide to try and do it.
My parents own some apartments and offices, and having seen the issues they have had with them, despite having for the most part good faith tenants, i know for a fact that when they pass and i inherit their assets i will liquidate them all and never get involved in any form of real estate in Portugal.
I do this not because I don't want to, but because the ever changing laws, confiscatory taxes and public ill-will on landlords makes it a stupid proposition.
> these laws and regulations are so stringent that they cause massive costs to landlord who want to rent
I would argue that the laws and regulations are sort've working as intended in that they deter renters. Unfortunately it also isn't working as intended in that it's not encouraging primary residency. So you end up with the worst of both worlds: neither renters nor homeowners.
Personally, I am strongly of the opinion that renting for more than a temporary amount of time should be very strongly discouraged; that people should own their place of residence; and the correlation that there should be very few landlords over renters. But I can see how that can be bad for some types of economies...
Would you also be opposed to a group of pensioners getting together and buying an apartment block, and renting it out to young people who have no savings? That way the pensioners have an income to live on — without slowly draining their savings — and the young people have a place to live without having to take out a huge loan.
> Would you also be opposed to a group of pensioners getting together and buying an apartment block, and renting it out to young people who have no savings?
Yes. Why should anyone have free income? That idea is backwards to a functioning economy.
> That way the pensioners have an income to live on — without slowly draining their savings — and the young people have a place to live without having to take out a huge loan.
Here's a better solution: group of pensioners getting together and buying an apartment block. Then instead of renting it out, they rent-to-own. Renting there builds equity. Moving out means an opportunity to sell the equity, with a guaranteed floor that the landowners would buy back. At some point the equity means you own your unit.
In places with rapidly rising housing prices and strict rent control, it would be better for a speculator to hold the property empty rather than rent it. If you rent it, you lock in the rental price, even if prices go up a lot. If you keep it empty, you can wait until it appreciates the amount you want, and then rent or sell it.
it's the same tenants protection laws that keeps these apartments empty. someone can move in, pay rent for a month or two and then stop. good luck getting them to leave.
That's breach of contract and you can sue them. Have it say something like "The obligation is terminated only after the tenant has moved out and returned the keys". If they stay, you can sue them for not paying rent since they're still a tenant. If they return the keys, immediately change the lock and enable the alarm. If they break in, you can sue them for damaging your property and they also get criminally charged with B&E.
not sure if you're talking hypothetically or from experience, but (depending on jurisdiction) trying to "sue a tennant" is really, really hard. In Canada most of the laws protect the tennant, making trying to evict someone next to impossible. It can take months to years, and they will most likely do thousands of dollars of damage to your property.
If they pay month for a month that seems better than them paying rent for no months using the squatting path?
Letting good property sit empty when there's affordability crises because it's an "investment" and you're just waiting for the ability to charge more, say, is tragic.
I agree it's tragic, but there's more than the speculator's side to this:
I'm currently in the market for a home (SFBAY), one that could also house my aging parents in the future, so that they're not forced to move away to a LCOL ___location if they don't want to. Because of this, I'm looking at purchasing a duplex or a home with an in-law unit.
Due to extremely powerful tenant protection laws in the city I'm looking to buy in, I am not considering purchasing units that are tenant occupied, and am willing to pay a significant premium for a vacant unit vs an occupied one.
This isn't a comment on tenant protection laws themselves, but a note that both sides value a vacant unit over an occupied one in highly regulated markets.
I knew a realtor in the Bay Area who specialized in selling homes with existing tenants. He had a lawyer who specializes in owner move-in evictions.
He could find buyers properties at a substantial discount and then guide them though the eviction process. Buyers, if patient enough, could buy a $1M home for $800k plus $50k in legal costs/buyout funds.
You're claiming that tenant protection laws are the reason apartments are kept empty? That seems like a pretty tall claim. Why would someone even continue to own a space that they feel they can't rent out because they disagree with the laws? Speculation on future prices is the only reason I can think of. Introduce a tax penalty for units/buildings vacant longer than X months. There would be more incentive for property owners to lease out units if it was costly not to do so. Eroding protections for the most vulnerable class of people doesn't seem like the best way to reduce upwards market pressure on something that basically everyone needs to survive.
As I understand it, that is basically how it works in the courts in many US states. The court takes several months to schedule and hold the hearings to determine whether or not the person is, in fact, legally entitled to be in the dwelling. If not, then the landlord can file different orders to get the sheriff or other law enforcement to perform the eviction. By the time all the steps have occurred it's been many months... sometimes 1-2 years. Which is why the advice I see given to landlords is to offer "cash for keys" to get the people out without a court case.
It has been worse recently because of moratoriums on evictions (due to covid). In many cases, that meant that the people occupying the dwelling had no incentive to pay anything at all, and no process existed to remove them.
I cannot imagine in the US it bring more than a simple police call to remove randos from your property. This is very different from evictions where someone had been legally living there.
The problem is, how can the police know who's property it is? Or more specifically, who has a legal right to be there. It becomes a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Granted, if it's a primary residence, you have your driver's license and neighbors to back you up. But what if it's an investment property? What if the squatters have been there long enough to have their ID say the address?
> But what if it's an investment property? What if the squatters have been there long enough to have their ID say the address?
If you own the property, then that's public record and can be easily looked up. Once they verify you own the place, police are going to believe you if you say these people are squatters not renters, and they'll have trouble producing documents otherwise. I'd also love to know what percentage of squatters end up getting IDs with addresses to places they don't own, which also requires btw proof of residence (deed AND other forms like a utility bill with your name on it).
Once they verify you own the place, police are going to believe you if you say these people are squatters not renters
If that were true then land lords could evict someone just by calling them a squatter. More to the point, everything you're saying is about making a judgement based on evidence. Police collect evidence, courts make judgements based on that evidence.
I mean, I just had the local library mail me a postcard so I could get a library card. Post office delivered it no problem and that's enough proof of residency for a lot of things.
I don't need an ID with a to turn on the gas and electric. Or, I haven't anywhere I've been.
I don't think it'd be hard to get an ID anywhere I can pick the mail, to be honest. I don't recall needing a document like a lease to get my last drivers license.
But then, I'm not squatting, and given that I try to keep a reasonable credit record and avoid court, I'm not disposed to start squatting.
The real reason for squatter's rights is to prevent rug-pull scenarios, where someone resides in a place for some period of time under good faith but themselves get scammed or otherwise exploited in the process.
This then runs into obvious problems when the police use it as an excuse to just not bother with short-term situations that obviously don't fall under actual squatter's rights precedents.
I thought the reason for squatters rights, and adverse possession in general was to avoid property being neglected by the owners. Or more specifically to make sure the taxes are being paid.
After living in the US for a few years, the rest in Europe, and having worked there too, it amazes me the disdain for private property and its defense that exists in the latter.
And don't get me wrong: it's mostly hypocrisy IMHO, but real defense, like e.g. making sure laws like this don't pass, it's marginal. It's common, at least in Spain, for leftist politicians and media personalities, which tend to be the ones proposing pro-squatter bills, to have large and/or multiple houses.
> The company started work three years ago and now gets 150 calls a day, says director Jorge Fe - 75% about tenants who aren't paying their rent, and 25% about squatters.
So these are basically thugs performing extralegal evictions 75% of the time.
When I went through the courts to have someone evicted - after a year long legal fight, the bailiff that finally came out to remove the tenant, gave me a business card to a friend of his that removes tenants.
He said that as long as I have the eviction notice, the police/court would have no issue with physically removing someone, and that there was no reason to make the additional multi-month petition to have the court physically order the bailiff to remove the tenant.
So ever since, I get the order, and then get two guys to go in and physically put all the person's stuff on the sidewalk, and lock them out.
