Squatters wrongs

[Gob]

A businesswoman has lost her life savings in a 15-month ­battle to evict a squatter from her home.

Dy Maurice, 50, rented out her mews home when she moved to Dublin to run a beauty salon, but while she was out of the UK the tenant secretly sublet the property to another man who then refused to pay rent. Police were powerless to help remove the squatter, and the mother-of-two was dragged into a lengthy legal battle that cost her £30,000.

When she finally got her home back, to her horror she found it had been trashed, with damage estimated at £20,000.

Mrs Maurice also claims the saga has put a black mark against the address and knocked as much as £80,000 off the value of the house, which was originally worth £250,000. The divorced former hotel manager is now demanding a change in the law.
‘The law on squatters’ rights is totally and utterly disgraceful and damaging, soul-destroying, and it’s time MPs realised this. I will not stop until this law is removed and the police have every right to remove any squatter who has not got a contract for the property in question.’

Mrs Maurice bought her two-bedroom home in Macclesfield, Cheshire, in 2001 but moved to Dublin in 2007, letting it to a local businessman. When she called to check all was well a few weeks later the man informed her that his business partner was now living in the ­property instead. She immediately flew back to the UK, but the new tenant refused her entry.

She called police, who told her that if an unwanted occupant claims squatters’ rights and refuses to budge, the landlord cannot force entry but is legally required to obtain a court order enforced by bailiffs, often a costly and lengthy process. She flew back to Dublin feeling ‘livid’, ‘distraught’ and ‘helpless’. Unable to cover her own rent in Ireland without any income from the Cheshire property, she moved into a B&B before eventually quitting her job and returning to England to win her home back.

Finally, in August 2008 she won a court order to have the man evicted, but even then he refused to leave and it was a ­further month before bailiffs were able to remove him forcibly. ‘When I eventually got back into my home and put the key through the door the state of it was ­unbelievable,’ Mrs Maurice said.The alarm system had been broken, the lamps and beds were ruined, the kitchen equipment had vanished and the carpets and curtains were stained.

‘This has been devastating and cost me my life savings,’ she said. To add insult to injury she has even been visited by debt collectors looking for the squatter, who had been ordered to pay her backdated rent. Mrs Maurice, who is now out of work due to ill health, said: ‘I’m still suffering because of the amount it’s cost me mentally and physically to get over this. If I had been five years older I would have had a heart attack.’


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z119k89xCA

Squatting UK style

[loCAtek]

'The British Welfare Empire."

[Sean]

Tell me about it...

My mum has been trying to sell out old house in Ireland for a few years now but nobody wants to know cos of the family of fucking pikeys who have taken up residence there. They have ruined the property and even made major structural changes (knocked walls down etc) but there's not a damn thing she can do about it!
Since the house is insured (by my mother) I have strongly advised her to throw a few euros in the right direction and get someone to torch it. Then the pikeys can decide whether they want to stay or not as it burns down around them while my mum picks up the insurance and sells the land (about 2 acres).

Everybody's happy!

[Gob]

Sounds like a solution Sean.

Give word to the IRA that the Brits are using it as a reconnaissance base?

[The Hen]

God Sean that is terrible.

I agree with your advice to your Mum. A well insured house is a damn fine asset to burn.

[Jarlaxle]

Sounds like a solution Sean.

Give word to the IRA that the Brits are using it as a reconnaissance base?

...then go to a different pay phone and give word to the Brits that the IRA are using it as a safe house. SOMEONE is bound to deal with it, then!

[@meric@nwom@n]

Why exactly do squatters have rights?

[Sean]

I don't know @W. The only right they should have is to be chased off private property by a pack of hounds!

From wiki

In England and Wales, the term squatting usually refers to occupying an empty house in a city. The owner of the house must go through various legal proceedings before evicting squatters. Squatting is regarded in law as a civil, not a criminal, matter. However, if there is evidence of forced entry, then this is regarded as criminal damage, and the police have the powers to remove the occupants. If the squatter legally occupies the house, then the owner must prove in court that they have a right to live in the property and that the squatter does not, while the squatter has the opportunity to claim there is not sufficient proof or that the proper legal steps have not been taken. In order to occupy a house legally, a squatter must have exclusive access to that property, that is, be able to open and lock an entrance. The property should be secure in the same way as a normal residence, with no broken windows or locks.

That being said, I do believe that the hundreds of thousands of empty council houses in the UK should not stand empty while people live on the streets...

[Crackpot]

I believe the squatters rights thing came into play over abandoned properties. Though ever since then seemingly has been used to screw over any owner unlucky enough to have someone break in and take up residence at a vacant property.

