The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1070: Squatters | Skeptical Sunday

Episode Date: October 27, 2024

Scared of squatters taking your home? Nick Pell brings perspective to what the media tells us is a "growing crisis" on this week's Skeptical Sunday! On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: Squatting occurs when people occupy a property without legal right or permission, often in vacant homes or rental properties. While they may create fake leases or documentation to appear legitimate, they are distinct from legal tenants who have stopped paying rent or are being evicted. Most squatting cases become complex civil matters rather than criminal ones because squatters often create fake leases and establish utility bills in their names, making it difficult for police to immediately remove them. The current housing situation contributes to squatting — average rent has increased 13.7% year over year since 1980, while wages have only grown 0.2% year over year since the early 1970s, making housing increasingly unaffordable for many. Changes to squatting laws need careful consideration, as overly strict laws could potentially be weaponized against legitimate occupants (such as domestic abuse victims) or lead to frivolous claims against legitimate tenants. Property owners can protect themselves by regularly checking on their properties, maintaining good documentation of ownership and occupancy, and quickly establishing a paper trail with authorities if issues arise. Being proactive rather than reactive is the best defense against potential squatting situations. Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1070 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Nick Bell. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. And our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, we do Skeptical Sunday. We're a Rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic. Such as, why tipping makes no sense, acupuncture, astrology, why expiration dates are nonsense, the death industry, the wedding industry, are they one in the same? And more. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime and cults and more. And I'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right, guys, I want you to imagine something. You went on vacation for two weeks, maybe you have a rental property that's been sitting empty for a couple months. When you come home or go by your rental property to check on a couple minor maintenance issues, you find some schmo live in there. This isn't a tenant, it's a squatter. That is, somebody who's just living rent-free. But instead of

living in your head, maybe with six or seven of their closest friends, the worst part is you can't just Call the cops to boot them out. No, that would be too simple. In fact, you might have to drop a serious chunk of change to get them out of your house while they continue to live rent-free for weeks or even months as the wheels of justice slowly turned. So how big of an issue is this really? I mean, is this just some total non-issue blown up by the media or do you really need to worry every time you go on vacation or leave a rental property unintended for a couple of weeks? Well, professional panda fluffer Nick Pell is here to help us pop a squat. Did I use that term correctly? Papa squat? I'm not sure about that one. Not at all. What's up, Jordan? Do you own any rental properties,

by the way? I do not. Normally, I would lament something like that, but I'm kind of glad about it after reading all these articles that you sent me about squatting. And I want to know what the deal is with all this. First of all, what the heck is squatting? Because up until now, this was something I did in the gym so I can get them cakes. Well, the important part for that is that you go, ask your grass on every rep. You're just not going to grow your glutes without hitting proper depth. Noted. I will set up my home gym accordingly. So basically squatting in a nutshell is when people find these houses that aren't being rented or in, you know, absolute nightmare scenarios, when people go on extended vacations or something. And the squatters move in, set up shop, and start living there like

you and I do in the houses we own or the apartments we live in. And sometimes they start selling the furniture or whatever's there. Other times they might make moves to start literally taking your home from you, like paying the property tax. Well, that certainly sounds illegal. It does sound illegal, and it probably is, but that in five bucks is going to get you a gallon of gas. Yeah, well, maybe not where I live, pal. That's what you get for living in Kami, Fornia. So for those who don't know, this is my arch, right-wing libertarian friend who lives in Florida, but somehow still maintains a thin veneer of sanity. I live in Arizona. Yeah, like I say, it's the same thing. You've got better beaches. They just don't have as much water. But anyway, the issue is that say you call the cops and this person comes out and they've got a lease that looks all official and water bills and electric bills in their name. Like, realistically, what do you expect the cops are going to do about it? Well, I expect them to throw out fake tenants. Okay, so I'm going to call the cops and tell them that your house is my house and that you're squatting in it. Do you want them to throw you out on my say-so?

No, okay, now I suppose you're right. But it just sounds absolutely crazy that the cops won't do anything about it. How can that be the case? Well, they do something about it. They treat it like a civil matter, and that means you have to go to court, and court costs money. But here's the thing. There's all these misconceptions about squatting floating around right now, and I really want to put them to rest because I seriously cannot stand fake outrage, as I think you know. Yeah, I agree.

That stuff is the worst. I mean, that's social media in a nutshell. people get into all these issues and I'm like, hey, slow down, let's pick this apart a little. And half the time, all the outrage is nothing more than a headline that some editor at Newsweek pulled out of their ass. So what actually is the law about somebody moving into your house, setting up shop and just calling it their own? Like everything else in America, it's super complicated. I mean, there's 50 states, there's thousands of counties and municipal governments, and they all have their own laws. So there's not really an easy answer to what does the law say.

I mean, obviously the federal government isn't getting involved in this yet. Are there plans for that that we know of? None that I can find, but, you know, give it time. Right. So the law varies, but how the law responds to it doesn't really. In most places, you know, these squatters are not stupid. They're doing stuff so that when the cops show up, they have some kind of protection. Like what?

What could suffice? Usually they drop a fake lease. And once they have that, they can start getting utility bills in their name. Why? I mean, okay, hear me out here. You're stealing somebody's house. Why not steal the electricity in the water while they're at it? Why bother making a fake lease that's not going to pass muster in court at all?

You print it out on some inkjet at Kinko's, but you're paying my electric bills. Make it make sense. The short version is they have something to show the cops when they show up when you call that, you know? They want something. The cops are going to check their utilities? Yeah. That's usually how it goes. Hey, we got a report that you're squatting.

