I’ve heard dozens of stories that go something like this:
Family buys home or rents apartment. Before they can officially move in, somebody rolls in with a sleeping bag and claims “squatters rights”. It takes months/years to evict them and costs thousands of dollars.
How is this legal? The squatter isn’t on the lease or deed to the home. They’re trespassing – why do they get any rights at all? Shouldn’t the police show up within hours to throw their ass out?
It’s important to distinguish between squatting, squatters’ rights, adverse possession, tenant, and tenants’ rights. Each state is different, but generally, a situation like you described doesn’t fall into a squatters’ rights or adverse possession territory. A squatter in the sense of squatters rights (adverse possession laws) is someone who has lived, without the permission of the owner, in a space continuously for a number of years (depending on state, but the lowest number of years is 5), along with some other very specific conditions.
In most places in the US, a tenant is someone who has been given permission to live in a space by someone who legally has the right to give that permission, regardless of whether the tenant is on a lease or has any written contract or whether they pay any rent or utilities.
In many states, there isn’t a concrete time requirement before someone is a tenant. All tenants have, in some form depending on state, legal rights. One of the most basic protections that tenants usually have is a right to maintain occupation of the legally occupied living space until a court-ordered eviction is in place, even if the lease period is already ended or they haven’t paid continuing rent.
A tenant is not trespassing until a court ordered eviction has been served and a specified time limit, like 10 days, has passed.
In your sleeping bag example, a random person who just rolls in the day before a new tenant is moving in would be trespassing.
But let’s say the person was the last legal tenant and they’ve continued to live there after their first lease ran out 2 months ago- if the landlord doesn’t follow the procedure for eviction in their state (usually a 30~ day notice giving the tenant a chance to leave, then filing for eviction in court, then a court date, then an eviction order that gives the tenant a short amount of time to legally be out before police can remove them), the tenant is still legally occupying the space and the landlord can’t just change the locks or kick them out or turn off utilities.
They aren’t a squatter or a trespasser until they no longer have a legal right to live there.
It probably seems like these laws are set up to screw landlords or home owners, but in reality, they protect tenants from things like an angry rooomate/landlord changing the locks while you’re at work one day, or a landlord/roommate calling the police and claiming that you’re trespassing and getting you arrested for simply being in the space where you live.
Squatters take advantage of tenants’ rights.
We’ve decided, as a society, that when there’s a landord/tenant dispute, the best course of action is to let the tenant stay in place until the legal action is completed. The alternative is that unscrupulous landlords can just kick people out on the street for no good reason. It’s one of the few areas of the law that protects the weaker party.
Squatters have figured out the minimum acceptable proof (utility bill, etc), under the law, to have a proper claim to living at a property. Once they have that, the landlord is required to go through a full legal eviction preceeding, which can take months to get before a judge and has all sorts of legally mandated “warning” phases.
The alternative is that your landlord could call the cops and have you tossed out of your home with no notice and then you can fight to get it back.
If you check out a property 2-3x per month or actually get people living there, it’s not an issue. Issues only comes up when a property is abandoned for a while and being ignored long enough that people can get some mail or something in their name.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.