WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: Squatters' Rights

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

This week we discuss adverse possession/squatters' rights across the states. Tune in to hear some of the crazy stories that accompany the tricky legislation, timelines and loopholes, and some creative ways to get rid of a squatter, legally. 

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, where we examine the truth disparity between what's on social media and what's actually true. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Gerard Gouldsby. And today we are going to talk to you about squatters' rights. The impetus of this episode was a video I saw of a woman and her grandma trying to get into their apartment that they owned but had been away from for not that many days, maybe like a month. I think they were on vacation together or something. and they could not get into the place because the person was like resisting

and I remember being like how is this legal and the police there was a policeman with them like and he couldn't force his way in either and I remember being super confused and all the comments being like this is why squatters rights are terrible and I was like people like this have rights like specific rights and then I realized we probably had to do an episode on this so

yeah so when you think of squatters rights I think of like the 1800s and people moving out west and homesteading and things like that. But it's still around. Oh, you don't think of that. Because I didn't learn about that until I was scrolling through social media. Really? I will tell you, I have very little history. I know two things about the history. Number one is that it started, I think, with this thing called adverse possession. That's right. That's actually still the legal term for squatters rights. Okay. Wonderful. And the idea, I guess, was that if people abandoned land and property, it could still be put to good use by somebody who came in and occupied it for a certain

amount of time. A lot of the comments on videos talking about this were like, well, it's what we did with America, so I don't know why people are so upset, which kind of gives you an idea of the clientele that are advocating for squarer's rights. There's kind of this, it's evolved since then. I think it was actually originally meant to be a helpful thing to like have people come in and take over land and put good use to it that hadn't been being used. But it has been. majorly abused by people who are typically homeless. A lot of them that I saw were drug addicts, because you could see their paraphernalia on the ground. But they move into these. It seems like the biggest chunk of people that this happens to are people that own multiple properties.

People that own a bunch of different houses. They're not living in all of them, obviously. I think a lot of them are realtors, property owners that are looking to sell the property or maybe just want to hold on to it for investment's sake and if they're not able to check on it and within this allotted amount of time that each state allows for squatters to like I guess be taken out before then they kind of lose that property before they have to go through court battles um in a lot of states it seems like you actually can't just call the police to get these squatters removed you have to go through a really lengthy court battle to prove that these people are not tenants it seems um If they claim to be a tenant, you cannot, they can't be arrested for trespassing in New York, which is crazy.

Like all they have to do is say that they are a tenant and they can't be arrested on site. They again have to go through like what they said was like a two year legal process. And in New York specifically, I think the thing that like really freaked me out was that the landlord cannot change locks. The landlord cannot remove their belongings. And the landlord cannot cut off utilities. for these squatters. So they literally just have to pay rent and utilities for people that are not going to be paying for them. I saw one story that is really interesting that happened in L.A. I guess in L.A. the law is six months or something. If you're there for six months, you can claim tenant status or something. We'll get to where how different places do it because it is different not only state by state, but even city by city. Yeah. Okay. So in L.A., I think it was six months or something. And there was this crazy story of this woman who

bought or like did a long-term stay in this Airbnb and she found something in this luxury house that was not up to code she reported that the transgression to the city and the city said that moving forward the landlord could not evict her because the living space wasn't up to city code until i guess he fixed it but she had been barring him from entering his own house by like locking the doors changing the locks that sort of thing um even though she was refusing to pay further rent moving forward because it wasn't up to these living standards. So in one way I can see why these would be helpful in asserting tenant rights. Like landlords can't just have these unlivable living conditions ignore their tenant and make them still pay rent and arrest them or evict them

when they don't get what they want. That is a situation where I feel like it kind of makes sense, but it just seems like it's so abused to being something where people can just come in for a certain amount of time and then be like, no, you have to pay a lot of money to get me out of here. And some places, it seems like it's, even court battles aren't helpful. Like there are places and stories that I'm hearing where it's like this woman is $1 million down in property taxes and rent and utilities and she still isn't able to get them out. I do not understand that. What I do not understand is those situations where it's like she's going through the legal

system and nothing's happening. It could be what we've talked about on this show before, the fact that the legal system is just really slow. it seems like something I saw that may or may not be true is that like Michigan has a time period of like 15 years where you can be considered a tenant versus a squatter. Yeah, some states are longer. Which sounds safer to me. Yeah.

