“I’d much rather make a squatter homeless than have a landlord lose property,” James added.
Keeping it classy.
wanted to say the same thing. what a dickhead, simping for landlords.
Hear me out: I don’t blame landlords for wanting to protect their investments. But, I do have a problem with them (and guys like James here) who do it at the expense of the downtrodden. Being a landlord should not have to be mutually exclusive with helping people.
I’m not seeing it.
For there to be squatters, the landlords had to have this property open and unrented for a while. The only way that happens is if the rent is too high.
What kind of landlord can afford to have a rental property vacant for a significant period of time and not accept a lower rent? Ones who own lots of property and would prefer to lose income rather than reduce the average rent price in the area.
In the industry, withholding housing from people because you want to make more money, when you can clearly afford to get no income from it, is called “a dick move”.
The only way that happens is if the rent is too high.
That’s not the only way. It’s not even very likely. If they are looking for too much rent and can’t get it they will lower their ask rather than sit there month after month getting nothing. Too high rent is the most easily fixable situation conceivable.
Other explanations include things like: it’s owned by someone who is elderly and due to their health or other problem they simply aren’t managing it actively or are even incapacitated and can’t make major decisions. Perhaps the owner died and the property is in the probate courts, which can take years.
Also, the presence of squatters doesn’t necessarily indicate it has been vacant for a long time.
Corporate landlords lose more by drops in real estate price and lowering of rent averages than a handful of empty properties. They have scale.
In theory. Long term vacancy is not in any corporate landlord’s plan, though. They will adjust rather than seek impossible rent forever. And aside from large apartment buildings, most residences (75% of 1-4 unit buildings) are owned by small landlords who don’t give a shit about network effects.
Squatters could move in the day after the property becomes empty. Really it depends on when it is noticed the house is unoccupied.
Sometimes houses can’t be sold for months because of legal BS (happened with my moms house).Yes, there are always edge cases. Wouldn’t it be great if there were no corporate landlords and the problem was small enough to worry about those?
Counterpoint: some people would rent an Airbnb and stay after the two weeks they rented, effectively preventing the homeowner to return to their homes after a vacation. There’s little legal recourse to speedily remove them, as two weeks of occupation requires a lengthy judicial process to evict them (IIRC in California).
I dislike rent seekers too, but it happens to people with only one home as well. They think they could put their home to use while they’re not there (effectively reducing the problem of real estate under occupation), only to be exploited.
The thing is, what you describe is incredibly rare, to the point of being a statistical anomaly.
Also, if you take the “low income” piece out of it, abusing others and cheating the system to save money is “just good business.” Ask all the millionaires doing immoral but TECHNICALLY legal things on their taxes.
You’re mistaken, sadly. It doesn’t happen more often because people got smart to it and no longer put their houses for rent for longer periods.
And I don’t get your whatabout millionaires comment. My comment was that not all squatting hurts landlords, some hurt regular people. I don’t need to ask millionaires about it because it’s not about them, it’s about middle class people.
If that’s true, we would all do it. No?
Are you asking why isn’t everybody stealing each other’s property?
If there’s little repercussion and everyone is broke, yes.
For there to be squatters, the landlords had to have this property open and unrented for a while.
Huh? A squatter is most commonly simply a former renter who stops paying without moving out. The property is not vacant at any point.
You’re describing holdover tenants. Those are not the same as squatters. Holdover tenants have more rights in California.
Edit: worded that wrong.
Landlords protecting their investments is always at the expense of the downtrodden. The role of landlord is one that exists solely at the expense of the downtrodden, and it is mutually exclusive with helping people.
I disagree, though I know I’ll get roasted for it… Landlords do serve a purpose to a point. Not everyone wants to own property. Owning property ties you to a particular place, makes it difficult to leave. If you know you want to stay in an area for the rest of your life, or even just the next 10 years, absolutely, you should be able to buy, and not being able to is a societal failure. But if you don’t know where you want to spend the rest of your life, you still need shelter now, and renting provides that, and when you decide to go somewhere else, it’s relatively easy. One of my bigger regrets in life was feeling pressured to buy a house in 2005… Just in time for the subprime mortgage crisis. I had a traditional mortgage, but nonetheless, my house went from $150k to <50k in months. I was stuck. Couldn’t sell without coming up with extra money to pay off the mortgage, but I wasn’t in as bad shape as some people, I could afford the payments, so I couldn’t justify walking away, just had to wait for it to rebound, which took another 5 years roughly. Had I been renting, I would have been able to leave much more easily.
