> You should be able to leave your house for two weeks and not come home to it being taken over.

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.

The only difference between a liberal and a neocon is one mugging. You can smugly say “everyone has a right to sieve the housing they need”, until it turns into a right to your housing.

I agree. And if my attitude on this topic changes, I will be in the wrong when it does.

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.)

I get absentee landlords as a problem. I would totally not feel comfortable buying property like that, I put off buying a home after 2008 because I wanted to live abroad and didn't want the headache of owning something I couldn't take care of directly (I still kick myself for this, since I could have save $500k or so). The squatter problem is only one, but where I live property owners are held to a lot of crazy standards (don't let the half dead tree crush your neighbors house, but don't cut down the tree either, because we really love trees here!), there are just so many headaches in owning property remotely like that the hard way.

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.