It's again, very state by state the longest is, I think Texas is the longest. What is it? Do you know? 30 years. Okay. So there are like years. Very long time. In fact, most states are 10 plus years.

10 plus. There's a few exceptions. and we'll get into where those are that allow you to become, take possession in some legal way, maybe not full possession, much quicker. But 30 days, right? 30 days is insane to me. 10 years, I can actually start to see where that makes sense. If somebody leaves a property alone for 10 years and does nothing to it.

And then someone moves in like, I guess this is mine. It's kind of still stealing because it's not your property. Yeah, but it's been 10 years also. People do that. That makes more sense than just people coming into these places. But there are squatters rights advocates. Some of them that lean more on the side of just being anti-landlord and like anti-corporate greed. And some that just lean more on the side of like homeless people deserve houses, which is an interesting dichotomy.

That's a whole other kind of confusing world. And many people look at it as just a money grab if you're an advocate for for these things. A lot of these squatters rights advocacy programs or groups, things like that have membership fees. And the people that run them actually wind up making. a ton of money. It's just it's a pyramid scheme in a lot of ways. Wow. They don't get a lot of productive legislation. In fact, typically the trend is moving in the opposite direction. Oh, really? Squatters are being kind of more legally penalized as, as time goes on because it's become such a problem. Florida, most notably recently, the governor of Florida signed an order that

criminalized squatter type behavior. I saw a video that was talking about the fact that now in Florida people can call the police and police can remove squatters. Versus there are places where you absolutely cannot do that. Police will tell you there is nothing we can do. Before we switch over to Garrett for the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 1.1.7 FM, I'm going to give him some tips for removing squatters. Should Garrett in his house next year encounter any? Excellent.

I learned these from watching people. There's actually a TikTok page that's so fun called Squatter Squad, and they literally just go into places and do absurd things to get squatters out. one thing that they do pretty frequently is remove all the doors. They just remove all the doors for the house. So even if they're paying utilities, like, no doors. No doors. So you can't close them, whatever.

And the thing about squatters is you can move in with them because they're just squatters. You can be a squatter with them. And they cannot tell you to leave because they have no leasing. So sometimes they'll send in big scary people to squat with them. And that works out funny. They set up cameras around the house to just survey them 24-7. I don't want somebody to video me squatting. Yeah, exactly.

I don't like that either. Moving in with them was a big one, though. Was a lot of people just moving in with them and making the conditions really horrible to be in at all times, you know, as you can imagine what that would look like. The last one I saw that was really fun was a boy whose grandpa's cabin had squatters in it. And so to get them out, he released skunks in the cabin.

That is excellent. And the squatters left because who wants to be in skunk cabin? Yeah. I would leap to. Exactly. So, Garrett, help me understand. A, how do they vary by state from state to state? How are they similar among states?

And I really do need to know what the historical, maybe legal precedent is for this sort of thing. Well, as in almost all things that are legally related that we talk about on this show, it starts with Rome. And I love being able to say that because I feel like after we talked about how much men think about the Roman Empire, it's just fun to always bring it back to Rome. So yes, there was these legal codes that existed in the Roman Republic where, as you, I think, correctly hit on, when land wasn't being used properly, people could come onto the land and start working it, start using it, start making it productive. And this is an agricultural law for a long time. And it wasn't, the first example we have of it being in a written legal code is actually not till much later. It was just kind of a practice that took place not codified in law. but 1804 in the French legal system, actually is the first time this appears in the code.

And essentially what it says is when somebody's not using a piece of agricultural land, it is incumbent upon the society to make it productive, right? That's just a way of keeping really rich people from buying up land and then keeping it from being productive by not using it. Right. So this is sort of a way to keep the economy's wheels moving in an agricultural society. and then this kind of expanded when you have the settling of the American West. You know, if you have the Homestead Act where people, if they are able to live on and improve a piece of land for a certain number of years, then the government would give it to them.

