This isn't really about squatters rights (legal rules like adverse possession). It's laws which protect tenat rights being exploited by squatters who falsely claim to have a lease. And I don't think it should be controversial that if you *do* have a valid lease the police shouldn't just trust whatever the landlord says and help kick you out (your property interests in the contract are now less important than the landlord's interests in the real property).
Luckily, even without fixing the overwhelmed court system, there is an easy solution thaf should make everyone happy. States should create a registry of both real property ownership (which they essentially already have) and of all rental leases -- or at least ones that come with eviction protection.
If there isn't a valid lease registered in the system under your name then the police can assume you're a squatter and take action. If there is one you do the normal eviction thing. And it requires approval of the property owner to enter such a lease into the system but the renter can check to verify it's entered before paying up.
I agree with the headline. But the word “squatters” is doing a lot of work here. Most of the situations discussed in this piece are legally distinct from each other, some are closer to an alleged breach of contract, while others seem to just be straight up trespassing. But one person’s holdover tenant is another person’s squatter, and we should be precise in our language when discussing a topic.
I also do not think that this is, numerically, quite the problem people make it out to be.
watching parts of the urbanist community embrace a sort of Marxism-lite and reject the field of economics has been extremely disheartening over the last decade or so. tbh, it's sort of alienated me from the cause. I think the reluctance of urbanists to weigh in on squatting is part of a larger issue of urbanism being derailed by larger culture war battles
This isn't really about squatters rights (legal rules like adverse possession). It's laws which protect tenat rights being exploited by squatters who falsely claim to have a lease. And I don't think it should be controversial that if you *do* have a valid lease the police shouldn't just trust whatever the landlord says and help kick you out (your property interests in the contract are now less important than the landlord's interests in the real property).
Luckily, even without fixing the overwhelmed court system, there is an easy solution thaf should make everyone happy. States should create a registry of both real property ownership (which they essentially already have) and of all rental leases -- or at least ones that come with eviction protection.
If there isn't a valid lease registered in the system under your name then the police can assume you're a squatter and take action. If there is one you do the normal eviction thing. And it requires approval of the property owner to enter such a lease into the system but the renter can check to verify it's entered before paying up.
Welcome to the upside-down.
I agree with the headline. But the word “squatters” is doing a lot of work here. Most of the situations discussed in this piece are legally distinct from each other, some are closer to an alleged breach of contract, while others seem to just be straight up trespassing. But one person’s holdover tenant is another person’s squatter, and we should be precise in our language when discussing a topic.
I also do not think that this is, numerically, quite the problem people make it out to be.
watching parts of the urbanist community embrace a sort of Marxism-lite and reject the field of economics has been extremely disheartening over the last decade or so. tbh, it's sort of alienated me from the cause. I think the reluctance of urbanists to weigh in on squatting is part of a larger issue of urbanism being derailed by larger culture war battles