There are ways to meet that particular need without landlords. Tenant unions buying out their apartment building and making it cooperatively owned, for example, or municipally owned public housing. The alternative to private property is public property. That kind of thing isn’t available because private property owners are the ones calling the shots, and that would undercut their parasitic lifestyle.
I don’t blame landlords for wanting to protect their investments.
I’m a landlord (not by choice, but shit happens). I’ve never hired goons and never would. I do blame landlords for resorting to this kind of bullshit.
It might help if you read the remainder of my comment. 🤷♂️
Their investments fundamentally come at the expense of the downtrodden by relegating necessities behind a paywall that they have private ownership over.
Being a landlord is fundamentally against helping people. It is explicitly about utilizing the private ownership over housing in order to profit off of someone else’s inherent need of shelter.
It is mutually exclusive and there is nothing that can be done to change that. The system is fundamentally oppressive.
I’d definitely claim exception there in cases when someone travels often. Picture a guy who’s going to study at the nearby university for one year, but isn’t going to put down any roots in the city.
But yes, I acknowledge that’s a comparatively uncommon case to most renters.
Transient tenants can be accommodated by collectively owned lodging. There is nothing that necessitates private ownership.
OK I heard you out. But I absolutely do blame them. It is mutually exclusive, they’re parasites and aren’t helping anyone. The guy who helps fix up your home is the property manager, for which landlords occasionally hire themselves using your rent money.
The kind of squatters that you have to fight in court to get rid of are downtroden in the sense that all petty criminals are downtrodden. In the sense that the guy that robs you at the bus stop is downtrodden even as he treads down on you.
Now I don’t much give a fuck about people’s return on investment and shit, but property, if you actually give a shit about it, is expensive to maintain and repair. That plus an arduous legal process highly incentivizes property owners to capitulate to unjust demands from squatters, much like any other robbery uses a threat of harm to coerce compliance.
Its all well and good to hate on the Bourgeois until you become one at which point the proletariat are your problem.
Its all well and good to hate on serial killers until you become one at which point the victims are your problem.
Yeah but being a serial killer doesn’t add anything to society. Bourgeois ownership of property and the competition that creates (capitalism) put a man on the moon and given you a better life than the aristocrats the bourgeois overthrew. How many people have serial killers raised out of poverty?
Sorry if I’m getting whooshed, are you being sarcastic? NASA is government-run. Feudalism was even more property-based and less democratic than capitalism is.
U clearly have no idea how NASA actually accomplished man in the moon. Most of the rocket and infrastructure was built and designed by private companies being paid by NASA. NASA just did the integration, design, and analysis. Its the perfect example of a socialist policy taking advantage of capitalist industry.
Capitalism, communism, socialism, and feudalism have nothing to do with democracy. They for the most part only refer to property in how its owned, who owns it, and what is property. Marx says everything that is not a person or a person labour is property owned by the state.
This is a direct analogue to feudalism and its structure of property ownership. Under feudalism the state owns everything including you, under communism the state owns everything except you. Marx himself comments on the similarity and how that relationship can be leveraged to bring in a communist regime.
Ah, the Space Race. Something that was famously only participated in by capitalist countries.
The USSR never put a man on the moon. And what your implying here is that the USSR was communism? If so the genocides and mass starvation it caused should be enough evidence against communism.
I’m asserting that capitalism didn’t do that on its own. The USSR is not a good example of communism, no, but it’s certainly not capitalist, and if they hadn’t provided competition at every step of the space race, beating the US out most of the time, the US wouldn’t have gotten to the moon.
Oh, here we go with the “little black book of communism” bullshit.
Gods, you guys are so predictable.
So as long as the bourgeoise exist, there will always be a problem?
Sounds like the only solution is to collectively agree to delete the bourgeoise.