That's a great way to get a big acreage of land, and that's pretty much how the West was settled, right? So these laws make a lot of sense in those cases. And back in those in the 1800s, if you had somebody that claimed ownership of a piece of, of land. Let's say it was a big plot in like the Louisiana territory, right? But they didn't live on it. They didn't have a cabin on it. It was just, you know, on a map. They claimed to have that piece of land. And then somebody moved in and built a cabin and lived there for a span of, let's say, five, 10, 15, 20 years. You know, it's not like people traveled quite as easily then as they, as we do now. So that is feasible. Then from the government's perspective, the person who lives on the land is the ownership, has owner, ownership of the land. And that was essentially just,

a way to guarantee that people who had worked really hard to make a piece of property better weren't being abused at the expense of the people who quote unquote owned it. And so as this doctrine evolves, it's changed a lot because of urbanization, right? Now that a lot of, you know, we're not talking about most people owning these huge tracks of land, you know, that are hundreds and hundreds of acres. You know, we're talking about city apartments and suburban homes and things like that. So where we have now, you brought the term out perfectly. It's adverse possession, which essentially means unfortunate possession, right?

So we'll talk about what are the legal requirements for taking possession of a property? Yes. Because there's four standards that have to be met, but what the standards mean in each state is different. Okay. Okay. So the first standard is exclusivity. That means the squatter uses a property exclusive of others or the owner. So it's not like, okay, the owner lives there.

I move in with the owner and now I own it. And it also can't be a group of people. It has to be an individual or family. They take possession of that. So exclusivity. The second one is openness, which means that the owner of the property has to be able to notice and take action that the property is being occupied. That's a big kind of gray area.

like, oh, well, I wasn't hiding. You know, they could have, you know, they could have known that I was occupying the place. And so there's a lot of gray area in that. Oh, people hide as squatters? That's crazy. Yeah, you go in and you, you make just as big an effort as you can to make sure the neighbors don't know that you're there, things like that. That's illegal. Can't do that.

Okay. And then continuity. So this is where it varies a lot, state by state, city by city. There has to be a set amount of time that you squat, right? You have to squat for a period of. days or months or years depending on the state and then the big one that uh i thought was really interesting is that if a squatter starts paying the taxes on a property uh starts paying the property taxes they can actually shorten the length of time that it's legally required for them to stay there

and in some states you have to be paying the property taxes the whole time so like again texas is kind of the high bar for entry you have to live on the property for 30 years and you have to pay all the taxes related to owning that property for 30 years before you can legally be called the possessor. That's kind of crazy. Yeah. So most states fall between 10 and 15 years. And it doesn't seem like the states that fall one way or another fall on political lines.

Like Florida for a long time had a particularly short. I think seven years was there, which by comparison is pretty short. There's only a few states. There's only a few states that are under 10. Because California, Florida, I think maybe area. Arizona. Probably New York, right? New York, I think, was 10, but here's where the gray, like where things get troublesome

in cities like New York, New York City, L.A., is that they have laws that stipulate that if you occupy a place for only 30 days, you are now legally no longer considered a trespasser. You're considered a tenant. And the reason why that's important is because you can't just call the police on a tenant. Right. Right. If somebody is legally running your property, you can't just call them and say, hey, Police get them out.

No, they have a legal right to be there. But in this case, because these squatters have become legally considered tenants, even if they're not paying rent. That makes no sense. How are they not paying rent and they're still considered tenants? That's an excellent question. It's just codified that way? That's so weird.

And the reason why a lot of, so kind of the political reason, okay, why would politicians, why would this be in law? Let's say you criminalize it, right? Let's say you put out a law that says, you know, even if somebody occupies a place for 30 days, we can still have the police come and kick them out. That's seen as extremely anti-homeless people. And big city politicians don't like to be really anti-homeless people because, you know, we're not going to explore that right now. Yeah, I know. Yeah, kind of a weird thing, right?

So if somebody squats on a property for 30 days, even if they're not paying the rent, you have to evict them legally. And the legal eviction process is quite lengthy. And depending on the city, right, the courts that handle these cases, they're not super big and they're very slow. And they have a very high volume of cases to handle. Right. So in many cases, the reason why a squatter is able to stay for so long is actually simply just essentially legal tactics.

They're able to draw out the eviction court proceedings. And essentially the steps go, right? eviction has to be determined legally. So there's a legal standard for what's considered evictable, right? They have to prove the person is not a legal tenant. And there's all kinds of ways to fake this, right? You can fake a lease agreement. You can fake paying the property taxes, all these different things.

So let's say you have a really determined squatter that really wants to stay there. They can forge a lease agreement. And then once the case proceeds, they can come on and say, I have this agreement. You signed it, right? Obviously, in most cases, I'm not. That's not true, right? But most of the cases that I found where it was drawn out, they were able to stay there for many years. This is what they did.

