The Couple Squatting Next Door

In a world, where we seldom know our next door neighbors, some things fly under the radar. For the last six months, the couple next door seemed like anyone else in the neighborhood. They were by all accounts, a nice well-groomed couple, with two young kids, two shiny cars, a dog, and a cat. They planted flowers in their yard, washed their cars, chauffeured the kids to and from school, and both seemed to go to work everyday.

The family next door moved last week. In a state, where the population is a revolving door, and in a housing boom-bust crisis mode, neighbors moving in and out is nothing new. Nor, is the phenomenon of them moving during the night unusual. What is odd, is that the nice hard working couple next door, were squatters. They neither owned, nor rented the house, or had permission to be on the property they were living in.

This was easy for them to accomplish, when subdivisions designed for six hundred homes, are mostly deserted ghost towns, with only a handful of houses, and the rest vacant lots. Half the houses built are empty. Half the houses occupied are rented.

Adding to the mix of the problem, many homes are owned by absentee owners (mostly from United Kingdom who invested heavily in new homes in our state). It was a hugely popular investment, both for flipping in the former skyrocketing market, and as rentals to afford them vacations in tourist land. Some were using these homes as businesses (rentals) as a back door into immigrating.

The new Jones' who once lived next door, certainly weren't the first squatters I've encountered or heard of. As kids growing up in the American west, stories of "squatters on your land" was part of the fabric that made up the Western movies and television shows.

Stepping back in American history, if you think about it, we all started out as a bunch of squatters on Native American lands. Later, I guess to justify our outright theft of real property belonging to others, we wrote ourselves a bunch of laws that were the foundation of preemption policies. With the Preemption Act of 1841, our government actually recognized the rights of squatters and called it homesteading.

Nice governmental way of getting money for land in the form of taxes, that they never owned in the first place with respect to public lands.

My first real life encounter with one of this collective mindset, came as a young wife who was assigned the task of collecting rent from my husband's tenants. We'd rented out a small wooden "Florida cracker shack" to a nice young couple with a little girl. This style of house wasn't much, just a wooden house built before Florida had a building permitting system, the kind that come from those whose minds need no blueprints or architects.

Between the house's condition, age, and the neighborhood all potential tenants were either poor or unreliable, certainly no one stayed long term if they became able to do better. Still, to this young family, it appeared we were offering them a "dream house" complete with a quiet fenced in yard. They were just so grateful and full of plans to plant a vegetable garden, etc. that we waived all cautions, even a security deposit.

All was well, for the first two months, then the rent didn't arrive. We waited a few extra days before I made the trip over to inquire as to what problems that they might have in coming up with the rent. Surprise! Surprise! That nice young couple had rented out "their house" to a bunch of frat guys at the local university. They were even smart enough to collect a security deposit before they skipped the state.

You work with what you've got sometimes, so we agreed to let the new tenants stay, as long as they paid the rent the next month. Of course, they moved out before we collected another month's rent, and apparently they had one hell of a moving party. Not only was the place trashed, but the appliances went missing this time. It took us weeks to get the house cleaned and rent-able again.

While we were running an ad for new tenants, with few calls and none interested enough to even look inside, we had no occasion to check on the house for a couple of weeks. Needless to say, the first time we had a bonafide inquiry to show the property, I was a little shocked to arrive early, and find the house was occupied. Not only was it lived in, it was very lived in.

I was greeted at the door by a man who identified himself as "Auggie." Standing on both sides of him were two lunging doberman pinchers. Auggie was given to the leather biker style of fashion. The very noticeable machete he wore, in the back of his cut off jeans shorts -- was an alarming reality in terms of what type of non-tenant I was dealing with. Other clues that I didn't grasp immediately, were the thirteen autos in and around the yard, all in various states of disrepair.

He refused to move out. Auggie knew that by Florida law, it was going to be real hard for us to have him removed from the property. His exact words to me that day, the ones that were repeatable were:

"You do anything you want lady, call all the police you want, there is nothing they can do to evict me." Sadly, in terms of him being a squatter, he was right.

It took three months to evict our "tenant." It was only when the police determined that he was running a stolen auto ring, and parting out the parts, that was he hauled off. There are not enough words to describe the mess Auggie, his friends, and those dogs did while squatting there.

Brazil-- In Brazil there are over ½ million squatters just in Rio de Janeiro alone. Beyond that, there are an estimated over twenty-five million squatters across the country. Add another almost two million squatters in rural squatter efforts throughout the country -- and it's clear that Brazil has a huge problem, not likely to be solved any time soon

Mexico -- The paracaidistas alight in vacant areas and float among the downtown areas in the large cities of Mexico. Here, they have rights if they can show five years of peaceable occupation. Many residents in Mexico City and Nezahalcovotl came into their properties by this method.

Scotland -- has a dim view of squatting. Land owners can evict squatters without notice or any legal intervention as long as they are not violent to the illegal squatter.

South America -- Common throughout South America, and a persistent problem even in areas where the authorities intervene, the mentality of squatting is alive and well in South America. In some South American countries, squatters form whole communities and once recognized, they improve their often home-made dwellings. Some communities eventually accept the inevitable and agree to provide them public services.

Switzerland-- Squatters in Switzerland have concentrated their presence in Berne, Geneva, Winterthur, Lausanne, and Zurich. In Geneva it has been a long standing battle concentrated, by the efforts of an organization of RHINO in which the local authorities have had some success in combating. The real land owners and authorities seem to be winning the battle.

United States-- In the U.S. squatting laws are different across the states, and different municipalities within those states. A lot of times, it boils down to the owner’s knowledge, or apathy upon the part of neighbors -- as to squatters even being noticed. In many parts of America, squatters are often homeless people squatting in either underground places, or vacant land hopeful of development. In these cases, the authorities often look the other way until the landowner, realtors, or others complain.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with squatters on real property, now our world includes cyber squatting or domain name jacking. Under the Federal Anti-cyber squatting Consumer Protection Act, the Internet theft of a domain name, with the intent of making money off a well-known or trademark -- solely to resell the name back to the person or company for huge profits -- is illegal.

Far worse, is the practice of some cyber squatting trashing the good name of a trademarked product, celebrity, or service.