It sucks, but it's not like we're evicting single moms (who are usually able to pay due to gov't aid). In my experience, the tenants that get evicted are always the single male drug addicts (who are also on gov't aid).
The most shocking YouTube channel found last months is this one from one of these companies. They tried to produce a Reality Show showing their day in day out routines, but the broadcast networks rejected the project (they have obvious links with far right movements). Crazy stuff:
"this has led to the rise of private eviction companies, some of which use threats to achieve their goal."
Some times landlords rent without contracts, to not pay taxes, and claim that the renters are squatting to evict them. A lot of shadow business going there.
They may even doing him a favor: they're warning him he's breaking the law, and could face the consequences. And the things they're accusing him of are not just squatting.
It's not just that the courts are bogged down meaning people can take advantage of the slow eviction process. A lot of places have a growing housing crisis, Barcelona especially, meaning there's a lot of people struggling to afford rentand being forced to look at less legal means of living in the city.
It seems like there is an emerging western world trend of people being unable to afford their home, landlords being unable to enforce their property rights, and housing activists opposing new construction and rent increases.
Generally all these issues seem to be made worse by restrictions on new housing development, land use restrictions and a large indigent population who cannot afford housing with their current wage earning ability.
For now it seems like the government’s preferred solution is to not address the root causes and let landlords slowly incur losses and wealthier renters pay through the nose. I believe governments should be doing the exact opposite, they should have landlord and development friendly laws. The alternative seems to be mass homelessness and general societal decay. No one will invest in real estate if property rights cannot be enforced. However, indigent voters are a large vote bank. In California, 60% of adults paid no income tax in 2020.
Real estate shouldn't be an investment. Just let people own the homes they live in. Everything else should be well-regulated perhaps even by government monopoly (e.g. first hand contracts in Sweden, or council houses in the UK).
The entire reason we have such issues is because housing has become such a popular investment.
> No one will invest in real estate if property rights cannot be enforced.
Good! "Real-estate as investment" is one factor responsible for the above-inflation rise of property values. It's part of why housing is unaffordable in so many areas. Non primary residences should be taxed out the nose.
Nonsense. You reduce house prices by increasing supply via construction of apartments, and potentially having a land value tax. You don't do it by undermining property rights. This just makes everyone's reality a living hell and doesn't solve anything. What a truly sinister worldview you've adopted.
While I find your proposal agreeable I feel bound to point out that it's not really happening, and meanwhile abusive/exploitative property investment practices are going on day by day. I think in many jurisdictions too much importance is attached to property rights and that is exploited by wealthy individuals and corporate actors to the great detriment of their neighbors and the health of the economy.
Disagree that too much importance is placed on property rights. It's one of the necessary conditions for societal prosperity. History is very clear on that.
Disagree that the wealthy are "exploiting" property rights. The wealthy are exploiting government to push through NIMBY policies that cap supply, similar to how the poor are exploiting government to turn the other cheek and decriminalize squatting.
If you subtly erode property rights by decriminalizing theft you get a hellscape and decay. You haven't helped the poor, you've helped the worst and most shameless moral characters in our society.
My former colleague was a victim of squatting. He owned one apartment and rented to live and some asshole who is apparently a serial squatter moved into his apartment and refused to pay. I will never support the psychopaths doing it and I will never support the ideologues enabling these vampires.
In the US for most states squatting doesn't really 'pay' as legally you have to occupy the ___location for a relatively long period of time, maintain it, sometimes even pay taxes regularly before you have any real rights at all.
In the US to get actual squatter's rights you need to be somewhere for years and basically not get noticed or requested to leave at all. The idea is pretty interesting: if a piece of property is being completely unused to the point where its legal owner does not even know someone is living there, it's better for society for the squatter to live there and keep an eye on it, and it doesn't even really negatively impact the legal owner because how can they possibly care about a place they never visit?
Yeah, adverse possession laws which kick in after years/decades of using some property make a lot of sense. You can even think of them as a sort of statute of limitations on property disputes
My understanding is that the most common use of adverse possession is something like I have a dock on the property line. That dock has been there for 20 years, but my neighbor sells their property and the survey shows the dock is over the line by 6 inches.
By adverse possession, I get that 6 inches of property and don't have to move the dock.
> By adverse possession, I get that 6 inches of property and don't have to move the dock.
AP needs to be exclusive. So if you didn't have a fence keeping the neighbor off the dock, then what you'd get is a prescriptive easement. You'd get to keep using your dock where it is, but the neighbor would still have title to the strip of land. There may be some conditions in which the neighbor would get to access the part of the dock on his land.
You can gum up an eviction in the States for several months on very flimsy grounds. “We had an agreement” is sometimes enough to get the police to go away, requiring a lawsuit.
The real experts find a target and record fake deeds, almost guaranteeing a year or two.
Add in the federal “moratorium,” and landlords or sellers in this market will often pay for them to leave.
I think the goal of the squatters isn’t to own the property, it’s to just get a roof over their heads and extort the owners in the process. They’ve carefully chosen a legal zone where they have a lot of room to maneuver.
Most of the squatters aren't trying to extort, they're just trying to get somewhere to live for free or for cheap. Yeah, some are freeloaders, but lots of them have lost their jobs and/or are suffering the combination of the crisis and the spectacular surge of pricing on real estate this last years.
Even with this problems, squatting incidence have been falling on the last 5/10 years.
> Most of the squatters aren't trying to extort, they're just trying to get somewhere to live for free or for cheap. Yeah, some are freeloaders, but lots of them have lost their jobs and/or are suffering the combination of the crisis and the spectacular surge of pricing on real estate this last years.
So much speculation. Do you have any proof for these claims?
They did. Also, municipalities tax by property ownership.
They don't do it more because they know most vacant property is owned by regular folks.
It's just a supply demand problem here. People in Spain just refuses to believe it because there are some narratives circulating, specially in the left, about how the housing bubble ruined spain so constructing is speculation and bad capitalism yadda yadda.
They don't want to hear about public housing neither because "it's expensive" while they advocate for more public spending in other useless stuff. They want price control and such.
AFAIK only Cataluña applied taxes to empty houses [1]. I don't know how is it going. And there are no national laws, it's still a proposal [2].
I don't think there's a supply problem that would be fixed with new buildings. Last governmental statistics shown that there were at least 3.4 million empty homes [3]. Statistics coming from the private sector (real estate agencies, and a private university) this year, they calculated a 10% of vacant homes nationally [4]. That's a lot.
I think there are no good statistics on the quantity of homes that are owned by "regular folks". Also, what's a "regular folk"? Is my landlord, who owns more than 50 apartments in top notch locations, a "regular folk"? (Not counting on the illegal things he's done)
That's why you can't only focus on big companies, like Blackstone (they own 20 billion € in real state just in Spain [5]). A study that has been making the rounds this year on all the economic press [6](pages 22 and 25) has been used, wrongly, to show that "big landlords" only (hah, only) own 4% of all the rental homes in Spain. But if you check the list, it only shows the top 40 companies, being the number 40 in the list owner of 121 homes. Also, I don't see any private owners.
Do you stop being a "big landlord" if you "only" own less than 121 homes? I can't see my landlord in the list.
Truth is, there are empty houses. The rental pricing rise doesn't correlate to salary rises, specially in big cities like Madrid or Barcelona. In less than 5 years (that's the time I stayed in my last apartment) I've seen prices rise 30 to 40% in Madrid. Before COVID AirBnB didn't help either [7], and 30% AirBnB owners were proprietors of at least 5 houses [8], so, pure speculation. And although people (specially those who can WFH) have been leaving Madrid after COVID, rental prices haven't lowered that much[9].