[Andrew D]

There are two basic components to what are known as "sqautters' rights". (I understand that @meric@n wom@n has chosen not to be able to see my postings. Perhaps someone can forward it to her somehow.)

One component is what is known as "adverse possession". Grossly oversimplified, what that means is that if you move onto someone else's land and live there long enough, that person's failure to do anything about your having moved there eventually forfeits that person's right to assert her or his ownership as against your right to live there.

(It has to do with the laws's longstanding antipathy to restraints on alienation, it involves a host of considerations (was the possessor's possession of the land truly adverse? was it "open and notorious"? blah, blah blah), and the results often depend on vagaries among jurisdictions.)

The other component is what is known as "self-help". That really isn't about squatters' rights; its' about the owner's rights, especially the limitations on the owner's rights, when confronted with squatters.

Most jurisdictions do not permit "self-help". That is, the owner has no right to evict the squatters by force. Rather, the owner must go through the legal process of evicting the squatters, and until that process results in an order for the squatters to go, they can stay.

Jurisdictions vary considerably, however, as to what measures an owner can take to induce (but not force) the squatters to leave. An owner might, for example, instruct the power company (whose bills the owner, not the squatters, has been paying) to shut off the electricity and the gas. And the water company to shut off the water. An owner might decide to have all-night tailgate parties in her or his front lawn.

An owner might hire a construction company to come in and dig a trench eight feet wide and eight feet deep around the entire property. An owner might hire a contractor to tear out and replace -- i.e., tear out today and replace, well, whenever -- the exterior walls. And so forth.

In some jurisdictions, all of those things might be considered OK. In other jurisdictions, maybe not. No property owner should take any such action before consulting an attorney familiar with the law of the relevant jurisdiction.

In my opinion, the best bet is a two-pronged approach: Initiate legal proceedings and, while they are pending, do everything legal -- remember, make sure to find out what is and what is not legal -- to make the squatters' stay on the owner's property as miserable as possible.

[Andrew D]

With regard to the Wikipedia article (posted while I was writing), I see nothing particularly explanatory in it. It says:

If the squatter legally occupies the house, then the owner must prove in court that they have a right to live in the property and that the squatter does not, while the squatter has the opportunity to claim there is not sufficient proof or that the proper legal steps have not been taken.

Well, there's rather the rub, don't you think: "If the squatter legally occupies the house". The article says: "In order to occupy a house legally, a squatter must have exclusive access to that property, that is, be able to open and lock an entrance." So does that mean that if a squatter gains entry to a house without breaking anything (climbs through a window) and then boards up the doors and windows so that he or she can open them from the inside but no one can open them from the outside, the squatter is legally occupying the house?

There's always the option of having some very large friends explain the matter to them ....

[Sean]

In my experience Andrew, they break a lock to gain access and then replace the lock. No visible damage and they now have a key!

The other (and very typical) problem my mother is having is that she is English. This means that the Irish legal system isn't exactly jumping through hoops to help her. Bigotry is alive and well with those backward fuckwits!

[Andrew D]

She has the ownership papers, right? Maybe she should decide that her house needs insecticide fumigation.

(Again, check with an attorney familiar with the applicable laws.)

Personally, I oppose squatters' rights in general. I have thought of only two categories of squatters' rights that merit any recognition.

One is simply a matter of timing. If the squatters have been there for a while, and the owner (who has long been absent) shows up and says "Leave," I don't have a problem with giving the squatters a reasonable time to get their shit together. And the longer they have been there (which means the longer the owner has been absent), the more firmly established they are in that place, the longer, generally speaking, they should have to get their shit together. But longer should have reasonable limits.

The other is if the squatters have actually improved the property. If when the squatters moved in, the property consisted of land and a shed, and by the time they are ordered to leave, it consists of land and a three-storey Victorian revival mansion, then the squatters should be entitled to something for having improved the property that much. (After all, the owner couldn't have been paying much attention to the property: A three-storey Victorian revival mansion doesn't pop up overnight. The owner should bear some burden for not having bothered to check on the property for all those years.)

But beyond that, squatters are simply trespassers. And they should be treated as such.

[Crackpot]

I'd go a bit farther than that. If it had been left to blight and squatters moved in and simply maintained the property over a long enough period (which is debatable) they should have rights to the property especially in urban areas where abandoned properties (see Detroit after the riots) are left to rot further blighting the neighborhood and the community.

[Andrew D]

That seems to me a close, but nonetheless clear, issue, Crackpot. In the shed-to-mansion case, it is clear that what the squatters did inured to the owner's benefit far beyond what it inured to the squatters' benefit: The owner ends up with property worth much more than it was worth when the squatters started squatting.