I saw so many videos of squatters. And by and large, they are liars. They will look right into the face of police officers and be like, no, we've had a verbal agreement for 10 years that I'm allowed to live here. We had a verbal agreement. I saw one story of a woman who snuck into somebody's hospital room while they were on, like, where they were in the hospital, took the keys. that person's house and was living there as a squatter and was like, well, he agreed while he was in the hospital that I could live here. And that was obviously a lengthy battle. There's lots of cases like that. So, you actually hit it right on the head. At minimum eviction

takes like two years. That's ridiculous. And in one case I found there was a gentleman in Long Island that managed to stretch the legal proceedings out for 25 years. Of course, he was trying exceptionally hard because he continually switched lawyers and filed new suits. So every time that happened, they had to start over, which is kind of odd because that's a very expensive process. Why not just pay for an apartment at that point? Well, the cool thing is he got rent on Long Island for free, which is a really, you know, might actually have costed him less than all the legal proceedings because it's so expensive to live there. But you have all these stories about people coming back to their vacation homes, finding them completely trashed or finding somebody like living in there,

sleeping in their bed and doing everything they can to stay there. And yeah, social media did a really good job in kind of pulling out some of the details. Like you're not legally allowed to change locks. You're also not allowed to cut off the utilities. That's crazy. I read one example where a lady was going through the legal process of dealing with the squatters and continually having to pay, she threatened to cut off the utilities and they said, no, you can't do that. But the bills were being sent to the squatter, not the actual owner, until the eviction finally took place, and then she got a $25,000 water bill for like, I don't know how many years of usage. So pretty insane stuff.

Terrible. Just a few to give you an idea of kind of which states fall in what category of how long. 20 plus years of ownership, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. So a pretty broad range of states in all over the country. Do you say 20 plus? Yeah, 20 plus years. Texas too, right?

Texas as well, yeah. Okay. We already hit that one. Yep. And then between 10 and 20 years. Okay. Actually, Arkansas, California, and Florida, and Montana are the only ones that are less than that. So every other state is 10 to 20 years.

Wow. Yeah. And the states that shortened the time based on paying property. property tax. Florida is one of them. I think that's actually going to be probably repealed very soon. Okay. But California and New York also are the other big ones. So you come in, you start paying the bills. That place is yours way faster. That's crazy. It is crazy. Okay. Other questions. No other questions for me. Other than, like, is this something that you think will eventually become obsolete? Yes. People will just. Yes. So Florida is, as has often in the case actually lately in state legislation, Florida is leading the way. And they have said, okay, now it's a criminal penalty to try to pull this, right?

You can't do the whole 30 days and now I'm the owner. That statute is being repealed most places it's in effect. Will it be repealed in California, places like California and New York? Probably not. Why? Because liberal politicians, they don't want to seem like they're out to get homeless people. And the whole advocacy thing is, it's a little bit ridiculous. Like I said, it is a money grab in most cases of people that are running these

advocacy groups are making a lot of money off of them. And it's not like, it's not as pious as we think. No, and they're not really helping anybody. You know, no new legislation in this area is likely to get past. It's just hard.

What's already there is kind of intractable because people don't want to see it, be seen as attacking the homeless people and saying, you know, we're not going to give you an opportunity to gain possession of a property. Because, okay, in some very, very rare cases,

having the law does make sense, right? There's a house abandoned for 10 years. No one's lived there for 10 years. You need a house. You live on the streets. Hard to say, no, you can't have that. Right. Especially if they're willing to pay property taxes.

Especially if they're willing to pay property taxes. It's an interesting thought. Okay, we're ready to give it a grade? Yes. Okay. I have mine. Three, two, one. B plus.

I was going to say A. Okay. You're being generous. Yeah. They did actually really good. I got to see a lot of videos of people being horrible. Which is what we love to see from social media. And it's like, I think sort of in an abstracted way, it's like, oh, this is kind of,

this can be kind of foggy. There's kind of like reasons people, you could kind of conceptualize why the laws exist. You can kind of justify them. But I think when you see the videos of just the situations that these laws are protecting,

it's a lot easier to kind of, I think, see the nature of the situation and kind of understand maybe why a lot of people would be anti these things. It was helpful, though, with some added context that these squatters rights advocates

are just typically making money, as you maybe would expect. Hopefully those of you who tuned in today learned a little bit about squatters, and you now know how to get rid of a squatter in some capacity. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Gerriton. On the social mediators on Radio for Hillsdale, 101.1.7 FM.

We'll talk to you next week.