Interesting hearing the situation in Spain! In the US, you sometimes see arguments centered around there being lots of vacant housing, but they usually neglect to mention that a significant majority of those units are actually either (a) so rundown they're actually uninhabitable, (b) empty for a month or two between when the old tenants leave and the new tenants move in, or (c) in middle-of-nowhere cities/towns that don't have any jobs.
Totally different as represented here. The "48h or is mine" for example is a rumor that journalists love to repeat, very good FUD element, but is false. The laws don't say that. Journalists know it of course, but they spread the rumor from time to time, because outrage attracts eyeballs.
This is a very local problem, maybe in tourist flaws, and empty houses or factories owned by banks, not so much to private homes, neither main or secondary. You can find outrageous cases in private homes involving vulnerable poor people that rent some room to the wrong people, or local politicians or judges that choose not to act, but is not the general rule. If you see some TV channels or tabloids it seems that is happening everywhere and that the police don't do anything of course, but it depends a lot on the place.
If you leave the property unattended and squatters move in, after 48h of them being on the property, you cannot have law enforcement kick them out and have to use the courts for months of proceedings.
I clearly don't understand all the dynamics here - but this seems completely ludicrous. So I go away for a weekend, someone breaks into my home, and when I come back I am homeless? Where is the delineation between "someone breaking into my home" and "squatting"?
Sometimes in England a landlord will be attempting to illegally evict a lawful (non-squatting) tenant, so the tenant calls the police for help and is surprised when the police assist in the illegal eviction! Obviously this is not supposed to happen. The police should not be evicting people just because some random told them he owned a property and it was being squatted.
On the other hand, the legal situation for evicting squatters in your home isn't so bad here. You have 28 days after you find out you are being squatted, and the eviction only takes 24 hours.
Unless you register all tenancies with the state (which seems like massive overreach) how can the police quickly determine the lawful possessor?
Property ownership is public information, in the US at least. I bet many/most of these situations could be solved by simply verifying that the evictor is the property owner
To avoid confrontation in the 48h window, a good squatter strategy is to target summer or weekend houses that have typically other weekend houses next to it so that neighbours aren't there and won't alert the owner.
Then squatters move in in two steps. First they do a small break in and leave, observing whether someone notices and fixes the first break in. If the first break in goes unnoticed, it is probably safe to move in, change the locks and squat there permanently as nobody will confront them in the 48h window.
Bringing a toothbrush and knowing your rights. If make it look like you're living there and say you have a verbal agreement, cops will let the courts handle it.
This refers specifically to adverse possession and differs by state. If memory serves New York is 10 years, Texas is measured in months, both require real improvements to the property and a formal legal process.
You don't get any legal rights over the property even after long periods of time (as in some countries or US states that give you rights kind of similar to a tenant if you stay long enough).
Here you can only wait to get evicted, and that'll happen sooner or later. But as right now the courts are understaffed and overworked, it's more later than sooner. Probably between a couple months to two years.
Also, during the pandemics, evictions were suspended to avoid situations of people loosing their jobs, and then their homes and having no surviving options in the middle of a lockdown,
> You don't get any legal rights over the property even after long periods of time (as in some countries or US states that give you rights kind of similar to a tenant if you stay long enough).
Adverse possession actually gives title to the property, not “rights kind of similar to a tenant”.
In the US it might end as soon as the squatters are found trespassing illegally on someone's property, especially if the homeowner notices a forced entry (could be reasonably interpreted as an intention of harming the occupants) [0].
If you're willing to discard any objections to the contrary, it's also easy to fix on the other side too. Require rental contracts to be filed with the city like deeds are, and immediately remove anyone reported as trespassing in a place where they don't have a lease on file with the city.
I think you're also ignoring that we're not out of housing. We're out of housing in the places many people want to live. If you go to Detroit, you can get a house for a song. Alaska will literally pay you for living there.
There's a difference between having a place to live, and living somewhere you want to live. The former is easy to solve, the latter is hard to solve because demand is often driven by exclusivity.
You make it sound like people don't want to leave in these places just because they don't like the climate or something. They don't want to live there because they can't live there. Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless.
If we want to have people to stop moving to big cities and live wherever they can afford, we need to have the infrastructure to allow people like that to work and socialise. I'd love to buy one of those 1$ houses (although these don't seem to exist as such in Central Europe) and move to some dying industrial town, but if that meant I'd have to work for minimum wage in that one local pub or gas station, and if there were no other people under 50 in a 100km radius, I don't think I'd last long there. I'd rather take my chances in the city.
> Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless.
It's not about a beautiful life. Housing is cheap both in places with little economic opportunity and especially in dying areas where former opportunity led to the construction of more housing that is needed after the opportunity dried up. These places are withering plants cut off from sunlight and water. It's like you stood in the oasis and opined that there was all that barren desert to grow in and how silly it was that the plants competed for space near the water.
Take a dying area with plentiful houses for cheap move a bunch of people there. It would cease to be cheap and if there is no outside money flowing into an area populated with the poor they wouldn't be able to resolve each others poverty merely by passing the same scant dollars back and forth and pumping each others gas and making each other pancakes. Instead they should all starve together.
You are asking to have your cake and eat it too. Half the nation is fairly poor. They can't ALL simultaneously move to the low rent district and simultaneously take advantage of the lesser cost of living while all working the small modicum of low wages jobs that are fewer in number in total than the number of folks and reorganize America based on this new theory if for no other reason than this relocation by people living paycheck to paycheck costs more than they have and they would tend to in a poorer area descend further yet down the economic ladder as they moved from not being able to afford to live well in <insert city> to not being able to live well enough in <insert poor area> where they have no family or support.
1. That's debatable. Some would argue every person is entitled to a good life in absence of any actions that would take that entitlement away.
2. It's not about anyone owing anyone anything. You can go to the city and have a small chance at a good life or move to Alaska and have guaranteed survival but nothing more. It's a tradeoff like any other. What it isn't is people rushing to live in a big city out of convenience despite the alternative being just as good otherwise, which is what people often claim - that's what I was talking about.
That's only if you believe that all moral systems are equally valid so whatever the majority wants is right. But I doubt you believe that, because the majority could decide something like "it's okay to rape girls under 15" or "all Jews belong in ovens".
I would tend to agree with you, with the exception that there are too many regulations preventing new housing from being built, for reasons that have nothing to do with safety.
If you're homeless in Seattle how are you going to buy a house (or rent an apartment, even) in Detroit?
You might argue that they should've made better decisions earlier - "my housing is precarious, time to move with my last few bucks before I'm totally out of money" - but then what is your proposed policy for dealing with bad decisions? Do you plan on doing things to try to prevent it? Or try to criminalize bad decisions?
If there is lots of housing in places where there used to be good jobs then there isn't a lot of housing because for practical purposes. It's the same as replying to the issue of poverty with there are N good jobs unfilled when N is some small fraction of the number of people in poverty.
It's trivially true that some can and in fact will climb out of poverty by accepting those N jobs and simultaneously true that most can't climb out of poverty via those jobs alone because multiple people can't accept the same position.
Most of the people who are on the edge of not being able to afford <insert city here> can't all move away into the suburbs let alone Detroit because they can't earn enough money for all the things that aren't cheaper and it would cease to be cheaper as soon as collectively chose to do so. It is only cheap because its undesirable.
If rental contracts could be registered with the state and enforced that effectively, they could also be enforced against landlords who fail to uphold their obligations as enumerated the contract.
I don't know a single regular on r/landlords who wants that to happen. Just today there was a landlord trying to force a tenant to pay for a window broken by an unaffiliated third party (collateral damage from a neighbor's domestic dispute) when the lease very clearly said the landlord was responsible.