OK Marx sure. So what do u replace it with? Someone has to “own” ie control all the things and if u just hand it all over to some entity “the state” you have just reinvented aristocracy.
Someone has to “own” ie control all the things
That’s an extremely silly statement. Do you really believe in a single global landlord that owns everything that everyone else must pay rent to? If one person owns everything like you say, you just destroyed private ownership.
You managed to accuse me of being both Marx and a monarchist all while you call to end any private ownership in just one post.
That is possibly the worst faith interpretation of my statement. Everything is owned by someone not necessarily the same someone. For instance I own and am thus responsible for my property, someone else is responsible for their property hence everything is owned by someone.
What’s the functional difference between communism and a monarchy? In both cased all property is owned by “the state” and can exercise control over that property however they please. Democracy doesn’t work cos the people have no control of any property and thus are completely beholden to the state. Good luck protesting against the government when you have no food, water, means to communicate, and travel. What are u gonna do about the inevitable authoritarian takeover? Die?
actually, ownership is a human invention and it is not necessary at all.
Bourgeoisie for owning a house? A very petty kind of bourgeoisie if at all. Petit? Something like that.
And let’s be real, squatting isn’t labor either. This is a weird flex.
I thought for sure I was on the onion when I read that line. Sad that it’s real
he smells like a nimby. he probably would be at the place when MILLBRAE(rich white residents) were complaining about converting a former hotel into a liviing space for the impoverished that occured like last year.
So it was him making all those pro-landlord memes…
“I’d much rather make a squatter homeless than have a landlord lose property,” Jacobs added.
These are the pieces of shit your politicians listen to every time they increase funding for police enforcement against the homeless, and deny zoning changes, even if it would improve the housing crisis. “theft is always bad no matter what 🤓☝️”
You have to be genuinely mentally ill to believe that someone going homeless is better than someone with more properties than they need to live in losing one of those properties so someone has a place to live.
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Especially empty properties.
that cannot be a real quote from a real person. it just can’t be.
In fact, this is something I could genuinely see multiple people in my own extended family saying.
You don’t believe him? But he’s got the only squatter removal business with a Yelp account! /s
…with professional-grade tactical gear.
The gear includes firearms, ballistic full-body armor, flash bangs and smoke grenades, tear gas…Where the fuck are you sourcing explosives and tear gas as a civilian, and more importantly…
Where can I get some? Purely for home defense, of course. Definitely not wanting it for defrost purposes.Plus points for “defrosting” there, very nicely put.
It would seem contrary to known physics, but tear gas actually makes frozen water whine like little bitches. 🤷🏼♂️
Where the fuck are you sourcing explosives and tear gas as a civilian
https://www.keepshooting.com/clear-out-6oz-tear-gas-grenade.html
Clear Out 6oz Tear Gas Grenade
Gun show.
The best part is the 50/50 on if they work or not
Oof. That bad?
I would wager much of the “tacti-cool” market stuff to not perform.
I’m not an expert.
Totally legal, all of that. The grenades require a $200 DD stamp each (don’t think the smokes do, unsure about tear gas - I know I bought smoke grenades for airsoft all the time back when I played), but everything there is totally legal from your local gun show or Bubba.
Bubba is the guy that Trump sucked off
its very important that the property remains empty, you see. if we allowed people to pay too little for it that would drive the prices of our other properties down.
literally just the passage from grapes of wrath.
this is a puff piece about the kind of gangster who turns up murdered and unmourned
“The average squatter has no melee experience,”
But what about magic? Magic beats melee in the combat triangle.
At a distance! This would be close quarter
If the squatter mage has been there long enough to count it as a chantry, then there’s wards and no paradox, so the melee assailant is cooked.
It actually doesn’t matter as far as the combat triangle is concerned because melee armor has debuffs for magic defense and magic armor has buffs for melee defense IIRC
Also mages can freeze you and shit
Here me out, longbow is still melee range.
No argument there. See: Legolas in any LOTR
what about crack, and fentanyl buffs.
Fentanyl is a debuff.
And people with melee experience are not bulletproof.
I cast GUN
Hm. This guy might have trouble against a higher-level homeless like Nanba-san.
I’d much rather make a squatter homeless than have a landlord lose property,” Jacobs added
I’d much rather make poor people without an option homeless than have a rich asshole lose some money!
