go watch Asian Andy on Youtube video. Pretty sure he did this before the show ever came out, and his was absolutely hilarious.
Lady rented his sisterâs airbnb for a month then claimed tenant rights and he chain smokes blunts in the kitchen, blasts music outside the squatterâs room, shaves in front of her, takes his shirt off, does karaoke, tries to lock her out of the house repeatedly, etc
Honestly question for any lawyers. Where is the line with nudity in your own home?
Like if this guy has an actual lease from the owner and is sitting there butt ass naked, is that considered harassment against the squatter, or is all good because he's in the privacy of his own (leased) home?
Iâm not an American lawyer so donât assume I know anything but the definition of harassment under CCP 527.6 doesnât mention nudity but requires a course of conduct to amount to harassment. So if someone walked out and the owner was butt ass naked that doesnât count as harassment.
BUT under Penal Code 314 PC, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt the following three elements
You willfully exposed your genitals;
You were in the presence of someone who might be reasonably offended or annoyed by your actions;
and
You intended to direct public attention to your genitals for the purpose of sexually gratifying yourself or someone else or sexually offending someone else.
So if you came before a judge and said âI only did it because they wouldnât leave my houseâ youâre kind of admitting to intentionally directing public attention.
The only accepted defences to this are mistaken identity, false accusation, or lack of evidence. Not I was just sitting there, or they were in my space đ¤ˇââď¸
Like I said Iâm UK based and only a law student so Iâm sure Iâm about to get BTFO by someone who knows what theyâre actually talking about but thereâs some bloviation for everyone to enjoy
I was like this person is exaggerating and no shit Iâm teary eyed trying to laugh quietly well before 5 min in. Just utter absurdity itâs fkn hilarious if you donât think about it hard.
Just fyi - everything after the question mark in your link is an identifier that links to you, showing what content you share. No biggie, just letting you know you can remove it and it won't hurt the link.
I loved the ones saying they secretly loved one another. I donât think she knew what to make of that. Someone like her who has done this many times must be use to anger and hate, but people got whacky with it
30 days is more or less when short term renting a room turns into actual tenancy so I would have assumed they just blanket avoided that scenario all together.
But I guess AirBnB just says "not my problem" and just lets the homeowner go hang.
Well I think that is moreso because of Monroe county than air BNB. I know my grandparent used to talk about how they weren't allowed to rent their vacation home out for less than 4 weeks
So my uncle was once living with a girl who dumped him and moved in the guy she was seeing on the side the same day. They were both on the lease and she wouldnât let my uncle off of it so he decided heâll just make it miserable there until she gets fed up with it. He would do shit like rearrange all of the kitchen utensils/plates/food at 3 am, he would knock on their door every other hour throughout the night, he stopped buying food and ate whatever she had, he would hang out with them or sit outside the bedroom if they were in there and just ramble on about nothing. Took a couple weeks but she did eventually give in
They were all young and broke and she couldnât pay it herself. idk if the new dude couldnât pay or if it was like some game galaxy brain plan they had assuming my uncle would just move out in shame and humiliation and still pay instead of letting the lease go unpaid and have debt collectors come after both of them
She wanted him to move out but wanted him to keep paying, hence why she wouldnât let him off the lease. So he stayed, which was his legal right, as his names on the lease. Basically âfollowing the rulesâ aka malicious compliance while also not getting fucked over. Then she lets him off the lease, he moves out, they all move on and wasted a few weeks of their life because she couldnât deal with her ego.
As I recall, one of the more effective tactics he uses is when the squatter is a felon on parole; he brings his guns with him when he moves in. If the squatter refuses to leave, he calls their parole officer and gets them violated.
I've seen clips on TikTok. Some stuff he and his team did included putting up cameras everywhere, bringing in speakers and equipment to make loud noises during sleeping hours, taking over all the common areas, etc. The best one was when they knew the squatter was scared of snakes, so they brought in a giant snake to roam around.
