Well, this is how they will develop melee experience.
And then we will all be carring swords again.
At least guns are egalitarian.
Yes, I am ducking.
What about hiring a bat-wielding man to scare squatters out of your vacant home by swinging the bat from time to time like Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining (1980) and exclaiming, “All I want to do is bash your brains in, bash them right the hell in!”, to see if that will scare the squatters out of a home they don’t own?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 accordint to the article. This is also in California where the likelyhood is lower.
28.3 people out of 100. Not that unlikely
I’ve read about this guy before. He’s got an amusing variety of methods. Squatters ruin homes, sometimes destroying them entirely. House across the street from me burned this morning because of squatters who kept breaking in. Someone would have saved the house eventually, now it’ll be a parking lot. Who is helped by that?
is it even legal for “this vigalante” to threaten the squatter with a sword, it seems like something it can backfire.
Sounds like a plot from Cobra Kai
“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.
Its all well and good to hate on the Bourgeois until you become one at which point the proletariat are your problem.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it was him making all those pro-landlord memes…
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.
If you were a tenant and you are getting kicked out you should have different rights like a proper eviction and a court date.
If you just broke in you should simply be removed by the cops on penalty of law if the landlord lies and you are actually a tenant who was illegally evicted.
This is what the law in liberal wa state is.
In theory yeah, but squatters rights do exist for a purpose of keeping abandoned buildings from just decaying if you can show you’ve been maintaining it in the owners absence. Now I’m not saying that they’re used like that now but that is their actual purpose.
I wish to God squatters would quietly drill out the locks on an old abandoned property, occupy it and slowly fix it up and just go over to whatever agency 5 years later with the documentation to show it and say “by right of labor and occupancy this house is mine.”
I just doesn’t seem to be how it works in places with tolerant squatting laws. The way it seems to go is some enterprising criminals will run off some fake leases, gain entry to a home that’s only temporarily unoccupied, and then when the owners come back they ask them for money to leave. And then the owners give them money, and the squatters either leave or they don’t.
Is this some Craigslist shit?
donning full plate armor and a dagger “Luckily I’m no average squatter”
Nah fuck squatters too. Everyone sucks here but squatters are just as trashy. We need to have a vacant homes penalty desperately but yeah that won’t happen anytime soon if ever in my lifetime.
We need to have a vacant homes penalty desperately
Technically that’s what adverse possession or squatters rights actually is.
The general criteria(without state specifics) for legal squatting is incredibly difficult to fulfill though. It’s not reasonable to achieve in the majority of situations.
Right now there is a penalty for not keeping it vacant. Say you’re an elderly homeowner in Los Angeles. Your husband died 15 years ago when the property you bought in 1970 for $35,000 was worth $500,000. The tax basis resets from $35k to $500k. But now the property is worth $2 million and you need to move into a retirement home due to your health. If you sell the house now, your family takes a capital gains tax hit on the $1.5 million of appreciation. If they wait until you die, the tax basis resets to current market value. If you make the qualifying event the move to the retirement home instead of death it would save on taxes but would give your kids a powerful incentive to move you out. Tl;dr most of the vacant homes I’m personally aware of are owned by elderly people with health issues.
this is a puff piece about the kind of gangster who turns up murdered and unmourned
He stabbed me with a sword Mal … How weird!
You can’t stop the signal, Mal.
