I’m a condo super, there’s one apartment in my building that has been vacant for 5+ years and the owners i think live in Hong Kong. If someone busted in there they could squat for years
Where I live there was a super-popular local bakery. The landlord tried to get them to pay a higher rent and then kicked them out when they refused. The building has now been empty for the last five years. I do not understand the economics of this shit.
Not likely intentional, more likely a redevelopment attempt that fell through, is blocked by zoning or other red tape, or changing market conditions.
We have a similar situation on a prime location on a very active street of shops and restaurants: there’s no reason for these building to be vacant for years. However I understand they wanted to redevelop to a much bigger building and have not been able to get it re-zoned.
Right across the street a similar redevelopment effort has been a huge success with something liver 100 apartments over street level restaurants. That’s perfect for that location and we need more of it, but exceeded zoning limits. Ever since then, our town council has been dragging to slow redevelopment
I don’t understand that either! Sometimes I think people are so numerally illiterate and emotionally butthurt that they completely disregard carrying and opportunity costs.
Where I live, there’s a bunch of abandoned squatter places where drug heads go to shoot up.
There’s been countless court cases of the city government trying to sue the landlords who own it. 90% of the time, the lawsuit fails because of some clause where if the landlord isn’t able to show up (because they live in a different state or a foreign investor), the court hearing gets postponed.
My city tried to pass an ordinance to remove that clause but it was shot down.
So random crack house owned by some rich asshole in California that’s next to a school doesn’t get any better for years.
We need to strengthen adverse possession laws. Adverse possession, aka squatter’s rights, were intended for this exact problem. Adverse possession laws were very popular in the 19th century in the American west. In western states, there was a problem. Speculators out east would buy up undeveloped parcels and hoard them for investment purposes. They might buy up a piece of land in rural Kansas. They would wait until homesteaders moved in nearby, worked and built up their own farms. Then the speculators would sell. This was a way for lazy speculators to profit off the hard work of yeoman farmers.
So states passed adverse possession laws. The idea was that if you cared so little for a property that you don’t even notice someone openly living on it for 7 years or so, then really, you don’t deserve to own that property. There is only so much land on this Earth. We need to be good stewards of our finite land; especially if we’re taking that land from its natural state.
We need to strengthen and expand these laws. I would set adverse possession for condos and houses maybe to just three years. We have a severe housing shortage, we cannot afford to let units sit completely unused and wasted. If you own so much property, and care for it so little, that someone can live there for three years without you even noticing? Sorry. Use it or lose it.
Private property is a social contract. We agree to respect private property rights, because we have found through generations that a system based on private property produces a lot of benefits to society. But private property is not some absolute natural right. If you are going to own property to exclusion of everyone else, it is reasonable for you to be required to use that property productively. Why should we bother protecting the property rights of those who are using property in such destructive and anti-social ways like using vacant properties for speculation purposes?
I agree, but I don’t know if it would work well today. In the 19th century, the only way to find that someone was living on your land was to either go there yourself, or to hire someone to look for you. That was complicated because even communicating with someone from east coast to west coast was expensive and difficult.
These days you just need to leave a cheap security camera and check in every few months.
I’m trying to think up a scenario where it’s fair. Something so if someone genuinely cares about the place they don’t get screwed, but someone who isn’t local and never visits loses their rights. Also something so the place can go to someone local, and it isn’t easily compromised by someone who lives far away.
I keep thinking that getting this done requires getting rid of the anti-circumvention rules in copyright law. If it’s legal to provide someone with a tool that tricks a home security system, then people can actually buy that tool, use it, and move into the place, and the absent owner won’t be aware.
I’m a condo super, there’s one apartment in my building that has been vacant for 5+ years and the owners i think live in Hong Kong. If someone busted in there they could squat for years
Where I live there was a super-popular local bakery. The landlord tried to get them to pay a higher rent and then kicked them out when they refused. The building has now been empty for the last five years. I do not understand the economics of this shit.
Not likely intentional, more likely a redevelopment attempt that fell through, is blocked by zoning or other red tape, or changing market conditions.
We have a similar situation on a prime location on a very active street of shops and restaurants: there’s no reason for these building to be vacant for years. However I understand they wanted to redevelop to a much bigger building and have not been able to get it re-zoned.
Right across the street a similar redevelopment effort has been a huge success with something liver 100 apartments over street level restaurants. That’s perfect for that location and we need more of it, but exceeded zoning limits. Ever since then, our town council has been dragging to slow redevelopment
I don’t understand that either! Sometimes I think people are so numerally illiterate and emotionally butthurt that they completely disregard carrying and opportunity costs.
That’s terrible. You should post the address and unit number so everyone knows to stay away from it.
Where I live, there’s a bunch of abandoned squatter places where drug heads go to shoot up.
There’s been countless court cases of the city government trying to sue the landlords who own it. 90% of the time, the lawsuit fails because of some clause where if the landlord isn’t able to show up (because they live in a different state or a foreign investor), the court hearing gets postponed.
My city tried to pass an ordinance to remove that clause but it was shot down.
So random crack house owned by some rich asshole in California that’s next to a school doesn’t get any better for years.
Seems like the kinda thing that would get fixed with a Finnish cocktail party.
We need to strengthen adverse possession laws. Adverse possession, aka squatter’s rights, were intended for this exact problem. Adverse possession laws were very popular in the 19th century in the American west. In western states, there was a problem. Speculators out east would buy up undeveloped parcels and hoard them for investment purposes. They might buy up a piece of land in rural Kansas. They would wait until homesteaders moved in nearby, worked and built up their own farms. Then the speculators would sell. This was a way for lazy speculators to profit off the hard work of yeoman farmers.
So states passed adverse possession laws. The idea was that if you cared so little for a property that you don’t even notice someone openly living on it for 7 years or so, then really, you don’t deserve to own that property. There is only so much land on this Earth. We need to be good stewards of our finite land; especially if we’re taking that land from its natural state.
We need to strengthen and expand these laws. I would set adverse possession for condos and houses maybe to just three years. We have a severe housing shortage, we cannot afford to let units sit completely unused and wasted. If you own so much property, and care for it so little, that someone can live there for three years without you even noticing? Sorry. Use it or lose it.
Private property is a social contract. We agree to respect private property rights, because we have found through generations that a system based on private property produces a lot of benefits to society. But private property is not some absolute natural right. If you are going to own property to exclusion of everyone else, it is reasonable for you to be required to use that property productively. Why should we bother protecting the property rights of those who are using property in such destructive and anti-social ways like using vacant properties for speculation purposes?
All that would do is increase demand for security guards and expand their services to checking on residential properties the parasite class own.
That sounds like a bonus. Either way it’s distributing some amount of wealth and making it more expensive to be a deadbeat landlord.
I agree, but I don’t know if it would work well today. In the 19th century, the only way to find that someone was living on your land was to either go there yourself, or to hire someone to look for you. That was complicated because even communicating with someone from east coast to west coast was expensive and difficult.
These days you just need to leave a cheap security camera and check in every few months.
I’m trying to think up a scenario where it’s fair. Something so if someone genuinely cares about the place they don’t get screwed, but someone who isn’t local and never visits loses their rights. Also something so the place can go to someone local, and it isn’t easily compromised by someone who lives far away.
I keep thinking that getting this done requires getting rid of the anti-circumvention rules in copyright law. If it’s legal to provide someone with a tool that tricks a home security system, then people can actually buy that tool, use it, and move into the place, and the absent owner won’t be aware.