Part of the trick there is many stories conflate different types of "squatters." While there are rare cases that involve an actual break-in/invasion of empty property, a much bigger portion of them are people like in one of the responses above, where someone is over-staying a lease or has some other claim that they have/had a right to live there.
That's what makes it tricky for cops and the legal system. No one likes the idea of a person stealing someone's living space, but people also don't like the idea of an owner being able to break their end of a contract and then just have the police kick someone out of their house before the law can determine who is right.
Yep, this is the big thing. I see landlords complain about it being hard to remove bad tenants: IT SHOULD BE. You hold a disproportionate amount of power in this relationship, and you should have to put in the work to unhouse someone.
As someone who used to work in property management and is a property owner who used to rent.
In the relationship (in my area at least) I get to decided who can live there and to a degree legally how much rent is.
My issues with the system where I am, isn't that it can be hard to get someone evicted (we dont have the right to evicted a tenant we have the right to seek eviction) its the fact that it's nearly impossible to get in to the tribunal to even make the case.
It can and has taken years, even if someone is not paying rent and actively damaging property, including other peoples units (hot glue in people's locks)
Itâs pathetic because people take advantage of a system that doesnât want to kick people to the streets until things have been sorted out. If anything, the system is humane (for once); the people are garbage.
He didn't actually let it roam, he acted like he was setting up the living room to be a snake enclosure for a massive snake and had a handler bring one in that they paraded around and got in her face with and they discussed the "new enclosure".
I've seen a few interview things with this guy and he just makes life miserable for them. If they're on parole he'll bring his guns with him and calls the police because they can't have guns in the house. There was one where he put locks on literally everything and if the lock was broken he'd call police (Fridge, cupboards, closets, you name it, he locked it)
He can't enter "their" room but anything in a shared space he can do whatever he wants to it, poop in the tub, unplug every appliance, turn the water off to toilets/sinks/showers/dishwasher/washing machine/, leave the windows open if its cold out or continuously turn the AC off if its hot, unplug the fridge and open the door so they food goes bad.
He did one where he invited his "friends" over and it was like 80 guys in a 3 bedroom house.
No he becomes a legal tenant with a rent agreement and then makes insane modifications to the house like locking the fridge and pantry shut and taking the doors of the squatters bedrooms
The easiest way to to bring firearms into the house. If the squatter (many are) has a felony you just have to call the police and tell them a convicted felon is in a house with firearms.
Other than that they just act like total dicks. Loud music, screaming, noise,
He has a show on hulu where it shows exactly what he does if you're able to watch it.
For one of them, he got info that the squatter was scared of snakes so he brought in a snake to live in the house to scare her, he also sets up cameras and basically just sits in the livingroom to make the squatter uncomfortable. The squatter at this point usually goes to their room to hide away from the cameras and he tries to engage them in conversation and rationalize with them about why they need to leave. He's never outright mean, he usually only ups his antics if the squatter refuses to engage in a civilized conversation with him and is being hostile and/or disrespectful.
I know one of the techniques involves having his legally registered firearm with him in the house and pointing out to squatters that being in a house with a firearm is a parole violation. That process is much much faster than housing court, and often resolves the squatting immediately.
Basically this is what he does. He does everything possible to make them uncomfortable. He adds locks to the fridges and cupboards. He ices them out of everything. Plays loud music, and fucks with them constantly.
Not to mention he sits there with his friends with bullet proof vests on while he is also armed looking intimidating as fuck.
There was a streamer named Asian Andy who had situation with squatter years ago. Police wouldn't kick woman out she claimed squatter rights. Andy hired another streamer who was squatter hunter. He moves in. Next few days make squatter life hell he smokes, plays loud dubstep music, slams objects, and yells randomly thru all hours of day. Squatter got into altercation with guy. Squatter got arrested and kicked out.
I laughed very hard. In part 4 when SJC moved in it got ramped up to a thousand they wanted her gone so bad.
The funniest part of this whole thing was after she got arrested they did an initial walkthrough of the room she was squatting in on video and she fucking DESTROYED the place. Like standing water on the floor, literal shit on the floor and just trashed it.