Right? Like, what in the fuck?
It’s a horrible quote, but most squatters from what I’ve seen are just scammers. They squat, they muck up the eviction process with fake documents, and they generally extort money from the property owner in exchange for leaving early and not damaging the place.
Do you think broke people should feel the same way about banks? Just take their assets because they’re in need? Besides, I’m not sure most squatters are poor. They tend to fill a captured house with new furniture quickly.
You seem to know a lot about them, what are their names? Are they squatting in the room with you right now?
Shadija Romero has been making the news recently turning a 30-day or less Airbnb rental into a 9-month drag out fight, but she’s a probably only made the news because she’s mentally not all there. Most squatters aren’t delusional enough to try to defend themselves publicly or lie about things to the press.
When I look up squatters most of the info seems to pop up around DC and Maryland so if I wonder if it’s a particular issue around there.
I imagine squatters are more common in any big/desirable metro area, where a lot of housing is unfilled for months or years at a time because a property owner just wants to have “a place in DC” in case they need it.
I think it’s probably more the legal regime, but a higher than normal number of well kept but empty homes could also contribute.
This fool is going to get shot.
I assume it’s a joke, but the guy said professional tactical gear and firearms apparently, as well as teargas and such. If he’s not joking I’d say their odds of going to prison are pretty good. Premeditating and provoking a situation with deadly weapons instead of contacting actual authorities and following the laws/procedure doesn’t seem like it would work out well for anyone.
Isn’t that the exact gear that cops use to break up homeless encampments?
Whether we like it or not, those cops are the proper procedure/authorities in said situation. Thus they are allowed by law. I can’t just hire a neighbor to show up to a homeless camp with said gear and expect when something goes wrong for them not to get arrested for murder/battery, and probably be arrested for something else. Paying them to do so probably has a different terminology than an accessory. Might fall under the rico shit, not sure
Eh, bounty hunting is an entire industry.
So are all kinds of private security.
Wouldn’t be that hard to just create some new class of crime that can legally be dealt with by people or agencies with the proper licensing, then shunt off encampment clearing to basically PMCs.
Then you just tie in existing apps that city governments or police put out, to report encampments, tie that into a conctracting system.
Its the most neoliberal solution to homelessness that can exist, therefore, just give it a couple years.
Works well with the prison industrial complex too!
Trump did say, and has been, settting up massive internment camps for the homeless.
Why not spread some of the money around to some new enterprising startups? Helps make it not look like a no bid contract situation.
I sure hope he does!
IDK bout fighting vigilantes with vigilante justice though, isn’t there something he could be charged with if he’s breaking laws?
The legality of house sitting ninjas probably varies state by state.
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Squatters rights are an important part of common law and they serve as a foundational means of ensuring valuable real estate remains in use. Adverse possession requires openly living somewhere for years without permission or resistance from the owner
Yep, and this guy is one form of “resistance”. But doesn’t reporting the squatter to the police count as “resistance” as well? Surely you don’t need to hire private goons to chuck them out?
Squatters is a civil issue in California, and can take many years to have them evicted if the squatters know how to game the system.
The time frame it takes to resolve this issue is the primary problem.
It should be fast and easy to determine if a rental agreement is invalid. I don’t know what that system needs to look like exactly, but we’ve been setting and improving standards for document validation for generations so it shouldn’t be that hard.
The current issue with squatter’s rights is the time. A squatter can draft a fake renter’s agreement and change the locks while you are on vacation, and then it takes a long time to evict them the “proper” way.
I’m totally on board with expedited eviction of squatters from a primary residence, and even harsher penalties for it. I believe squatters are valuable and I’m generally in favor of all sorts of crust punk bullshit, but they should have a duty to do reasonable reconnaissance. The difference between someone getting into an old boarded up building or a house nobody has used in years vs one where people are just on vacation (even if it’s a few months) is massive. The former is an attack on property believed to be abandoned with good reason, and the latter is an intimate violation of someone’s home.
sword-wielding man
ASAP Squatter Removal has a 95%+ success rate
Every now and then, you run into a spearman.
These people think evil quest givers in games are role models, not warnings.