I would say its two pronged. One is definitely helping the homeless but another has to be upholding law and order. Otherwise people like that guy the article mentions as minting 10k euros per squat is going continue whether he has a roof or not. Its a classic broken window syndrome. If a small crime is tolerated for any reason, it encourages bigger crimes or organized crime (like the stories about stores not calling cops in Cali due to lack of response).
if it's easy why does LA throw a billion USD at it every year and have the worst homeless problem in the country?
Where I live, the homelessness is seasonal -- they don't stick around for the winters. But when they are here, they subsist by stealing pretty much whatever they can get their hands on. When they relocate, they leave behind immense amounts of refuse. These are not individuals who are down on their luck but tramps who embrace the lifestyle. No functional adult would behave in such a destructive and careless manner.
It is actually incredibly difficult to convince people they should participate in society.
This is the reason why it's ridiculously hard to just get a flat rented in Spain. Ever since covid it has gotten much worse.
You will not believe the checks landlords and the agencies require, the bank needs to play along as well.
I needed to rent an apartment for 6 months a few years ago while on an Erasmus course and it was hard enough then... I even offered to pay up front - in cash - if it would make the process simpler, but nope. A few agencies simply turned me away, then eventually I found one that would go through the process but it took a while and lots of paperwork.
> And there continue to be rumours about the relationship between eviction companies and criminal squatter gangs. [...] "They might even be linked," says Michael Regan. "I've heard very strange stories - it is quite murky."
Brilliant. Squat then cousin calls the owner and says, we can get rid of them, just pay us and then we'll pay them too. Rinse, repeat.
it costs something like 10-20k cash to remove tenants from an apartment in SF, on top of whatever else the city requires you to provide, even if the tenants have not been paying rent.
You can Alice act the house but that drastically reduces the market value of the house (e.g by more than the pile of cash you would otherwise be paying the tenants)
This is very Spanish. I remember reading something years ago about how there weren't good laws or consequences in Spain to force people to pay debts. So in response, a company sprang up to follow debtors all day with people dressed in hideous costumes, until they basically shamed them into paying up.
I wonder if this is an opportunity for paid house-sitters? You could have them sign a binding contract to prevent sitter from turning into a squatter. The house sitter gets free rent, the homeowner gets peace-of-mind.
There was something like that in the UK a decade ago, although that itself seemed like a racket, as the property owners and residents both paid. I understand now the law has changed, making it a lot harder to legally squat in the UK.
When legal systems fail, folks will turn to 'hard men' to get justice. Thus it has always been, thus it shall be.
To avoid this a society should aim for just laws, swift execution of those laws by law enforcement, and speedy trials by courts. If any of those three are failing, other avenues of justice will be sought by those who can afford it and that impacts the poor who can't 'afford' justice.
I agree completely. I think workers should organize and seek extralegal justice from bosses responsible for wage theft. Since this is a crime that's almost never prosecuted.
As I see it, people have a right to receive justice. The deal we have with governments is simple: the government handles justice, and in return, we don't handle it ourselves. This is a good deal, it leads to better outcomes because courts are more capable and less hot headed than victims. Vigilante justice is inferior to the sort of justice a government can provide.
But when a government abdicates their side of the deal, what choice to people have? Does such a government really expect people to forego receiving justice at all when their government repeatedly and consistently refuses to provide it? When governments abdicate their duty to provide justice, vigilante justice becomes morally justifiable. This is not a good state of affairs, and is why a government must prioritize being an effective provider of justice. When a government abdicates their side of the bargain, the aftermath is blood on their hands.
> The deal we have with governments is simple: the government handles justice, and in return, we don't handle it ourselves.
The deal is slightly longer: the government gets the right to handle justice, you forgo your right to pursue your personal justice, and you gain the right to not have other peoples' arbitrary sense of justice enforced upon you. And yes, the government bears responsibility for enforcement of personal justice.
If the government abdicates its role, I agree you have the right to enforce your own personal justice. You have not, however, gotten everyone else to sign away their right to not be the target of your vigilante justice.
Put another way, the subject of the "justice" may not feel that the government has abdicated their role and may be content with the way things are going. They have not agreed that the rules have changed, else I strongly suspect they would react differently. If vigilante justice is permissible, responding to vigilante justice with force is also permissible (as is their right to claim what they perceive as "justice").
I also find it a bit spurious to say that the government has abdicated their permission, but the laws are still in effect. If you and the other person have absolved your relationship with the government, the laws no longer apply, and your justification for forcibly removing someone becomes dramatically weaker. You say it's your property and they should leave, they say that was enabled by an unjust socioeconomic system and that reclaiming it was the more just thing to do, and we end up in a very subjective incarnation of justice.
> If the government abdicates its role, I agree you have the right to enforce your own personal justice. [...] I also find it a bit spurious to say that the government has abdicated their permission, but the laws are still in effect
You've conceded that in absence of a government, people have the right to enforce their own personal justice. If the right to pursue justice still exists in absence of a government, then some sort of law must also exist in absence of a government (from what else would you derive a right to seek personal justice?) The laws to which I appeal now do not come from governments, books, or gods; I believe they are encoded in our genes after eons as living as a social species. Social instincts which evolved to facilitate cooperation in groups are the root of all basic laws written down by governments. When somebody is wronged, in violation of these universal laws, they feel it in their bones.
If you don't believe any of that, believe this: when people feel wronged they will seek justice. Either a government can provide them with a safe framework to receive justice, or people will seek it themselves. You'll never succeed in scolding people away from desiring justice. When seeking vigilante justice is routine, that is categorically a failure of government to provide justice.
>from what else would you derive a right to seek personal justice?
Natural rights.
>The laws to which I appeal now do not come from governments, books, or gods; I believe they are encoded in our genes after eons as living as a social species.
>If you don't believe any of that, believe this: when people feel wronged they will seek justice. Either a government can provide them with a safe framework to receive justice, or people will seek it themselves. You'll never succeed in scolding people away from desiring justice. When seeking vigilante justice is routine, that is categorically a failure of government to provide justice.
You're trying to justify violating the sanctity of life in response to a violation of the sanctity of property. These are clearly not on the same level, and so you feel the need to defend this utterly unnatural stance. What you want is permission to carry out vigilante justice without the threat of reprisal, but that's not how this works. If you do something as protest that can later be rectified, that is something different; but if you throw off the mediating force of the law to unilaterally take what can't be given back, you have opened yourself to like or greater doom. Nothing can protect you, not even your self-righteousness. Justice doesn't exist in a state of nature, only dead-reckoning and vengeance.
He's suggesting that it's his right to do so. That's what is meant by his referring to action outside the law. It's the natural conclusion to such action, because for the people being evicted, the loss of shelter can be tantamount to loss of life.
There is no world in which violence is seen as an appropriate tool to force an eviction where people do not die resisting eviction.
Not to mention, property doesn't come for free. I as a middle-class person may have poured years of my sweat and blood into my property and then someone can waltz in and claim my hard work for their own with a hand-wavy "I can't afford market price for rent here"
'Natural rights' are the entitlements we feel that we have, derived from the rules we feel others must follow according to natural law. 'Natural law' is the rules for social conduct which are baked into our genes. Or, as wikipedia puts it
> Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights.
Natural law and natural rights are two sides of the same coin.
If natural law is a form of genetic determinism, as you suggest, genetic variation and diversity would lead to not one singular set of natural laws, but a spectrum of them. Collectively-held rights cannot be derived directly from this broad spectrum; natural rights serve as a medium through which felt natural law may be applied practically and collectively. It is thus wrong to speak of "natural law" as a justification for socially-permissible action; you are only doing as you wish, with no regard for how others feel.
Again, when you do so, you must understand that others have no obligation to tolerate it.
Indeed. This was the force behind the Me Too movement. Legal channels failed, and therefore were circumvented in favor of going straight to the media, with all the issues that entails.