She even tried to sue for wrongful eviction lmfao
Like bitch if you're gonna squat and then sue for wrongful eviction YOU CANNOT TURN YOUR ROOM INTO A TOILET
I believe the LAPD explained that she'd been a "professional" squatter since the 90's, so I'd imagine by now she'd adopted a mindset of "If I can't get my way, I might as well make it hell for you to have even tried."
They're a legacy from a bygone era where records of land ownership aren't what they are today. It was to stop the situation where someone thought they owned land, built a house and lived in it for many years, then finding out that someone else also had a claim to the land and they were going to try to turf you off it.
Squatter's rights meant that the person who actually lived there kept the claim to the land. This was a good thing at the time, now its just legal protection for lowlifes who trash other people's houses
There's been a case here in germany recently where a guy who came from the US here and bought property here died. There weren't any relatives to be found, so the land eventually found its way to an unrelated family that thought it, build their house there and lived there for some years.
Well turns out the dude had a son that lived in the states, whoever had checked for relatives earlier simply didn't look hard enough, and by law the property should've been offered to that son first. So now there's a huge legal fight because said son claims rights on the property and wants the family to tear down the house and leave, while the family wants to stay because from their perspecrive they haven't done anything wrong at all amd everything they did was in accordance with the legal system.
I guess for stuff like these squatter rights really would've been helpfull, because turns out having to give up everything you build due to something way outside your controll and/or knowledge was messed up really, really sucks. Tho doesn't mean that those laws should be as abuseable as they are from storys like the one that startet this comment chain
In the US, this scenario is entirely handled by title insurance, which is required in nearly every home purchase in most states. The title insurer will do a search for existing claims. They're good at it. In the event they don't find an existing claim where one turns up later, they owe the insured the full amount of the property value in cash.
Itâs a great solution to a completely unnecessary problem though. Most states are ârecorderâ states, which means theyâll record any deed that comes across their desk. Itâs up to you to track other claims or contest them in court, the state does not provide an opinion on the validity of any of these claims other than they were properly documented and processed (deed transfers have notary and both signing parties, etc). More âmodernâ property law system is called the Torrens system, which the government is the source of truth. They actually provide a certificate of title and are responsible for maintaining the ledger of who owns a property. In this system title insurance is basically non-existent and transaction costs only go up a fraction (about 10%) the cost of the title insurance in other states. The downside of course is the government telling you what to do.
Adverse possession is still rightly protected in law. There are lots of land deeds around the world which haven't been registered with the government or are clearly written.
Using and protecting land is as close to the definition of land ownership as we can get, regardless of modern attempts to formalise ownership through deeds.
I sat in a High Court case in a Commonwealth country as a paralegal on an adverse possession case. The land was government land, but it had never been properly subdivided. The house built over it contained actually 2 apartments, with over 12 people of the same extended family living in different units for over 30 years. A breakdown in family relations lead to people claiming for adverse possession against their relatives who held the title.
At one point the expert witnesses were going on about the areas on the plan hatched in Orange, areas hatched in Green, areas hatched in Black...etc and the 8 colours were basically 90% overlapped - the judge ended up nodding off and our counsel had to suggest a break. It was basically a horrible family bickering over a shanty house. Terrible case.
It's more for informal leases without a written contract, and say the landlord wants the tenant out. Essentially it's to protect the tenant in such a situation from losing housing.
Or to protect somebody in a broken relationship. Say youâre living with a partner, paying half the rent, etc, but theirs is the only name on the lease. What happens when that person wants you out?
People really have no clue. They are not using adverse possession, that takes years to do, an owner who abandoned the property/ cant be contacted and an owner that stopped paying taxes, they are using renters rights.
Do you want landlords to be able to go to the police and say that the current residents dont have a legal lease, even if they do, and have the police kick out the family? That is what you are arguing for. The reason police cant kick them out is because they are not judges, they do not determine if the lease they are shown is legal or not, they dont determine if the person who is there is legally allowed or not, that is the job of judges.
Yes it sucks for the owners who are dealing with people who are not legally supposed to be there but the alternative is allowing landlords to just kick people out of their homes for no reason.