I feel like this is a time to vouch for an element of a story I’m writing.
In this world, there’s an Adventurer’s Guild. It’s named, and oriented, very much like the generic guild that appears in so many generic Anime-MMO medieval fantasy worlds. In it, travelers with weapons, be they swords or bows, complete missions for money.
As one would expect from that setup, the only people with money who ever hire the Adventurer’s Guild are wealthy merchants with cargo to protect, or land developers with an excuse to enact aggression on innocent people, or anyone who can veil their murderous intent with some legal excuse. The first way the story introduces them is that a city has contracted with the Guild to use them as extra peacekeepers, and it’s a horrible setup because they have no deescalation training. The guild itself lures in members with ideas that they’ll “take down troublesome animals for troubled townfolk” and maybe even sometimes have those quests, but primarily, most of the other characters in the story just refer to it as “The Mercenary’s Guild. Oh, I guess they call themselves Adventurers’ Guild now.”
It’s my way of getting people to analyze their desire to kill things for rewards, which is fine for a simple game made for children, but shouldn’t be part of your fantasies as you grow up.
I am also doing my own MMO isekai thing, where the concept is that the inhabitants are vaguely aware that they occupy an artificial world. Or more specifically, they view developers and players as gods and demigods, respectively. Things like player housing are special mechanics that the inhabitants have to work around, or guild privileges vanishing if certain NPC lineages (player “pets”) die out. The world in general is falling apart, because the game has long become a museum piece - almost no one ever visits, in the hundreds of ingame years that the MMO has been running. It is a story about the NPC cultures have developed in the absence of realworld humans, in a world of game mechanics.
Anyhow, I figured that I might as well mention it to you. Way I figure, we can take each other’s angles and remix them.
I will admit to being personally aggrieved by the supposition that I’m childish for enjoying fighting things. But I believe there should be a way to interrogate the levels of critical thinking and agency people/players give away in the pursuit of an easy, “clear” target without making prescriptive, defamatory remarks about how people have fun in fiction.
We must defend the empty properties!
Also, we must solve the housing crisis by building more houses!
It’s gonna be really funny when dude gets charged with menacing and extortion.
He’s gonna meet a former mall ninja/disciple of the sword fedora wearing meth head and he gonna die.
This might also count under assault, depending on state laws. Someone turns up at my door with a fucking sword, a gun, and a belt full of chemical weapons, I’m definitely going to feel like he’s there to harm me, whether or not he says he is.
TBF, the article never really describes exactly what the man does with all his equipment. We don’t even know if he’ll be the aggressor.
Squatters don’t usually go for genuinely abandoned properties, but rather ones that are empty in the short term for normal reasons (vacations, sales, grandma got moved to a home). If they went into abandoned properties then there might be repairs that need to be done, some of the utilities might not be able to be activated immediately because of connection issues, it might not be safe, and certainly the owner might not notice and then come to ask them to leave and then they would never be able to ask the owner for money to make them leave.
Do you have knowledge of these truly abandoned properties? I could use some adverse possession…
You could search Zillow for off-market properties. Look for stuff that’s way below market for the area. Cross reference state property tax records. Title records. Maybe it’s boarded up and in obvious disrepair. Particular look for one that’s owned for a long time by an LLC. The owner there has enough business accumen to fix it up, but believes that he’ll profit more by waiting around until market conditions change. Look for the LLC owner, for one who doesn’t live nearby. Now you have someone whose distance and dereliction of social duty shows through in the condition of the property. He’s harming the neighborhood, keeping housing empty and off-market, and not even paying attention. That’s the one.
This is not legal advice, just a mental exercise.
Ads for this type of services show up in craigslist regularly where I live. Named organizations like Viking Acquisitions or FAFO LLC post weekly. I bugged the local newspaper about it, but they were disinterested.
Then I’ll train and purposely squat so that this stain can be humbled
Ok…but what happens when a squatter has a gun?
“The average sword-wielding man has no firearms experience.”
He should slowly develop his resistance to bullets, starting with air rifle and then small calibre rounds.
He also has a gun according to the article. This is also in California where the likelyhood is lower.
28.3 people out of 100. Not that unlikely
