When the court system fails you, I believe you have a right to take matters into your own hands. The court system is created so that we don't start feuds, harm people above and beyond what's reasonable response to their action, prevent abuses. It's here to protect us so that we don't have to violently protect ourselves. When it fails to do so, what choice do you have? The court is an institution of civilization, when it fails we go back to the natural way.
But ya, we are approach “lawless enough that the law doesn’t help protect you against squatters” and “lawful enough that the law makes it very hard for you to act on your own against squatters.” Remember, you have financial things to lose, these people squatting generally don’t (besides their freedom, and they usually get out of any time).
Nor is it safe for the goon squad. If squaters start responding to such behavior by shooting on site anybody who tries to break into the building, the law will protect them because threat of bodily harm is more important than abuse of property ownership. And it should be.
Ownership of real estate implies responsibilities to the community who are inextricably tied to the geographic proximity to that real estate. Don't own more than you can maintain. Don't own more than you can use. If you have entire groups of people coming into your property and setting up shop for months at a time without your knowledge, maybe you own too much.
(Incidentally, that ethos applies to more than just squatting. The Catholic church in Philadelphia got fined a pile of money because they abandoned a church and failed to either sell it or pay the money to maintain it. It ended up with a water main break in the basement that nobody detected because nobody was on the property, and the water poured openly into the sewer system for months. The city find them for every drop of water that got wasted in that open pipe because that pipe was their responsibility; it was in their property).
https://www.quora.com/I-just-arrived-home-from-a-beautiful-v...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLegsj31Pp8
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/07/03/squatters-...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/maryland-resident-squatters-bedro...
It has happened in Seattle already, enough for me to be worried about it. Everyone should think about it before leaving on vacation, since it is a real thing that you need to protect yourself against. Even if you rent, someone could break in to your place, change the locks, and then have a scrawled out fraudulent lease document. You would eventually get your place back, but being homeless for 3-6 months sucks. This just isn't a rich house speculator problem (though they are more at risk, of course).
I do live in a neighborhood with a large unhoused neighbor population, who are well aware of squatter rights and looking for opportunities, so its not just a "well-heeled" problem for us. Frankly, if you tolerate this kind of behavior against rich people, it is eventually going to effect you as well (they just get bolder and bolder).
I just can't agree that's fundamentally true, unless you have in-home monitoring set up. Swizzle that to "You should be able to leave your house for two weeks without a water main break flooding it" or "You should be able to leave your house for two weeks without a gas leak blowing it up."
Real estate ownership implies obligation. It's one of the reasons so many people choose to just skip out on that entirely and rent their residence.
> Frankly, if you tolerate this kind of behavior against rich people, it is eventually going to effect you as well
Frankly, if I tolerate leaving people unhoused long enough and in large enough numbers that it effects me, it should effect me. Those are probably fellow citizens and fellow neighbors, and if not, they're still fellow human beings. Adequate housing is a human right as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Down that train of thought is "taxation is theft," and it's not a good place to be.
(Cards on the table, I've come from the other side of the story: absentee landlord with undeveloped property sitting next to a relative's home, and the neverending fight to keep the dead trees on that property from crushing said home in a storm. The process to get a property that is owned by someone five states over who is holding it to be sold for 2x the market value and hasn't seen the property in fifteen years declared a nuisance property is atrociously long.
Owning property implies an obligation to the place where it is owned. The law should have more teeth to enforce those obligations.)
But I see that as no excuse to take my property away if I'm doing everything right. And the squatters can't tell who is absent and who is just on vacation. We have to deal with this problem seriously.
Your attempts to cloud the issue are laughable at best.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Haile_Kifer_and_N...
Escaped slaves had bounties placed on their heads and were often captured and placed back with their owners.
Fugitive slave laws
https://infogalactic.com/info/Fugitive_slave_laws
Now do you see how preposterous your point is? It's important not to live in a far left shithole state, where property rights are not taken seriously, and which do not have stand your ground laws.
(also, your link has nothing to do with squatters, it has more to do with laws surrounding intruders. In Texas the homeowner would not have been charged.)
Edit - confirmed with wife, who's a property manager. The key, at least in our state, is a property must be vacant before squatter rights applies, otherwise it's trespassing. Squatting then is a bigger concern for vacation homes, beach homes, and the like. What is considered vacant? Well, that varies by locale! Literally, YMMV.
* COVID created an extremely unusual circumstance around residency law, one that we are not likely to see again in our lifetimes pending another virulent pandemic
* The house (unless I misunderstood a detail of your story) wasn't stolen from its rightful owner... The rightful owner died. It's flow through the probate process was disrupted. But people have all kinds of opinions about how we will property in this country and you can definitely turn your head and squint and say "The only crime committed here is a dead woman's will was not respected, and a living person other than the one she would have chosen ended up with the house."
Still, it does suck that the house went up to auction because fundamentally the people with the most claim to it can no longer afford to pay the state to maintain the right to that claim.