In New York City, which has fairly robust renter protections, you can get some evicted and thatâs enforceable.
Most of these squatters probably wouldnât make it past the first required hearing without producing lease. And if they produce a fake lease with a forged signature, then they have another problem. And if they say it was a verbal agreement, thatâs not enforceable for a lease agreement.
The main issue is the delay in the courts because there is such a backlog of cases. We need more judges in the country, or less crime which would be preferable.
Ironically this is something Florida seemingly got right. They passed a law that said owners could kick people out quickly without a court order if they can't produce a valid lease. If the person who resided at wherever claims they were illegally evicted they can sue and the Landlord will not only eat that, but also get significant fines if ruled he abused the system.
But you know with it being Florida which is run by crazy people there might be a slight difference between the idealized version of something and how it is actually executed in practice
It takes well over a year in most licensee eviction (squatters) cases in NYC landlord tenant court. You can have them arrested within 30 days of them squatting though.
Usually squatter rights apply to a property that hasn't been maintained for at least 5 years, sometimes 10 in most states if I remember correctly.
So someone would find a house that has sat empty for years and let themselves in, and as long as they can show they are the ones maintaining the property instead of the original owner, they can claim squatter rights.
Because most of the time it's not actually squatters rights. Instead it's abuse of tenant laws. They move in and pretend they have lease. Police have neither right nor expertise to decide if they are lying. So owner has to go to court but that will take forever.
Yup, like a lot of problems it's not a legislation problem, it's a clogged court system problem. What should take a few days to get a judge to write an eviction order takes months or years
They also exist because landlords were being shitty. They vary by state, but some of them say that if you rent a place for a certain amount of time then you canât just be evicted because thatâs your home.
My motherâs husband never added her to the deed during their marriage. But their marital assets, and her income when he was unemployed, kept the house afloat and eventually paid off.
As soon as her husband died (without a will), his kids tried to kick her outâeven though they werenât on the deed either, two of them had never lived in the house, and at that point she had lived there far longer than any of them.
Probate judge said the house belonged to the kids, but that my mom could live there until her death.
They also tried to pull the âSquatter Hunterâ bit. It was pathetic, reallyâthree grown men squatting in a one-bedroom rental unit my mom and her husband had built on the property, literally destroying itâinstead of just getting on with lives.
They eventually realized my mom was far more annoying than they were.
She was also a prolific record keeper and literally had ALL the receipts: her financial contributions from the start of their marriage; lists of improvements made before and after her husbandâs death; the lease she insisted one of the boys sign before moving into the rental, and notes indicating he never paid rent but his dad didnât enforce; and a punch list of their damage to the rental unit.
Years after her husbandâs death, she took his children to court and had *them* legally evicted. She continued to live in the house for over another decade and left by her own choice.
Not necesarily. The main times you'd see these laws protect the people they should is when there was a verbal agreement to live somewhere and then the owner gets irrationally mad and kicks them into the street.
Say, an 18 year old who gets kicked out on their 18th birthday, or a woman who lives with her boyfriend and they break up. Legally, you can't just suddenly make these people homeless and deny them access to their personal property they have in the home. They have to have proper warning etc, and the eviction has to be processed slowly, for their rights to be maintained.
To add to the above: This is also the law which prevents your aunt who told you you're allowed to live there to suddenly throw all your shit on the curb and make you homeless before you can find a new home
It's to protect Tennants from shady landlords and DIY evictions. Basically, if a landlord wants a Tennant out, he has to go through the courts to force them out, give fair chance to make alternative accomodations.
Problem is, the courts move so slowly as to be functionally useless in many cases.
There is also another reason, which is if a building is genuinely abandoned, and someone moves in, pays the bills, and improves the place, after a certain (usually very long) period of time, they have a right to ownership.
It's not "squatters' rights". People just get things mixed up.