That one is slightly different because proving it is much harder.
In the squatting case, it is just government (and all taxpayers) dumping the problem of homeless people onto a set of unfortunate property owners. It is simply much cheaper for the government (and hence taxpayers) to not address the root causes.
I’d argue that the injustice in this situation is the lack of housing that’s causing people to squat in the first place.
These people want to sound like their just “hard men taking justice into their own hands” but they’re really just a bunch of low-level goons being hired to enforce the existing power structure (property and capital owners at the top and everyone else at the bottom)
I mean, yeah, like how the cops feel comfortable to do whatever they want to people like me without repressions. My worst experiences living in this country has been with cops, not with "lawless people".
So yeah, I do believe state sanctioned violence is worse for the majority of people.
Oh and if I try to defend myself from an attacking cop I go to prison for decades.
What do mean by "people like me"? What country are you referring to?
If you're in the USA, then it's the one of the safest areas in the world. Do you realize the reason you don't deal with lawless people is because of the police? There's a lot of accountability and procedure in policing here. For every bad news story there are millions of daily encounters with some of the worst offenders that you're fortunate to never deal with.
> "So yeah, I do believe state sanctioned violence is worse for the majority of people."
This is beyond ridiculous, especially in the comments of an article describing people being beaten and thrown out of their homes with extrajudicial violence. Is your suggestion that they're better off this way without any protection or oversight and instead left on their own? Do you really think billions of people around the world agree with you?
> "Oh and if I try to defend myself from an attacking cop I go to prison for decades."
An attacking cop means you've started a fight with the police, so the advice is to not do that. But are you implying that you'll do better against some attacking gang instead?
It's seems like you have not experienced any serious danger because you'll change your opinion very quickly in the face of unchecked criminal activity. It's easy to make sweeping statements from your safe and comfortable home but it's highly unlikely you would enjoy, let alone survive, in places with less rule of law.
You can make a guess at that and assume what you want.
> There's a lot of accountability and procedure in policing here. For every bad news story there are millions of daily encounters amongst some of the worst people that you're fortunate to never encounter.
No, there isn't. Cops can do literally anything they want to you with minimal/no repercussions. If I defend myself against an aggressive cop I'm getting a felony and going to prison for decades.
> This is beyond ridiculous, especially in the comments of an article describing people being beaten and thrown out of their homes with extrajudicial violence. Is your suggestion that they're better off this way without any protection or governmental oversight and instead left on their own? Do you really think billions of people around the world agree with you?
Actually - argubly yes. I do believe in no state sanctioned violence. Someone removing me from a place I'm living would think twice if they knew I was armed/had weapons. I could rely on the protection of my network and my community, rather than the protection of some cop that lives two hours away from the area they're supposedly serving and protecting.
> An attacking cop means you've started a fight with the police, so the advice is to not do that. But are you implying that you'll do better against some attacking gang instead?
So let me get this straight, cops don't harass people in your opinion? I really wish that I didn't have the experience with cops that I've had - maybe I could stay ignorant like you about police violence.
> It's seems like you have not experienced any serious danger because you'll change your opinion very quickly in the face of unchecked criminal activity. It's easy to make sweeping statements from your safe and comfortable home but it's highly unlikely you would enjoy, let alone survive, in places with less rule of law.
Again you know nothing about me, where I've been, or how I've lived.
>"cops don't harass people in your opinion?""Cops can do literally anything they want to you with minimal/no repercussions.""If I defend myself against an aggressive cop I'm getting a felony and going to prison for decades."
That's not my opinion, and harass is not the same as attack. Unprovoked/unreasoned encounters are incredibly rare as to not be an issue for the vast majority. Have you even looked at the case law and statistics of police encounters? Also felony does not mean prison for decades, and defending yourself in court does not lead to a felony in the first place. Unless you mean defending yourself through violence, but then again that's against the law.
> "Someone removing me from a place I'm living would think twice if they knew I was armed/had weapons."
Really? Do you intend to tell all those people in mentioned in the article to just shoot back next time? How do you imagine that's going to go for them?
The police is not just a single person but part of an entire apparatus that has far more reach and resources than you which is where their ability to combat crime comes from. You're not really a match for motivated criminals, but even if you were, this is clearly not the preferred solution for the majority of the population.
> "You can make a guess at that and assume what you want.... you know nothing about me, where I've been, or how I've lived."
Why use such vague statements then? But since you said so, I'll go ahead and assume (with extremely high confidence) that you have no experience with violence and lawless environments. I have history with both sides of the law and know career criminals with less hostile police interaction than you seem to have. In fact, police are the least of their concerns, similar to anyone who lives in dangerous places, but then again you would know that if you were familiar with such areas.
Police violence is definitely an issue, but this thread is a comparison to not having any state protection at all, and just about everyone in the latter situation would happily switch places with you. But I'm pretty sure you know that, and would never take up such an offer.
> There are a lot more people who don't own capital than there are people who do
This attitude explains, at least in part, why they live in a place with the shoddy rule of law and a deficiency of capital. (The track record of revolutions which violently re-allocate property is terrible, mostly for the people who originally lacked capital, moreso in the last century.)
Why does this even exist? Why not simply make any and all trespassing a crime punishable by lengthy prison terms? Or problem is prison capacity? Why not solve it supply-side, just as healthcare?
There’s really only one way out of this mess, and that is for cities of the world to get serious about housing supply.
First, in most cities, it is far too difficult to bring new housing units to market due to slow-moving non-deterministic regulation. Replacing that with efficient and deterministic regulation is the most important thing, so that over time the market can supply enough housing to bring prices down.
Second, in strained housing markets (most major cities), property taxes need to go up significantly to reduce the utility of housing as an investment, and there especially needs to be a substantial tax penalty on vacant and semi-vacant (second, third homes etc.). There’s no reason a housing strained city shouldn’t use that mechanism to raise funds from the wealthy and discourage vacancy.
Finally, cities that are sufficiently strained should impose significant hotel and vacation rental taxes. That’s harder to implement ordinarily because it’s not actually that easy for the government to tell the difference between a normal rental, short-term rental, and vacation rental. Also, short-term rentals are actually a healthy part of a local economy. But assuming that they started by making it much easier to build new supply and reduce the housing shortage, in the short term the city should be profiting wildly from tourists rather than letting tourists displace local residents. That tips the economic balance by lowering the demand for tourism to levels that don’t distort the local housing market.
Over time that should be able to bring housing supply and demand to an equilibrium that is affordable to the locals, and at that point taxes could be adjusted over time (likely reduced) to maintain the equilibrium.
Sadly, most people who work in City government have a really poor understanding of economics. They lean utopian socialist and are really offended by things like low income housing which tend to be ugly, and so they strangely and unintentionally ally with the hyper wealthy to try and exclude anything that offends their aesthetic (ie the poor), then fail at providing state housing that has the aesthetics they prefer because it’s economically infeasible to provide luxury housing for all. I wish this would change, but I fear that things will have to get much worse before this deeply entrenched dysfunction can be rooted out.
You're absolutely right that (many? all?) cities need to get way more serious about housing supply. It's a difficult topic, and it seems to be a divisive one as well.
Any property that is empty (and not actively being renovated etc) should be taxed to death. There is really no room for empty, abandoned buildings in urban areas. It's a huge waste of space and resources, and it's disgraceful that homelessness and abandoned buildings can coexist within the same city.
There's a disturbing amount of negativity towards squatters in this entire discussion, calling them "scum" and whatnot. I hope none of these posters ever have the misfortune of becoming homeless. A squat is a damn sight better than living under a bridge somewhere.
I don't think empty properties are a big thing. The market makes that extremely unlikely. Got a derelict house in Boston? That's worth $500,000 cash. 6 months later there's a new house there.