Well, no, I'm not. Here's my lease, you know, in giant screaming air quotes because the lease is totally fake. But here's a very real electric bill. And then the cops tell you to take the squatter to court, which that costs a lot of money. Last I checked, Laura's are pretty expensive, right? Yeah, I used to be one. Technically still am one, so I know a little bit about that. I mean, I shouldn't admit this.

But I remember billing a client something like $75 because I was talking about a case to another attorney while I was taking a piss. And it would have been 135, but I didn't wash my hands afterwards. Gross, but typical 2007, Jordan, if I'm not mistaken. That's true. Yeah. So basically the property owners are then put in this horrible position where in extreme cases, they have to spend months and thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars getting these guys out the hard but super legal way.

Sometimes they just offer them cash for keys and pay them to take a hike. So essentially I'm willingly getting extorted at that point where it's like, okay, I could get you out the super legal way, but here's $800. I never want to see you and your three dumb friends again and please move my couch back into the house. Yes, exactly. Gosh. Okay, so I have to ask the obvious question. Actually, there are a lot of obvious questions here, but the one that really stands out is, how is this all legal? Like, I get the idea that you can't just throw a tenant out or shut their utilities off.

but that is somebody who is in a house legally who has a lease or a rental agreement and has been paying rent. In what world does that apply to people who just break into a house and start living there with some crappy lease scribbled on the back of a Chili's napkin? Well, the legal term for this is adverse possession. This doesn't apply to everyone who sets up shop on someone's property. You have to meet some key requirements to have any kind of leg to stand on legally. First, you need to be living in the place as if it were your own. you use the front door, things like that.

You're not hiding in somebody's house. That's not going to cut it. Remember that gal that was living in the sign of a grocery store for a year? Did you hear about that one? She just nobody noticed she was in there. Yeah, I remember that story. That was, of all the stuff I read about before this, that was honestly the most, like actual squatting that I heard about.

I mean, it's hard to say what's what with any of this because you just get these little blurbs that focus on the most lurid aspect of the story. So for those of you who do not know about this, some woman in Michigan was living inside of a grocery store sign. I mean like a big sign on the roof of a big building that's the size of a warehouse. And apparently you could get into the sign. I don't really know how that works. But she had a remote job. I guess she was using Wi-Fi or tethering to her phone.

She had a standing desk. Good for her. Sitting is bad for you. She had a Couric coffee maker, a printer, the whole nine, just on the roof of a random. grocery store and she was there for a long time. This was her home. Yeah. So other than her willingness to drink the abomination known as Currig Coffee, her setup was pretty much like mine when I lived in the middle of the desert. So this is like bona fide squatting in that she was making improvements and actually living there. Where it's not like actual squatting is that the property

wasn't abandoned. I see. And depending on the state, you might need some kind of legal paperwork that says that you're entitled to be there. Some states, you don't. You don't even need that. Some states require a good faith claim. That's known as the main doctrine, but that's kind of a weird name for it because it's not the law in Maine anymore. You also have to be improving the structure or land like the homesteaders in the Old West. So, and obviously, you know, government property is off limits. Of course. Of course the government figured out how to protect themselves. I assume this is because of, well, actually it makes sense, right? Because of government housing, it wouldn't make any sense at all if people who are given government housing could suddenly

claim like, hey, I've lived here for five years. This whole building is mine now. Yeah, of course. The main thing is adverse possession doesn't apply in any of these cases you're reading about in the news. The woman who got arrested for trying to evict squatters or the woman living in a sign, adverse possession cases take years to build. Weirdly, my home state, Arizona is probably the easiest state to take adverse possession. You only need to pay the property tax for like two years, but most places you're talking about the better part of a decade, and you need to be making improvements and whatnot. When you lived in the middle of the desert, and I know you kind of still do, but when you were living in the middle, middle, did you just park your trailer in like a plot of land and

be like, I guess I'll just stay here. It doesn't look like anybody else is here? No, I own five acres of land. Okay. You indicated earlier like, what I was just doing, I was living in the middle of nowhere. I thought you just kind of went like, well, it doesn't look like anybody is out here. I'm parking this sucker right here, and I'm going to dig a hole in the back. I don't know. That's what it sounded like. Okay, that makes sense. Because I figured land out there, the demand can't be that high for land in the middle of the desert in the first place. You might as well own it and have a deed that is not printed up on your inkjet printer, just in case anybody asks, especially in a place where a lot of gun-toating folks are around. You don't want somebody knocking

on your door and telling you that you're on their land at 4 o'clock in the morning. All right, so I'm still kind of lost. I would strongly advise you against squatting out where I used to live because of the, yeah, gun-toting maniacs. Because of the guard towers that people build on their property. You told me about that. People with literal gun towers on their property and a trailer.

That's not a neighbor you want to screw with. People have guard towers and 100-yard markers. Like, don't squat where I used to live. That's insane, but also what's that good fences make good neighbors kind of thing? You don't have to worry about somebody trespassing too much. I mean, they would be dead by now. So, all right, I'm kind of lost

as to how people are squatting in vacation houses and Airbnbs and stuff like that and just these unoccupied rental properties. And this is somehow all legal? I mean, the short version is it's not, it's not legal. And it's also a totally different thing from squatting. It's not even the same law. It's what's known as defrauding an innkeeper. Okay, for those who think we are just making this up,

explain to us why in 2024 we still have a crime called defrauding. an innkeeper, which sounds like something from Game of Thrones. Yeah, so I know it sounds like something out of Harry Potter or whatever, but it's a felony. It's punishable by jail time. This is the same crime they hit you with when you run out on a restaurant tab. So, all right, how are bros then squatting or not squatting Airbnb's for Coachella then? That's theft of services when you do it at a restaurant, but sure, it's basically the same thing. Remember what I said to you earlier and maybe some of our listeners know all too well.