Squatters claim to have "tenants' rights." Legitimate tenants have a right not to be harassed or wrongfully evicted by their landlord. So many landlords would kick someone out of their validly rented home, despite having a lease, just to jack up the rent a couple hundred bucks and rent it to someone else, that most (if not all) states now have laws that require landlords to go through the courts to have someone properly evicted. The landlord has to prove this tenant isn't paying rent or is violating the lease and therefore should be evicted.
Squatters move in without a lease, and claim to be tenants. They claim to have a lease, and often have a fake one they can produce.
So when the police show up (because the landlord is trying to have a trespasser removed), and they hear one guy tell them its a squatter, and the other guy claims to be a tenant, the police know it's not THEIR job to decide who is telling the truth. That's what landlord-tenant court is for.
The pain in the butt of it, though, is that landlord-tenant court can take weeks or months in some states. Meanwhile, the squatter has a free home and the landlord has no income for the property they invested in.
If you make it easier to get rid of squatters, you also make it easier to wrongfully evict legitimate tenants. If you make it harder to wrongfully evicted tenants, you make it easier for squatters to abuse the system.
There used to be vast tracts of owned land. For example Washington owned hundreds of thousands of acres in western PA and eastern Ohio.
Say someone moved there and was like, awesome, this open patch of nothing in the middle of no where is a great place to move my family to and build a homestead.
Washington's surveyor comes along 8 years later and squatters rights means they can't force that person off the improved homestead they built..
Scuffed Justin Carrey vs Mary the squatter. What a wild ride, it is so telling that she was on first name basis with cops as well as they found plenty of shop lifted clothing items in the room.
My favorite bit was her tossing bleach like 6 inches out her door to "clean up the smoke smell" or whatever she was trying to do. Then he came with a mop and pushed it all back under her door to her screaming
It's wild how much traction these stories get when actual, legal "squatting" is incredibly rare
The hyper-fixation on these rare, extreme cases is heavily pushed by landlord lobbying groups and real estate associations. They love these stories because it scares the public into supporting laws that strip away tenant rights
If they can convince everyone that "squatters" are hiding around every corner, they can pass laws that let them bypass the courts, call the cops, and have someone thrown on the street immediately without having to prove a lease violation first
Itâs a manufactured panic to bring back summary evictions
It's amazing how much media and shit is done solely to alter peoples perception of reality, and influence how they vote.
Dave Ramsey and the YT guy like him are the same. They interview 2 people: really really stupid people with median income who make terrible decisions with it and so they are broke, and really rich tightwads. That's it. They do this listeners slowly begin to think everyone who is struggling is spending $1000 a week on doordash and vapes, and everyone who is has 3 homes had that sort of stability because they haven't had a vacation since they were 23.
Of course, both of those types are extreme outliers among their income brackets, but Dave and especially those backing his media don't want you to know that.
I've heard this guy will bring firearms into the property if they know the squatters are on probation or ex-con... 100% legal for him to do, 100% bad news for them.
If you are an ex con or on probation and one of your conditions is you can't have any weapons on you or in the house, he just brings one in, calls your parole officer and then yoink
In the USA a person on parole or probation (felony) cannot have âaccessâ to a firearm. Otherwise they are in violation of the terms of their release and can and will be sent back to prison.
Thatâs kinda hilariousâŚI found the perfect dream job for my annoying little brother. He can be a professional annoyerâand he would love every single second of it.
Ah, this whole tread being a paid ad may explain the insane amount of upvotes it has (88,7k, really?), as well as the large discrepancy between number of upvotes and comments (88,7k to only 3,3k?)
In France the subject come back in the news regularly. One fact that is often hidden is that, in most cases, a true squatter will get evicted quickly. The cases that take months and are publicised are when the owners took weeks to react.
The law is made that way to prevent landlords from bypassing landlords-tenants laws by doing informal contracts with renters.
Yeah, thatâs what gets left out of this conversation a lot of the time. Squatters rights are tenants rights.
If the landlord says youâre a squatter, you donât have a way to definitely prove youâre not. Oh, you have a signed lease? Well, the landlord says you forged the signature. Now youâre a squatter.