But in the case of simple maintenance of the property, it seems to me a balance of equities.

Yes, a maintained property is at least presumptively more valuable than an unmaintained property. But the squatter has, presumably, obtained a benefit by maintaining the property: The squatter has lived in a maintained property rather than in decomposing squalor.

So it seems to me that the benefit obtained by the squatter should be considered equivalent to the detriment (effort, materials, etc.) incurred by the squatter: Unless the squatter can show that what he or she did to maintain the property outweighs what he or she gained by living in the property, it should be a wash. What the squatter got by virtue of maintaining the property is equally balanced by what the owner lost by virtue of not being able to occupy the property, so the upshot is that the owner gets the property back, the squatter owes the owner nothing, and that's the end of that.

[Sean]

She has the ownership papers, right? Maybe she should decide that her house needs insecticide fumigation.

(Again, check with an attorney familiar with the applicable laws.)

Personally, I oppose squatters' rights in general. I have thought of only two categories of squatters' rights that merit any recognition.

One is simply a matter of timing. If the squatters have been there for a while, and the owner (who has long been absent) shows up and says "Leave," I don't have a problem with giving the squatters a reasonable time to get their shit together. And the longer they have been there (which means the longer the owner has been absent), the more firmly established they are in that place, the longer, generally speaking, they should have to get their shit together. But longer should have reasonable limits.

The other is if the squatters have actually improved the property. If when the squatters moved in, the property consisted of land and a shed, and by the time they are ordered to leave, it consists of land and a three-storey Victorian revival mansion, then the squatters should be entitled to something for having improved the property that much. (After all, the owner couldn't have been paying much attention to the property: A three-storey Victorian revival mansion doesn't pop up overnight. The owner should bear some burden for not having bothered to check on the property for all those years.)

But beyond that, squatters are simply trespassers. And they should be treated as such.

Yes, she holds the deeds Andrew but the problem is that Irish law says that she must use an Irish attorney. The first one she retained went behind her back and gave info to the squatters (what she was planning etc) so that they could keep one step ahead. She tried reporting him to the Irish Bar Association only to find that he was President of said association (and the brother of ex-president Mary Robinson to boot...)! It being a small town the solicitors and the squatters are very likely to be drinking buddies and it's a case of "How dare this English bitch try to throw this nice Irish family out on the street!"

She has since retained another solicitor in a larger town some distance away but little progress is being made. They have told her that her only realistic option is to sell the house as is (taking a huge financial kick in the process) as there is little she can do about it.

So would anyone like to buy a rundown six-bedroom house with a resident family of pikey cunts on the west coast of Ireland?

I'm thinking of starting a rumour that there is a potato hidden somewhere in the house and watch the Micks tear it apart brick by brick with their bare hands...

[Jarlaxle]

I have to say that I'd probably torch the place.

[Crackpot]

That seems to me a close, but nonetheless clear, issue, Crackpot. In the shed-to-mansion case, it is clear that what the squatters did inured to the owner's benefit far beyond what it inured to the squatters' benefit: The owner ends up with property worth much more than it was worth when the squatters started squatting.

But in the case of simple maintenance of the property, it seems to me a balance of equities.

Yes, a maintained property is at least presumptively more valuable than an unmaintained property. But the squatter has, presumably, obtained a benefit by maintaining the property: The squatter has lived in a maintained property rather than in decomposing squalor.

So it seems to me that the benefit obtained by the squatter should be considered equivalent to the detriment (effort, materials, etc.) incurred by the squatter: Unless the squatter can show that what he or she did to maintain the property outweighs what he or she gained by living in the property, it should be a wash. What the squatter got by virtue of maintaining the property is equally balanced by what the owner lost by virtue of not being able to occupy the property, so the upshot is that the owner gets the property back, the squatter owes the owner nothing, and that's the end of that.

What about the benefit to the community of not having a rat infested (or worse) home blighting the neighborhood and otherwise bringing values down? There are examples (rare though they may be) of people that left paces to rot when the local market collapsed and the houses were declared "worthless" only to come back and claim ownership after squatters came put in the work to restore the house and rebuilt the community. In such cased the "owners" are trying to do nothing rather to profiteer of an others hard work.

[Crackpot]

I know we have a law here (I forgot what it's called) that may expand beyond the state that states more or less after x amount of time a squatter, neighbor, whatever having improved the land (can be as simple as maintaining the lawn) after the negligence and absence of the owner can get the property declared theirs.

The law is weighted Heavily toward the owner (as it should be) but it is there all the same.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Wasn't there a movie about this some years ago? Took place in San Fran IIRC. Couple rented out there downstairs apraments and one of the tenants never paid and basically trashed the place.