lawyers and courts are expensive. And in many jurisdictions, the cops either don't care or they're too overwhelmed to do anything about it. And to a certain extent, the cops have to, and I think frankly should give squatters, or whatever you want to call them, the benefit of the doubt. Okay, why? What do you mean? Well, think of it this way. You're sitting in your own house or your apartment or whatever, and somebody calls the cops and says that you're not legally allowed to be there. You're a squatter on their property. They want you thrown out. Don't you want the benefit of the doubt so you can stay in your house while everything shakes out? Yeah, absolutely. That does make sense when you frame it that way. Right. So things become super complicated in these cases because the urban squatters are like getting the heat and the power and the water turned on in their names. I mean, there's entire websites dedicated to teaching people how to make it extremely hard to throw them out of these homes. So you own a property, you find a squatter, you call the cops, cops show up, the person has a fake lease they printed up, They have utility bills that maybe they've been paying. Maybe they haven't.

But they have utility bills. What exactly are the cops supposed to do? Because at that point, they kind of have to assume that the person is there legitimately. And now you have to go to court to get them out. And that's where it becomes hard, right? Because you have the law on your side. But the process of getting them to actually enforce the law is a whole other thing. You've got to file papers.

You probably got to hire a lawyer. And at that point, this person is already probably looking, for a new place to stay the second they get wind of the fact that you even know about it. They're just running down the clock and even letting you win by default judgment. They're not fighting you. They just know that they've got like 90 days before the sheriff shows up. Right. Why do they care? You're trying to get them out of the house. They know you're going to eventually, but they also know it could take weeks or even months to get them evicted. Okay, so they are gaming the system. That's the idea here. Yeah, that's correct. Is this a new thing? People can't have just figured this out recently. It's

It sounds like something that's been going on for a hundred years and is just recently in the news cycle because of some, again, twisted headlines. Squatting is a very proud American tradition. Think about how the West was settled. You had all this sparsely populated land that Native Americans didn't have the same concept of ownership as the settlers. And the government wanted people living on this land and developing it. So they set up a bunch of rules about what counted as owning it. and there were limits on how much you could own. You had to be improving the land.

They called it homesteading to differentiate it from people just kind of hanging out, you know, on the land. But the basic idea is the same. So more recently than that, you have actual bona fide squatters kind of like we have now, but it was more of a community thing and it was mostly anarchists moving to dangerous neighborhoods, stealing utilities, that kind of thing. They are actually using adverse possession claims. a friend of mine visited a couple of these squats in Philly and described the occupants as being straight from central casting.

Okay, I'm so curious what he meant by straight from central casting. You know, Mohawks, spiked leather jackets, ass flaps, that kind of thing. Okay, ass flaps? What is an ass flap? I know I'm going to regret asking this question. Or at least I think I will. So no word of a lie. These kinds of dudes used to cut T-shirts into these little flaps

that they would like hang off the back of the back of the their pants. And I think it started as a way to protect their pants from sitting on the pavement and begging for change all day. I'm not really sure. But it was a fashion statement in a certain circle at a certain time. You got to be making that up. That's so weird. Yeah, I'm totally not making this on. Me and my friends from the 90s hardcore scene joke about it constantly. It's like homeless people inspired fashion. I guess it does seem better than what I thought. It kind of which is cutting the ass out of your pants and just having a flap there. Like a, you know, those pajamas that people wear in cartoons of old where there's buttons

and you can unbutton it to go to the bathroom, the little onesies? Anyway, I don't know how we got on this subject, ass flaps. Well, you know, punk pants are expensive. You've got to keep them in top shape. And the irony of punk clothes being expensive is ridiculous. It's a topic for another skeptical Sunday. That's right. Anyway, in New York especially, but there were all their cities too, Philly being one of them.

You had all these buildings that had basically been abandoned by the owners, and so people started living in them. And the difference between that and what we're talking about today is this wasn't a game of whackable for these people. They would live there for years. They usually made very extensive improvements to the property. And so when Giuliani started cleaning up New York in the late 90s, these people were understandably very, very unhappy when the cops came and threw them out of places that, you know, in some cases they've been living in for a decade. or maybe more. There were riots over this. All right, now it's time for us to pop a squat.

Again, I'm not sure I use that correctly. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators, and Nick Pell, on the show every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know like and trust. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free

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Now back to Sceptical Sunday. Man, it's kind of funny to think about because I would imagine these people were occupying buildings that were worth jack squat, right? They were abandoned. The owner didn't even care about it. They didn't maintain it. And then suddenly Giuliani cleans up New York and they're like, this is worth $28 million, this warehouse. Oh, I better go check on that. I think I own that. Why are there 48 people living in here that have built bunk beds and a soundstage? And then they just have to throw everybody out. And they're like, what are you talking about? I've been here for 12 years. You're going to throw me out. I got no place to go.

I've never heard about any of this. But it actually sounds like, like a lot of fun if you're in your 20s and you don't have maybe a ton of career ambitions. You're just hanging out with a bunch of people in one of the greatest cities in the world and you've got kind of like your own little anarchist community. Well, greatest cities in the world, you know, pretty Giuliani, New York was pretty rough and tumble. It was a little mad maxy, yeah, for sure. I experienced it with my own eyes and it was a little mad maxy. But, you know, we don't have the time to get into it here.