IME it's much more common in industrial or commercial or office areas.
You can often spot the empty and vacant ones because they're the ones that are easier for local homeless to sleep in front of.
Whenever I see that I wonder why we spend so much time fretting about single family zoning instead of targeting these underutilized currently-non-residential areas.
If there were no empty properties, there wouldn't be any squatters. Given that there are apparently a lot squatters (in Spain), we can assume that there are a lot of empty properties.
Many cities have a lot of empty properties. Sometimes because they're derilict (and maybe the owner can't/won't repair); sometimes because it's hard to sell/rent out; or maybe the owner is just obscenely rich to the point of not caring. Whatever the reasons, this is something that shouldn't be allowed to exist. Cities are usually seriously space-constrained (by a river, or ancient walls, or roads etc). Not wasting existing real estate should be a no brainer.
That’s great if you need $500k cash. If you have a spare home, this probably doesn’t apply to you. Why take $500k of cash you don’t need now when you can take $700k or more in ten years?
If you're savvy enough financially that $500k is not interesting to you, just holding, paying taxes and insurance, and hoping for appreciation is a terrible investment strategy.
It is a pretty good strategy if it is just one of many of your assets, one where you can continue rolling into a higher value asset and never paying capital gains tax (1031 exchange).
For this to work you need at least some income — in fact this is the business model of many parking lots! Buy some land, make a bit of cash flow, and if it appreciates cash out and someone builds a condo.
Interestingly, out in the more rural counties here (not Spain), we still have squatter problems.
I posit that there exists in the human population a percentage of people who will always try to get something for nothing, no matter how fair the prices might be. You might be able to lower some theft and squatting by policy, but that will not eliminate that rock-bottom percentage of people, and therefore you must construct policy as to how to deal with that group.
This is a good point, and I agree with you. Ultimately that comes down to the top comment - the legal system has to take care of these cases quickly and effectively, or else people will just end up with corruption and vigilante justice instead.
Vienna keeps getting brought up in threads like this, but one fact is that the demand and supply is not completely off-kilter there like in some (many?) other European cities. Anywhere in Sweden, for example has a ton of public housing but a decades-long wait to get it.
In General it seems that Vienna uses both private and public developments. Public for cooling down the market, private for faster adjustment of demand and luxury property.
In Sweden they may just suffer from NIMBY syndrome or "building is capitalist speculation!" type of stupidity.
This was tried in many large cities in the 60s and 70s. The apartment buildings were ugly and generally became havens for gangs and crime. So.much so that most of them were eventually torn down. Cabrini Green is an example of this.
Building housing alone does not solve the issue. There is a massive support issue that also needs to be addressed. Jobs, child care, food, and so on.
this reminds me of a show i saw (iirc "nightmare tenants and slum landlords") where people found a house, rented it, and then found out the landlord had no connection at all to the property. the real owners were quite upset when they returned from vacation to find their newly remodeled home occupied by strangers and ended up living in one of their mother's attic for years with an infant trying to get the squatters to leave. unbelievable. in america you walk into your house with a 12 gauge (like you always do) and blast the cocksuckers you believe to be threatening your life. end of the goddamn story.
I’m not sure why you are being downvoted. This is absolutely the case. Big-time property owners like Blackrock don’t care so much; they have the time and money and thousands of other assets to use the legal system for eviction. Small-time landlords (think somebody who bought a few properties to retire on the income) incur heavy, lifestyle-altering losses.
The BBC article focuses heavily on a family that was fraudulently leased an apartment, which is a very sympathetic case; the criminals are unnamed, faceless grifters. But it is far more common that squatters are fully aware of what they are doing, and exploiting the slow pace of the legal system in whichever jurisdiction to get away with it.
Likely people think it's not possible. Until you experience it firsthand, you'd think what I was saying was an exaggeration but it's not at all. I wish I was making it up!
I don’t see that anywhere in the post to which I replied; they were telling a story about something that happened to a family member. I think you are being hyperbolic.
Look, it’s rough out there, but if it continues to be hard for the small-time owners—squatters are just one facet here—the only landlords left will be megacorps with 43-page contracts[0]. This will cripple one of the best paths for people from humble origins to build wealth.
If you are some form of anarchist and don’t believe this is a good cause, well, we have nothing to discuss. But if you understand that there’s no way property rights are going away in the West, and you think the common person should share in them, the zeitgeist should concern you.
Actually, that is a big part of the rent problem in Spain. Getting rid of squatters is hard enough, but getting rid of a tenant that stops paying takes even more time and effort. And you are still legally bind to pay for utilities, even though you are not getting any money. So people prefer to have an empty house than to rent it to a person they are not sure will be a reliable payer.
And if they decide to rent, that includes demanding the tenant has a stable job, running debt checks on them and asking for several months rent in advance, which makes more difficult to rent for people with low wages.
It starts with a general statement that 'squatters are the scum of the earth' and then uses the specific examples of some individual meth-head squatters to support that claim. The casual reader is likely to take away an inference that all squatters are somewhat similarly bad.
> I don’t see that anywhere in the post to which I replied
Try again.
They said "Squatters are absolute scum of the earth", and proceeded to prove that with an anecdote specifically about meth [manufacturing] destroying a house.
No I didn't, I called these squatters meth heads--they were meth users. They ripped the copper out of the walls and sold it for scrap and defecated in the tub until it overflowed. These were subhumans.
May your grandfather rest in peace. Sorry for what you have had to deal with. Far too many states have laws that protect these criminals to the extent that it takes years to do anything, and by that time the property is entirely destroyed.
I was very helpful to homeless people for a long time. Last year I let a homeless man shower and sleep on my floor. Even after a shower, the man's stench was not gone. It literally seeped into the wooden floor, could not be bleached away, and the floor had to be pulled up and redone, costing thousands of dollars. This was just one thing in a slew of many marks against the homeless that made me realize my efforts were not of any actual value. Almost all the homeless I befriended and talked to were just drug addicts who did not care to change their lifestyle. I vowed to never make the same mistakes and no longer waste my time helping them.
One of the homeless I knew, got so high he fell asleep while smoking a cigarette and lit his alcohol soaked squat on fire. He ended up in the hospital burn unit, despite not having health insurance. I felt bad and guided his homeless friends to the hospital. In the burn unit, he was laying there with bugs jumping around in his hair. His homeless friends, despite being told to put on hospital garb, were pretty much contaminating the whole unit with the amount of bacteria and bugs they harbored. These people are literally, a plague, on society. Sure, we can feel bad and source their current situation back to past trauma, or whathaveyou, but let's be real -- there is no way to help these people in the way that those who have never dealt with them think. Pretty much all of them hate capitalism and pretty much just live off the rest of us. In a small community like a tribe, they would be kicked out immediately and their fate would ultimately be their own.
When I heard that states were giving free hotel rooms to homeless folks, it made me cringe. Many of the hotel rooms are going to require the entire carpets, mattresses, and other items to be destroyed. The hygiene of a majority of the homeless is so atrocious that they do nothing more than spread disease while destroying their bodies through drinking and drugging.
"California's Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014 and lowered criminal sentences for certain nonviolent crimes like shoplifting and check forgery, is being exploited by those who want to commit theft. The initiative set a threshold of $950 for shoplifting to be considered a misdemeanor, which doesn't prompt law enforcement to make an arrest, rather than a felony, which could incur harsh penalties like jail time."
I've known someone who had to deal with this. Junkies can be impossible to evict, doubly so right now. They're overconfident, however. The key is to get them to sign a drafted agreement (you can get this on camera) and move everything out yourself, then have someone stay the night. They'll try to break in looking for drugs the same night, just call the police.
