Are ‘Squatters’ Rights’ Out of Control?
A man’s home is his castle. Or is it?
Over the past couple of weeks, squatters’ rights—whereby someone who isn’t a legal owner or tenant claims a right to stay in someone else’s property—has moved from a 30 Rock joke to the subject of white-hot internet discourse.
Kicking off this controversy have been several viral episodes of frustrated property owners trying to eject unwanted people from their homes.
Most prominently, New York City resident Adele Andaloro was arrested on camera after trying to self-evict several people who she says had illegally occupied a home she inherited from her parents. Before that, Washington state landlord Jaskaran Singh went viral for staging a protest outside one of his rental properties where his tenant hadn’t paid rent in close to a year.
In January, Bloomberg had an in-depth investigation into metro Atlanta’s housing market, where a real estate industry group estimates as many as 1,200 for-rent, single-family homes have been illegally occupied recently.
Venezuelan provocateur Leonel Moreno made waves with a TikTok video urging migrants to move into vacant homes and claim squatters’ rights.
The more sensationalist corners of conservative media have hoovered up these stories to declare an “epidemic” of squatting spreading across the country, which President Joe Biden is allegedly encouraging.
That in turn has provoked a stream of “well, actually” commentary from liberal outlets arguing all this talk of squatting is just right-wing “hysteria” and that the real problem is overpowerful landlords who can evict tenants on a whim.
So, is the U.S. experiencing a squatting epidemic?
This is a thorny and frustrating topic to discuss because, in the most literal sense, there’s no such thing as “squatters’ rights” in America. No lawmaker has introduced a “squatters’ bill of rights.” Open up your state’s code, and you won’t find a “squatters’ rights” section.
The closest thing to literal squatters’ rights would be states’ adverse possession laws that allow people to take ownership of someone else’s property after making exclusive use of it for years or decades. But as Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Mark Miller notes in a recent squatting explainer, adverse possession cases typically involve properties that have seemingly been abandoned, and bear little resemblance to the kinds of cases that are going viral right now.
Instead, we’re seeing a lot of different situations where owners are having difficulties removing unpaying occupants from their property. These have all been lumped together, somewhat unhelpfully, under the umbrella of “squatting” and “squatters’ rights,” but the individual circumstances and laws at play vary considerably.
Many of what’s being described as “squatters’ rights” cases are episodes of already illegal fraud or trespass: someone moves into a home and falsely claims (often with the aid of fraudulent documents) to be the legitimate owner or tenant. The Atlanta cases Bloomberg covered are mostly examples of this. So is Andaloro’s situation in New York City. It’s unclear how often this happens or whether it is happening more often now.
The Bloomberg article suggests a few reasons why these episodes might be happening more often. The increasingly online, remote business of property management makes it easier for scammers to gain access to vacant properties. Online billing enables people to produce real documents allegedly showing proof of residence.
The scammers in these cases can be accurately described as squatters. Depending on the sophistication of the fraud and the local laws governing the removal of illegal occupants, reclaiming one’s property might involve more than just a call to the police.
Andaloro’s case has drawn a lot of attention to a provision of New York City law saying that a property owner can’t unilaterally evict someone who’s “lawfully occupied” a property for 30 consecutive days or more. Instead, they have to go to housing court and get a warrant to remove the unwanted occupant.
When Andaloro tried to change the locks on her home and kick out the people claiming to be legal tenants, she was arrested for trying to perform a warrantless self-help eviction.
It is shocking and unjust that Andaloro would be led away in cuffs for trying to reclaim her property. But, for all the reasonable outrage her case has attracted, it’s not a neat example of “squatters’ rights.”
The police who showed up at Andaloro’s house were confronted with one person claiming to be the l
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