But if you're curious about that story, just Google C-Squot, like the Lone, like the letter C in New York City. That was the biggest one and you can kind of like go down the rabbit hole from there. I remember reading about this in anarchist punk scenes in the 90s, like profane existence and, you know, telling my parents, I'm going to drop out of school and go live off the land in the Lower East Side. Yeah, they must have loved that. Yeah, they definitely did not encourage that plan. I remember my old man saying to me, you know, you can't do that. Nobody does that. Well, guess what, Pop, I was right. So why are people doing? doing that? I mean, again, I can see how that would appeal to a certain type of sociopathic deadbeat who just

wants to take advantage of how slow the system works, but there's got to be some other reason that we're hearing about this is a lot right now. Well, you live at one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. I think you of all people would understand why we're hearing about this right now. Yeah, right. There are houses and apartments for rent and the jobs pay more here because the cost of living is higher. That's the thing, though. People talk about the standard of living in America being better, because you can get an alarm clock for $10 at Walmart or whatever. But the problem is we're experiencing a massive inflation right now that doesn't even take into account energy costs and food and housing,

among other things that people need to live. These are all things that are clearly more important than being able to get a 4K big screen for $500 when a crappy little cathode rate tube used to be $1,000 in the 70s, which was obviously, you know, a ton of money back then. I lived in Portland in the late 2000s, and one reason I lived there was it was so ridiculously cheap. My first apartment was 250 bucks a month. People who lived there since the 90s used to complain constantly about how expensive the city had gotten since they moved there. And I think it was maybe five years or so after I left that my old friends from the city started telling me that they were getting notices that their rent was tripling or whatever.

Wow, tripling. That's crazy. Yeah, I don't remember the. exact amount, but as far as I know, Portland's on rent control, that it was more than they could afford anyway. So I know I sound like an a hole saying this, but why not just move to a cheaper city? Well, that's the thing. The cheap cities are becoming few and far between. The people who are experiencing the biggest issues finding housing, I think it's safe to say, are probably people who don't have some robust skill set that allows them to move clear across the country. And I think, yeah,

In many cases, I think a lot of them just refuse to live somewhere as, you know, uncouth and declaise as Topeka or Boise. Poor Boise. I know. People expect us to be like, Topeka, no, God, no. Right, right, exactly. And Boise is like a really bad example because the rent there is nuts now. A lot of tech workers have moved to Boise. But the anecdotes are one thing, but actual statistics are rough. And when you look at the increase in rent, you're looking at it. average increase. Fair market rat goes up 13.7% year over year since 1980. That's according to Doorloop. You can look that up. Yeah, we put our sources in the show notes for people. Great. By comparison, wages, and this is Harvard Business Review. You know, this is not Jacobin or Mother Jones or some lefty publication. Harvard Business Review says wages have grown a whopping 0.2% year over year since the early 1970s. Yeah, yikes. Okay, so why all of the sudden is a city like Bozeman, Montana so expensive? It's not a coastal city. It's not, I can't imagine it's like Tech Central. I know people who are about to write me emails, yes, I'm sure there's a vibrant startup scene, but you all know what I'm talking about. Yeah, Bozeman's a great example of this phenomenon. I call them Silicon Valley colonies, but especially after COVID, there was like 22% of adults moved or knew someone who did or knew someone who did is obviously doing a fair bit of

work there. But, you know, so many companies just don't care where people live because they don't care if you come into work anymore. So I've worked remote since 2009, but now it's super common, especially in the tech industry. So when all of a sudden, little Bozeman, Montana sees its population balloon by 10% in two years. And I don't know this about Bozeman, but I know it's true. Some other cities, they have zoning laws that preclude quick and easy growth. That massively impacts the supply of available housing as well as what people can pay for it. So it is seemingly true about us Californians coming in and just ruining it for everybody else, basically.

Yeah, I mean, think about it this way. How is an auto mechanic, which is a decent job by all accounts, how's an auto mechanic supposed to compete with some senior level coder earning a ridiculous salary from a company based in Silicon Valley? But let's get some hard data on this so it's not just anecdotes and people we're making up, the average rent in Bozeman went up 20% between 2019 and 2022. Can you afford a 20% rent increase? Gosh, wow, even way out in Montana, though, that's kind of scary. You know, you come to Silicon Valley, by the way, it's Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is probably someplace in L.A., and they call it that

for a different reason. You know, you come here going, I'm going to get ripped off on everything. I'm going to go to Chipotle and pay $18 for a crappy bowl of beans and rice, right? But in Montana, I don't know. I kind of have this romantic notion that Michigan and Montana and Ohio still have reasonable prices and you're not going to be like, why am I paying this much for a basement apartment with a window that doesn't close and leaks in the winter? Yeah, I mean, I know renting Grand Rapids have gone nuts. I don't have the numbers, but yeah, Grand Rapids. Bozeman, one city. It's not Austin. It's not Asheville. It's not Portland. It's not any of these cities that have this cachet of, oh, I can, you know, take my remote work, tech job from a richer

coastal city, and it's just like San Francisco, but smaller and a fifth of the price. Yeah, that's fair. Wow. You know, it's Bozeman. It's Grand Rapids. Man, I can see how that could become a big problem pretty quickly because now there's almost no refuge for people that sort of make normal amounts of money. Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not justifying squatting. I think property rights are the absolute bedrock of any functioning free society. People are not going to have the kind of skin in the game they need to be functioning, engaged, concerned citizens if they have to worry about some random Portland anarchists showing up and claiming that, you know, I own your house now. It's just not going to work.