People openly deal and use drugs on the sidewalk, in plain view of police, in the jurisdiction where the OP's grandparent lived. The police will do exactly nothing if you tell them someone is using drugs in a private residence.
No. It's a joke. The police a) don't want to deal with the liability of an overdose on their watch, b) don't want to do the hour's worth of paperwork for arrests, because they just turn them right back on to the street. Junkies plainly do not get arrested most of the time.
Drug abuse is a health problem. Breaking into people's homes, damaging their property, and then extorting them is a criminal problem. You don't get a pass on lawbreaking because you have health problems.
Druggie squatters and shiftless cops? It sounds like your area has a cultural issue that you might want to work with neighbors and community officials to rectify.
Some cities are trafficking hubs. Drugs are everywhere. Effective deterrents for would-be users might include better support networks and opportunities both for work and social/active engagement, in a limited sense. Most would occupy varied low-income areas and consequently there develops microcultures of poverty, which includes drug abuse, but they have easy access to the rest of the city - they meander to those areas they want to squat. Breaking up these places geographically helps (as opposed to having large "projects"), but here again it's not a silver bullet.
There's little the community can do legally, voluntarily and with few funds, to fight off a drug epidemic. If it were so easy this would have been done many times over. The frequent violent altercations (including stabbings) leaves people afraid of users as well.
HAHA! You've clearly not been to California recently. You can shoot heroin or smoke meth on in front of the state capital building and no one's going to stop you.
It sounds like this problem exists even if it's your only home and you live there full time. Go out for the day, come home, and the kind of person they interview could have broken in, changed the locks, and there's nothing the law will do about it for years.
In this case, in Spain, squatters can be immediately taken out of the property.
Spain distinguishes between:
'usurpación': That's what usually is called 'okupación' and refers to invading a building/house/flat which is NOT currently serving as a home for somebody.
'allanamiento': When you invade a place which IS a home. i.e.: while in your office, in vacation, shopping, or even when you're inside.
The case you're talking would be the second one, and in that case, the police could act and vacant the invader immediately.
One of the okupa they interviewed says that they purposely target corporate-owned, vacant properties. Slippery slope, sure, but kicking people out of homes they live in doesn't seem to be the goal as of yet.
That sounds theoretically possible, but it doesn't happen in practice, does it? (Which means that something is missing from this model of how squatters work.)
Most of us leave our homes for the day to go to work and come back (or did, before 2020, at least). I don't know of a single case of someone returning home to find a squatter.
In Spain people have difficult saving money, and when they finally can, they buy property, as the financial markets in Spain are undereveloped, the spanish indices perform really bad, and until very recently wasn't easy to put money in other markets.
So most property in Spain is owned by regular folks.
Squatters come in different types. We could divide them in three groups.
1. Politically motivated. Only a tiny fraction, typically anarchist types that go after abandoned properties and the like.
2. People who "buy from mafias". There are people who look for vacant properties, break in, and "sell" the propertie to someone, for prices around 500€. This typically ends up with poor people living in, as the spanish institutions fail spectacularly providing either a good legislation for the market or provide public housing.
3. Drug selling points / conflictive people. They break in in whatever opportunity they have. In some areas they use the properties to sell drugs.
If a Squatter breaks in, the problem is not only for the owner of the property, but for everyone around. You have to take into account that in Spain most people live in flats, and squatters break into flats, because flats are more abundant than detached houses.
So if you live in a flat and somene breaks in near you, it may not be much of a problem with the type two, but there's definitely a problem for the other ones, specially when there is a drug selling point.
So everyone, not only the owner, pressures to get this situations solved.
Also, an empty property may not be possible to rent. It may be in bad shape so you can't rent it legally, because you don't have the money to repair it, and you don't find a buyer (a situation that happened in my family until very recently, that lasted for many, many years), or the financial risks are too high for the benefits you might extract, specially if you already have a low or unstable income (not rare in Spain), making it safer to just leave it empty.
So in summary, this is a self-inflicted wound for Spain. The regulation is awful, as the market is basically controlled by municipalities, making land scarce and expensive, leading to only few high profit developments, almost non existing public housing, and high costs of property ownership for large swaths of the population.
Sometimes people want to sell their property, move somewhere else, etc. For example someone inherits a flat. They want to sell it. It's empty. Are they forced to lend it out or accept that it'll be squatted and then it'll take years to be able to sell it?
Vacancy tax as a concept seems interesting, but it seems hard to collect on it without a total centralized property and occupancy database. Plus it seems easy to have a few friends/relatives fake move into each of your vacant properties. (Though the tax might still make sense, because big real estate management companies will likely not engage in these workarounds, and thus it might help to put more units on the market with better rates.)
The market is not free. Otherwise people were building all over the place, making all kinds of contracts and so on. Mostly it's good that they don't, but a modern tragedy of cities is the drastically underprovision of new high density development and mass transit investments.
This happens to us. We bought a property and it took us a month to move in. A family squatter in. If you tried to get them out with a judge order and the police, they will call their association and would have 50 people on call to resist. It took us 5 years, get a special favor and we had to pay them about 10% of the price of the house for them to leave.
Someone doesn't become a "landlord who rather let their properties sit unused than accept market-acceptable rents" by owning a holiday home they aren't renting out, and aren't planning to rent out. "Should people be allowed to have holiday homes for exclusive use" is not the same question.
Usually "landlord" is used to mean somebody who owns the property to rent it out. So it doesn't apply to a private-use holiday home, the leading example in the article as I understand it (but does to later ones).
I might be naive. But I think high property taxes help keep house prices down. Either you pay for a mortgage or you pay property taxes. The speculators may still buy property, but at least the taxes go to the community.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, I know this is a common genre of comment, but you really can't draw conclusions about the motivations of people who say one thing because of downvote patterns in a HN thread about some other tangentially related thing. How do you know they're even the same people, much less why they downvoted?
In the US, snowbirds often live in New England/New York/upper Midwest in the summer and in Florida for the winter. Not many people want to only rent for the 6 suckiest weather months the places are otherwise empty (meaning such tenants can be hard to find, not willing to pay enough to make it worth the hassle).
Say you buy a vacation home and want to be able to use it spontaneously. Then you have to put it on Airbnb for short-term rental, and have a property manager and cleaner. All that costs money. Then you have to pay taxes on that income. On top of that, you have to take on the whole risk yourself that the renters don't trash your house. Yes Airbnb has some program but they also have a great legal team to defend themselves from paying out.
Why?
>>an obvious amount of massive empty properties should, according to theories of supply and demand, lead to low rents
While this might seem true in theory, the reality is obviously different - multiple companies and individual landlords find it economically viable to keep them empty some or most of the time.
There can be many reasons for this. Maintaining a high-value property is not cheap, but maintaining it (and the neighborhood/area) as a high-value property can command disproportionally higher rents, more than enough to offset low daily occupancy rates. E.g., renting it out for 10 days every two months at $10K/night is far more profitable (+25%) vs keeping it fully rented out at $1000/week - and there's less wear-and tear, and those are low rates.
>>can find someone that is able to pay
the point is that if you build and maintain a property of sufficient value (view, amenities, etc.), there are plenty of people willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile, and they have the bank accounts to eliminate risk of non-payment. And it is often less of a hassle than trying to keep a place 100% occupied at low rent.
And, if you are willing to do it as an individual, you can have a far better vacation home by occasionally renting it out than you might otherwise have.
tl;dr: High quality, high rent, low % occupancy by time can be a better business model in the right locations.
Because of the federal eviction moratorium in the US (and squatting laws in other countries), yes, people have the right to live for free in another person's property.
you're welcome to your opinion, and can support & promote this position, but you had better be prepared for me to make arbitrary limits around things you covet as well: no one needs more than one child / car / computer, $XXX retirement savings, n years of education, etc.