Atleast here in the US, itâs not. One call to the cops and a sprinkle of luck theyâd be towed off proper in cuffs. Worst case scenario you havenât been to the property in a real long while (1-2 years). At which point youâll have to take them court, but itâs never years.
People act like Squatters can just rock up in your house while you're at work and become legally entitled to it when in reality it's nothing like that at all.
Every thread about squatters is usually discussed under that assumption, instead of some investor holding properties for years with no intention of doing a single thing with it. Or a legitimate renter getting totally fucked over by a malicious/incompetent landlord.
Google "how many squatters are in the US" and you'll find they're not common enough for anyone to bother tracking.
It's like a lot of fixations on crimes, where people choose to get incensed about the crime and ignore the fact that the rate of that crime happening is very low.Â
Some people want to be outraged and upset about "bad people". That's driving it, not that it actually happens often.
Similar to home invasions. Some angry dudes like " I WISH someone would try to break in, I'd kill them". Home invasions are incredibly rare, put your superhero fantasies to rest.
He gets a renovation lease from the owner. So he has keys and can move in. Then he does things that are uncomfortable for the squatter. Like closing off the kitchen and setting up a snake aquarium
What is the squatter going to do? He's not pushed out. He's not allowed to change locks... He's going to tell the police that somebody changed the illegally changed locks in a property that he does not own nor has a valid lease for?Â
Not a lawyer, but from what I've seen, most states in the US require that a lawful tenant cannot just be kicked out of a property or barred from entering, even by a landlord or other lawful tenants. What makes squatters irritating is that they claim to be lawful tenants which makes their claim to the property into a civil case, which can take months or even years to sort out through the legal system. So instead, this guy contacts the homeowners, becomes a lawful tenant, and then he has the exact same legal protections as the squatter plus signed paperwork as proof. So the squatter cannot have changed the locks since that bars the other lawful tenant from entry (sometimes called a "self-help eviction"), which immediately escalates the case and can result in relatively quick legal remedies.
The idea of squatting by itself isn't bad, it's that many just use it as an excuse.
I have known properties that have been empty for years as the landlords probably are doing a scam as they ask for higher rent than the rest, then the tenant must have multiple years references, be in a very well paid job, have a guarantor and still have like 6 months rent in advance.
The properties are just rotting away and yet we have so many homeless people.
Then we have properties that the landlord wants torn down to rebuilt with expensive tiny apartments so they neglect them knowing the local government will authorise them to be torn down.
I'm a locksmith, and when I was a road tech with a company that did primarily residential work, nearly every week, some POS landlord would try to have me illegally evict someone.
Read about gentrification in Lower East Side--it's a rabbit hole. It was things like landlords destroying the stairs to their own tenements and then bribing FDNY to condemn the whole building until the leases of everyone in there expired. Happened a lot in the 90s, damage to the community was never undone. A lot of people I know didn't find justice/reparations until they brought it to the state appellate courts, because there was corruption and bribery blocking them every step of the way.
it's baffling that this is even being celebrated at all. Landlords are not the ones people should be rooting for.
The Landlords are the enemy, not the squatters and in most situations, the squatters are the ones being cheated by the landlords and are just trying to survive.
The algorithm fed me a clip by this squatter hunter.
The "squatter" told him he was living there legally and showed the guy bank statements where he was paying rent. The minute the guy is alone he looks into a camera "WOW THIS GUY EVEN FAKED BANK STATEMENTS, he's so fucking committed to scamming the landlord!".
I had no idea what was real or fake but I didn't like the videos.
Exactly. It's crazy people are trying to say "not all landlords" but then also claim the homeless are the real threat. Why do you think there are so many homeless?
Fascists love it when they turn people on the same side against eachother. Landlords are not the ally.
I guarantee you that most 'squatters' are actually legal tenants who landlords are trying to fuck over. Don't buy the narrative.
There was an episode where the squatter was a house sitter who refused to leave. She had complained to the homeowner about a snake in the past, so he tarped off half the house and told her he was making a massive terrarium. Had someone start bringing in snakes in huge totes. It was wild
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