Yeah, it's hard to run a business if I've got to stand on the roof of my house with a rifle to protect my house all day. First of all, the acoustics are not great for podcasting and the gunshots are really hard to remove and post. But the view. Yeah, the view. So America is, I don't know if I'd say we're in a housing crisis. I didn't really research that, but I will say I think it's pretty clear that a lot of people are getting priced out. Yeah. And that comes with a lot of dangers. Like, I'm not a socialist, but- Not anymore, that is. Oh, you're going to ruin my reputation. But the point is that having a bunch of people who are only qualified to do low-income jobs that now don't even pay enough

to rent a decent place to live is probably more dangerous than the squatters. I mean, Jordan Peterson, love them or hate him. I'm not a huge fan, but one thing I think he really nails is if you have too many people who lose the game too hard for too long, they just say screw the game and flip the board over, and that's dangerous. It is dangerous. Scott Galloway says something similar, right? The most dangerous thing in society is an excess of young men that have nothing to look forward to. I'm paraphrasing it badly. But it's true. And I'm big on this too, right? I see a lot of guys that graduate from college and they're like, wow, I will never own a home. A car is super freaking expensive. I can't find a place to park it for under 500 bucks a month. My salary, unless you

work in tech, hasn't grown since 1970. My dad's yelling at me because I don't own a house, a car, a motorcycle, and have three kids already, and I'm 25 like he did with his high school diploma or whatever, right? So it's like, they just look at the comparison and they're like, wow, This totally sucks. Meanwhile, their neighbor works at Meta doing something on Facebook and makes $400,000 a year and his wife makes, you know, $400,000 a year and they've got a boat and two homes. It's just, that's not good. That is a recipe for disaster. So, okay, is the squatting thing, though, even a thing? How prevalent is this really? Because you know as well as I do that just because there's been two or three or even a dozen articles about this on MSNBC or Breitbart or whatever, that just does not mean that this is a huge issue. It could just mean it's a slow news cycle and people need a break from Gaza or whatever. I don't think there's really any evidence

that this is a massive issue. I don't think it's coming to your little suburb anytime soon. Pick whatever state you live in, Google it with the word squatters. And what you're going to find is a lot of articles about what the law is on squatting, a few news articles that have these vague, ominous headlines like police ward

about the threat of squatters. Here's how to protect yourself. But like, there's not going to be very many stories about squatters. Bonified squatters, they're going to be very few and far between. And a lot of the horror stories that make the rounds on social media aren't even what they appear to be at first glance. That somehow checks out. So let's assume that I've got squatters or people overstaying their welcome in my Airbnb or whatever.

How do I go about getting these people out? So you probably should call the cops, not legal advice. If you need to be told that, you have worse problems than needing legal advice. But call on the cops, creates the paper trail, and there's a good chance. You don't expect the cops to get rid of them. That's especially true if they've ever had a legal right to be there. And that's because, again, the cops treat this as a civil matter, not a criminal one. And there's only two states that treat it as a criminal matter.

And that's Florida and West Virginia. And how is that working out for them? We'll get to that in a bit. The thing with the cops is like no one wants to stick their neck out and be the guy who evicted some legal occupant from their home. So they're just going to tell you to go to court. Right. And that costs money, yada, yada. And I want to clarify something really quick.

If you come home from Trader Joe's and there's somebody in your house, they're a burglar and or a trespasser. Call the cops and don't, you know, they're going to get that person out. What we're talking about here is you haven't been to your Lake Tahoe vacation rental. in four months and your neighbors, you don't know them. And you come and there's people that seemingly live there and they've like been mowing your lawn, right? Yeah. The whole time.

Yes, exactly. And they thought like, oh, crap, I didn't realize anybody lived here. You can still call the cops and those people might still leave realizing the jig is up, especially if they're like 21 years old. But it becomes squatting when they're like, here's my fake ink jet lease. You know, I wondered why I hadn't gotten an electric bill for this place for a while because they switched it over to their name. Now you got a real squatter, right?

So, yeah, but getting them out with the courts, that is where you start dropping serious chain. Right. And the cost is going to vary from one jurisdiction in the next. So even here in the state of Arizona, there's a different procedure and a different time frame for every county. But here where I live, you're looking at paying between $600 and $800 to get them out in three to six weeks. And at that point, they very well may have trashed the place. Six to $800 to get an intruder out of your home? Honestly, that doesn't sound too bad. Where do I sign? Well, that's the low end, and that's in Arizona where everything is cheap. So like anything else involving courts and lawyers, it can get expensive real fast. I think that the thinking in Arizona is, you know, we got a lot of seniors, snowbird. So when people go back to Illinois or Alberta or whatever, once it gets to be 150 degrees out here, you got all kinds of prime real estate sitting around unoccupied. And because a lot of these people are seniors, they might not know that this is a danger. Again, it sounds like we have a lot of articles warning people about this and very few news stories about it actually happening. So out here, one thing that you do need to be aware of is somebody filing a quick claim deed or starting to pay the property taxes on a place.

That's where you can get screwed, but it's pretty specific to Arizona. The downside of living in Arizona other than, you know, it's 115 degrees out half the year, is that it's also one of the places where you have. have a lot of people willing to do stuff like that. Why? Why is that? There's no statistics on this, but I'm sure it's even, you know, I'm sure it's even less of a thing than other types of squatting. But anecdotally, we do have a lot of sovereign citizens out here.