For the most part free societies don't dictate directly but shape with the carrot and the stick.
The real issue is not homes but rather wealth, and some people (and some countries) have more of it than others. Unless you have a solution to reshape the Gini coefficient, setting arbitrary limits on the number of things one can own is not going to solve anything. Much the same way as rent controls don't solve anything.
Don't know where you live. But a big problem with rent controll here in Sweden is that it's just not enough appartments to go around. Sweden at least would need a new million programme or something similar
Homelessness is not a problem home owners should solve. It's absurd to think the solution is simply moving homeless people into unoccupied homes. We should address the root societal, economic and often personal causes of homelessness to begin with: lack of jobs, low income / unaffordable housing, mental health, etc.
What you're proposing is limiting prosperity for successful people, while allowing scammers like squatters to prosper instead. Why should I work to own a home if I can just take over someone else's?
Wealth inequality is a problem, but this is not the way to fix it.
seems like a combination of /some/ people being rendered homeless by high rents, and /some/ criminals making a living off extorting landlords. I have every sympathy for the former, and none for the latter. Seems like they have a similar issue to SF - lack of building new homes leading to insane house and rent prices.
It isn't primarily due to high rents. It is due to the Spanish economy being shitty and badly run for decades.
Then foreigners swooped in and bought prime real estate.
But that doesn't mean that there is not enough housing. It is just that people were getting more and more poor with more and more unemployment.
Here is a relevant quote:
"Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the Spanish economy plunged into recession, entering a cycle of negative macroeconomic performance. Compared to the EU's and US's average, the Spanish economy entered recession later (the economy was still growing by 2008), but it stayed there longer. The economic boom of the 2000s was reversed, leaving over a quarter of Spain's workforce unemployed by 2012."
It looks like it has recovered some but unemployment is still high especially for the young. Also there was a lot of youth emigration though recently there has been immigration from poorer countries.
The article itself claimed a lack of new housing being built...
I know the Spanish economy is weak, but it's concerning when a working family cannot afford rent and clearly changes need to be made to ensure that they can.
Not exactly. It says lack of social housing. In other words, housing for the poor. In the meantime, there is an estimated 10,000 housing units sitting empty in Barcelona.
The problem is that the working class has grown increasingly poorer because of the terrible economy. Fix the economy to fix housing. Something needs to pay for the housing. Trying to fix housing without fixing the economy is a fool's errand.
"Lucía Martín cut her political teeth in the PAH, the housing pressure group. She believes Catalonia - and Spain more widely - is dealing with the fall-out from decades of failing to invest in social housing."
"In Barcelona alone there are an estimated 10,000 empty flats or homes. After the crash of 2008, property prices plummeted and speculation soared. With homelessness still a big problem, unoccupied real estate is a source of grievance, especially as most of it is owned by large firms."
"That is what happened to Mariana Stirbu who moved into a flat in the La Sagrera district of Barcelona with her partner and two children three years ago.
"The two men who rented us the flat seemed like the owners - they were wearing suits and we went to sign the contract. We were paying 750 euros a month, so everything seemed fine," she says."
750 euros is not that much for a family of 4. More detail on flat size would have been helpful. It is roughly 25% less than I paid (together with a roommate) for a 2 bedroom apartment over 25 years ago. That was the US, but this means that Spain is probably at least 25% poorer than the US was 25 years ago.
Is it because the owner/speculators don’t want to rent them out because the laws allow squatting? There are articles that say that rental prices have increased (I think I read somewhere between 7 and 15%) but given how much that person was paying (even to a pretend owner), people just can’t afford to pay much. It may not be worthwhile to the owners to rent them out for so little. The hassle of bad tenants and having to refurbish after tenants may mean that you end up losing money. Also, increase in rental prices should be expected given the worldwide money pumping. The exception will be areas like SF with the move to WFH.
Here is more information. The family highlighted has a couple of disabled and someone who lost their job due to COVID-19. They have an income of 1000 euro per month and offered their landlord 250 euro per month for rent. From 2013 to 2019, rents increased 50% (I think another timeframe should be used since the property market deflated a few years before that) but salaries went down 8%. The Spanish economy decreased by 11% in 2020.
You really can't compare the American and Spanish economies on cost of living alone because American incomes are also much higher. For instance, developer jobs here in the UK that aren't leadership roles top out around 60k outside London. So yes you could probably say that Spain is poorer than the US 25 years ago if you only count individual income.
I agree that you can't directly compare but there are some aspects that you can: cost to travel, cost of common goods, etc... Another two aspects that can be compared are the absolute amount of investable income after cost of living and the taxation rate on that.
The rough measure is that you really want those Silicon Valley tech incomes because the investable income is so great. You can value that just via the market actions (how many people are willing to move if given the chance to).
It's not any easier to be sympathetic to the point when the first victim in the article is someone who owns a vacation home that largely sits idle in a city with a housing shortage and problems of homelessness. Not that it's not a problem, but damned if that's not as tone deaf as anything I've read in the past month or two.
Europe has many broken laws that serve only to erode society. If you lose your rights to your own property because someone breaks into it, what's the point of owning real estate? Similarly, illegal migrants from some countries can just enter Austria and Germany, knowing they'll not be deported even if courts find they don't deserve asylum - and they will enjoy the benefits of those countries' social security systems, paid by the taxpayers. It's like well-known exploits that aren't being fixed on purpose and taken advantage of until the system breaks down.
The legal system is largely to protect criminals from "extra-legal" law enforcement by wronged parties. When the legal system can't function properly, for whatever reason, it is criminals who are ultimately in the most danger.
In the US, if police are given stand-down orders during mostly peaceful lootings and riots then a lot of looters are going to get shot.
That's definitely a large component of the legal system but I disagree with your implication that it is a primary purpose and assertion that the criminals are most endangered when enforcement is scant.
Be careful with that thinking. It has undertones of ignorance and a blind faith in violence. The law is there to uphold the social contract of peace. For every crime, 'just' punishment.
Looters don't carry guns because they don't intend on murdering anyone. They are petty thieves. The moment we start to think everyone should have a gun, the unscrupulous - who would be a harmless petty thieves otherwise - can be transformed into the devils you imagined.
I was in Bolivia a few years ago and I saw a big sign at a town that said "Thief found, thief hanged". The person guiding me said that the people there actually believed in that.
Lynching is what happens when there is no police and justice system.
I was quite surprised by this article. I have been out of the UK for quite some time and didn't realize the BBC had become a mouthpiece for the Tory. When did this happen exactly?
Hard to find much sympathy for the wealthy landowners who use violence to clear poor people out of their vacation homes. This is an obvious systemic breakdown where the solution will be either tougher laws against squatting or better public/affordable housing depending on your political ideology.
If a person would only read the article, they would find out that it wasn't poor people squatting in the homes.
Rather it was people who did it to make a quick buck. And that one case of a poor person, it was rented out to them by someone who pretended to own the property.
Someone gets by effraction in an apartment/house, stay there for 48 hours and they are good to stay forever.
If this is your primary apartment, the local government (préfet) is supposed to issue an order to get the people out. They do not (because plenty of important reasons - important for them of course). Police usually try to negotiate with the squatters.
If there is a small child with the squatters getting them out is not possible at all. Except if you find them a replacement apartment. And they accept it.
If this is not your primary housing, then you are completely screwed. Thee is almost no way to get the people out. We have from time to time in the news information about people who are trying to get their house back for years.
If you try to move them by force, they will sue you and you pay 40,000 € plus prison. They can be sued for up to 12,000€ (and prison - this has never happened)
I love my country, but the brain-dead idiots who passed these laws should be publicly pointed to, with their home address, so that they can kindly invite the squatters to come when hey are on vacation.