Oh, okay. So those cooks who think they don't have to obey the law because the USA secretly signed a treaty with Morocco in 1779 or whatever nonsense. So these folks, and correct me if I'm wrong, they refuse to obey a lot of laws and regulations because their claim, their assertion is that they are not citizens of the United States, but are, as it says in the label, sovereign. And so they don't need to, I don't know, pay taxes. They don't need valid license plates or documents or whatever. Am I getting it right? Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it. It's anecdotal, but I've met a couple, especially when I lived out in the desert. And I have seen, I think, two license plates that were self-made or bought online that said, Republic of Texas, not driving,

traveling, these bogus self-made license plates. I mean, it's enough of an issue that I do know that the local sheriff's department is trained on how to de-escalate interactions with these people. They're generally not threatening or anything like that, but they don't really know how to quit when they're ahead. I asked a sheriff's deputy at my gym about sovereign citizens, and he just kind of laughed and told me a couple stories about dealing with them that were more humorous than anything. Yeah, these are the folks where you see them on, if you ever watch true crime court cases or something, they say things like, the American flag in this courtroom has a gold frill around the edges, so it's a maritime court, therefore you do not have jurisdiction over me or some like,

and the judge is just like, yeah, no, you're going to prison. And then the bailiffs take them out while they're screaming about how it's illegal and they're like, yeah, whatever. you know what's cheaper than ammunition for your rooftop gun and placement slash podcast studio the fine products and services that support this show we'll be right back thank you so much for listening to and supporting this podcast your support of our sponsors means i don't have to squat on somebody else's property to learn more and get links to all of the deals discount codes and ways to support the show visit jordan harbinger.com slash deals now for the rest of skeptical sunday so okay so i know what a quick claim deed is from my property law class in eon ago but can you explain this for people

who have never heard of it? This is a thing among sovereign citizens. I mean, a thing is like a relative term, but basically they just, they file deeds on the basis of quit claim, which means they're just claiming no one has a right to the property. And the clerks have to file these as if they're legit. Once they do that,

you're going to be able to get them out eventually, but this is where it gets really expensive, really time-consuming, because once they're filing stuff with the county, the county is absolutely going to step in and say, hold on a second, we need to figure out what's what, who actually owns this place.

Yeah, and that's absolutely crazy that somebody can just do this to your property, and then you've got to go, you've got to jump through all the hoops because somebody who's like insane or has two brain cells just was like, no, I'm a Moroccan citizen, so I can own this property because I like it. Yeah, you want to hear something really crazy about that and about all of this, is say you get somebody out of your house, are you allowed to remove their belongings from your home? Again, depends on where you live.

In many states, you can't even clear the place out once you're really. rid of these unwanted housecasts. And if you have a rental property, that means it could be several months before you're going to start earning income on it again, as usual. So why aren't there stronger laws against these types of bad faith shenanigans, which is all this seems like it is? I think one reason is, forget about not being at the top. It's on the list of priorities. The city with the most squatters as of 2024 is Atlanta. That's according to the National Rental Home Council. So I'd say maybe be. a little more conservative in estimating numbers because they might be including people who

were getting evicted anyway and are just waiting for the sheriff to show up and boot them out. But anyway, take a guess. Atlanta is a city of about 500,000 people. How many squatters do you think it has? I don't know. Number one squatting city in America, half a million people. I don't know. 10,000?

1,400. Okay. 1400. In a city of 500,000 people, 0.2% of the people are squatted. After that, it's Dallas. They've got 475 squatters in a city of 1.3 million. And bringing in the bronze is Orlando. That's got 125 squatters in a city of 316,000. So this obviously raises the question about the degree to which this is a moral panic and the degree to which this is a serious concern. Yeah, I mean, when you're telling me that a city of 1.3 million has 475 people squatting,

that just does not seem like a huge issue. Don't get me wrong. If I'm one of the people whose house is getting squatted, I'd be super pissed, but this is not like an epidemic that needs to be addressed immediately by the highest echelons of the government. Right. It's annoying. It's annoying if you're one of the people that are affected. But it's just not a lot of people doing it, at least not in big cities. Now out where I live in the Wild West, I've heard about squatters.

They tend to be really nasty. So tweakers will take over your home when you go and be. vacation, you come home, your pipes are gone. Your copper pipes have been stripped out of your house. And that's anecdotal, but I really don't doubt that it happens. So I think in some sense, it's easier to ignore in a city than it is out here in the countryside. Yeah, tweakers selling your pipes is somehow peak Arizona desert dweller behavior, present company excluded. But I will say in Detroit, there's a lot of stealing of pipes and abandoned properties. I don't even know if that's a bad thing because the property is non-inhabited and unusable anyways. But you hear about it around here,

there'll be a construction site. They'll go put in all the wiring and the piping. And then like over the 4th of July weekend, all that stuff gets ripped out and sold. That's not squatting. That's just straight up theft. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's burglary people. Call the cops about that. But, you know, I can see how the impact could be a lot greater in some little desert town, especially like, you know, if it has a reputation like, hey, the cops don't come here, which is definitely true Iso live. Like, the cops are not coming out unless there's shots fired. And basically, that little area then is like, if it gets that reputation, it's a magnet

for squatters. So if you've got a city of 500,000 people and you got 1,400 squatters, it's not that big of a deal. You've got a city or a town of, you know, 300 and 25 people are squatting. That's almost 10% of the population of that town. And it's going to make people. feel really uneasy. They're going to be afraid to go on vacation. They're going to be afraid to shop for groceries. So, you know, people think I'm nuts out there because I used to leave my trailer

unlocked all the time. But like, if a tweaker wants to break into my fifth wheel, the locks on that thing, we're not going to stop them. Yeah, you living alone in a trailer in the middle of the Arizona desert is wild, man. You're like a walking, talking billboard for the second amendment at that rate. Well, like my bumper sticker says, who needs a lock when you got a glock? It does not surprise me at all that you would have that bumper sticker, but I should know this, but where would you even buy a bumper sticker like that at the gun range? Gun shows. You know, gun shows.

If you never been to a gun show, I strongly recommend it because it's like- Oh, I have. I just didn't get a good appraisal of the bumper sticker offering. Bumper stickers are the best part, man. You thought Calvin Peeing on stuff went away. He's alive and well in America's gun shows. What kind of Glock do you have? or is that sort of top secret not to be advertised?

I've got a Glock 20. What is that? I don't know if I know what that is. It's basically a howitzer that you can hold in your hand. Okay. So something like 10 states are looking into making squatting a crime, but like so many things these days, now it's like, well, I want people out of my house that are there illegally. And it's like, oh, that's a Republican issue. And, you know, Democrats respond by taking some stupid contrarian position.

And by the way, I think this works both ways, like on a variety of different issues. Like, I am 100% not trying to beat up on Democrats at all. I think Republicans absolutely do the same thing on different issues where something becomes a, you know, a quote, unquote, Democrat issue and Republicans take some idiotic contrarian position against it. And the final, you know, analysis, what ends up happening is nothing. And so that said, I think that both sides of the aisle have some decent points. but mostly I want to highlight the fact that they're pretty solid and compelling reasons to be cautious about changing the law to be harder on squatters. So why? Why would we not want to change the law to be harder on squatters? Well, first of all, I am a, as I think you know, I'm a big believer in fewer laws rather than more. And if we're going to change the laws, there has to be a good reason and not just some moral panic because of tech talkers. State legislatures have limited time. State governments have limited resources.

It does not strike me as a wise use of taxpayer dollars to radically change our laws because the news picked up on this is the conservative outrage of the week. Okay, but hear me out. Why shouldn't there be stronger laws against squatting? Look, I am such a believer in property rights. I think it's, I think it is literally the basis of every other right that we have is, is property rights. Your home is your home is your home.

People who have no right being there shouldn't be there. And I absolutely think that it should be completely legal for you to use any means necessary to get them off of your land. That's in my perfect world where I'm king. But we had a thing out here in Arizona where our overwhelmingly Republican state legislature passed some tough anti-squatter legislation, and it got vetoed. Katie Holmes or governor, she's pretty far out on the left for Arizona, which yeah, isn't saying much. But her stated reasons for wanting to veto the bill are pretty sound. from my perspective. She framed it as protection for domestic abuse victims. Right. Okay. I actually, I understand. I can see this getting weaponized against abuse victims.

Like if you got a couple and one of them has their name on the lease or the deed and the other person doesn't, now they can just suddenly get the boot. Right. Exactly. And the issue with the law that they wanted to pass in Arizona was that all you needed was an affidavit to get the other person out of the house. and I'm just not okay with making it that easy for cops to throw people out of their homes. I think there's way more people who are going to use that in petty arguments with ex-partners or roommates than there are people squatting. So fair point. Okay, what should we do here, in your opinion?

I don't think we need to do anything. I'm sure there's some nipping around the edges to tighten up the process, increase penalties that can act as a deterrent or something. but for the most part, it seems to me like barring a few really egregious examples that obviously make headlines. The system works. There's a thing called due process in this country. And if we start throwing that out the window because we feel inconvenienced, it's just it opens a whole can of worms. Yeah, that tracks. I mean, what are people complaining about?

Oh, it takes too long. And that's not an issue with the law as such. It's an issue with how clogged up our courts are. and you can't really legislate that away. And in fact, tightening up these laws and making them more strict, it could have the unintended consequence of clogging up the courts more, as you see people starting to engage in these frivolous claims of squatters when it's really like their roommate who was a week late with the rent

and you don't like him because he smells bad or whatever. Yeah, you absolutely need to think in those terms because this is basically what the law boils down to is answering questions like, do we tolerate more frivolous claims of squatting in the name of getting squatters out, or do we tolerate more squatting because we want to protect people who might be targeted by tougher laws? And answering these questions is literally the entire project of civilization. It sounds like the hype about this is all just outrage, clickbait, as kind of we were

hinting at earlier. Yeah. So when ABC News in New York picks up a story about a woman getting arrested for confronting squatters, it blows up on a slow news day because people are tired of reading about the election or the warrant Gaza or the Trump trials or whatever. Yeah, so I did hear about that. What exactly happened there? Why did this woman get arrested? She did something like it was her house. So why did she get arrested? Unlawful eviction. She changed the locks. You're not allowed to do that. Okay. She changed the locks. And even though they were squatting, she changed the lock. So, okay, I get it. That's the constructive eviction right there. I think that if I recall correctly, they weren't squatting. They overstayed their lease. Oh, I think, but I could be wrong about

that, like, but either way, like, yeah, you can't just change the locks. I mean, I get it. On one level, it's totally insane. But for the reasons we've talked about, I'm not really hearing any convincing reasons for why you should be able to just change the locks on the door when there's people living there who don't have the keys to the new locks. That's true. So I've heard a bit about this happening at people's Airbnb. It's like someone will check in and then they refuse to check out and stay there forever. And then the person has to get them evicted. And how, how, how, Is that? Because that seems ridiculous, but I can imagine it's got to happen at some point. There's got to be people who've figured out they can abuse this. I looked high and low for stats on this and I couldn't find any hard data. But given what I've learned about squatting in general, I'm guessing it's pretty rare.

Do you remember the story about that lady who was living in this super high-end luxury house for two years or something? She probably rented it for a couple weeks and just wouldn't leave? Yes, yes. In fact, I read about it again when I was researching for the podcast, but here's the thing, though. This has zero to do with laws about squatting. I mean, absolutely nothing at all. This was a huge court battle over whether or not she had paid him rent and they had a long-term lease. She claimed that they came to an agreement for a long-term lease and she paid it. What's the truth? Who knows? But it's a great example of how the media seizes on these stories and makes them into something that they're going to, they're not and makes this huge moral panic around squatting. I mean, I'm not like a super into conspiracy theories here. Well, yes, you are. Yes, you are. I'm really not. But I will say this. If I were Airbnb, I would love these stories about squatting because they take the heat off Airbnb getting blamed for the housing crisis, which I think is also a false narrative that often gets brought up with squatting. I concede that there's an issue of affordable housing in America, but does it have anything to do with Airbnb?

I'm always getting these emails. Like, this company is ruining everything? And I'm like, is it really that? Or is it just like a symptom of a greater issue that's not going to be solved by not letting people rent out their spare bedroom? Look, it's like every other problem. It's super complex. People want easy answers. People want a simple villain to point to it's not.

It does not have an easy answer. It involves the housing market supply, private equity firms, zoning laws, supply chain issues. and yes, immigration, it doesn't matter if we're talking about California moving to Texas or people moving from one country to another. Airbnb is not the reason your rent went up. It is a very complex problem. Yeah, we could probably do a whole episode on that. But anyway, back to this lady who occupied that large home.

Wasn't she kind of using some COVID-era laws against the landlord or something? Remember when it was basically impossible to evict somebody because of COVID? I didn't see anything about COVID in the articles that I read. Actually, there were some articles that said she didn't want to leave because she was afraid of COVID, but I didn't see any direct quotes from her about that. So who knows? But the COVID thing is great to talk about because it's another example of people conflating things with squatting that have absolutely nothing to do with squatting. People who were staying in apartments for years without paying rent during COVID were not squatters. They were people who were leveraging COVID laws about eviction against their landlords.

I'm not saying it's good. I don't think that it is, but it's not squatting. If you have an issue with people who abused the system during COVID, your issue is with COVID madness. It's not with squatting. So talk to me about these online squatting guides. I've heard them come up in some of the news articles and general discourse around squatting. I mean, is there really like somebody out there who's like, I will teach you to squat on other people's properties? That's crazy.

I know there's one on TikTok. Every trending evil seems to come from TikTok originally. Yeah, like the guy's getting perms again, trend. No, are guys getting perms again? Say it ain't so. That is awful. I can definitely tell that you have not been to a gym after the local high school lets out anytime soon.

Oh, man. Broccoli head. That's what's going on. Not a fan of it, but it's what the kids are doing. So, yeah, there's this guy on TikTok. He's a Venezuelan migrant influence. which is a migrant influencer is apparently a thing, but he was teaching people how to squat, and that's unfortunate. I don't really believe in shutting people down for legal speech,

and the guy, he's a bastard for spreading the info, but speech is speech. He has every right to do so. I don't think that this is a genie that's going to get put back in the bottle. So again, the question is, should I care about this? As far as I could tell, the answer was no. This is just is not an issue. deserving of the press attention it's gotten. So how do you even begin talking about this with somebody who's convinced that houses are being squatted all over the place and that this is some huge issue? Well, first of all, ask them if they live in New York because so many of these horror stories come from New York, which notoriously has some of the weakest property rights protections

in the country. Other than that, I don't know. I don't think people are really convinced by facts and logic. Sadly, I think you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Yeah, amen. I mean, leading a horse to water is basically my secondary show tagline at this point. Obviously, I think your listeners are a little more sophisticated than that, and they're probably listening to this because they want some truth. Yeah, well, nice save, and I'm glad that we don't actually have to worry about this. My plans for a rooftop studio slash gun nest were starting to get costly real quick.

So thank you, Nick, for putting our fears to rest on this one. And thanks everyone for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday. today to Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. Show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I am at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Thanks to Nick Pell for joining me today. This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer.

forgot what a quick claim deed was, so you don't want to hire me for anything. Do your own research before implementing things that you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on skeptical Sunday. And if you think we really dropped the ball on something, definitely let us know. We're usually pretty receptive to that. And you all know how to reach me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, definitely share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. Maybe somebody who thinks that squatting is the next epidemic and we're not going to have homes.

in five years. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with an undercover ATF agent that infiltrated the infamous Pagans biker gang. Everyone was saying, hey, motorcycle enthusiasts, bikers are all bad. So they did this whole study, and basically out of study, it came back and said, hey, listen, 99% of them aren't. You know, one percent of these bikers might be problematic or gang members or what have you, but the rest of time. Well, Well, then the bikers, the real bikers, the outlaw bikers, were like, hey, this is great. We are the 1%.

We're proud of being the 1%. I mean, you know, people think these are just a bunch of morons running around a party, and they're very sophisticated in how they move their money. They're very sophisticated in their structure. And they're also very sophisticated in what they do. People are always like, oh, whatever made you decide to do a two-year-undercover. Listen, I didn't sign up for a two-year undercover deal. That's just what it turned into.

Very few of these run for two years. you're always kind of just seeing how it's going to play out, and that's where some of this dumb luck comes into it. They assigned me to this hit squad inside the game. Most of the game members don't even know that this group exists, but it's selected by Mother Club members of what they consider to be their heavy hitters, you know, the ones that can do the real down and dirty work.

And so Hellboy, he had approached me. He said, hey, they want you to be a part of this. We were going to be targeting Hell's Angels, and we were going to be killing them. You have to be very quick in thinking. The reason why to go undercover is, from the outside, you can deal with maybe some low-level members. You're never getting anywhere near the leadership.

The only way to do that is to go undercover in the club and go up into the ranks. I would have failed if I didn't have some dumb luck on my side, and I had plenty of dumb luck throughout this case. To hear how Ken Croke spent two years risking his life, going through initiation in one of the most ruthless biker gangs in the world, check out episode 673 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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