Tag: private property

Oklahoma Homeowner Charged with MANSLAUGHTER After Gunning Down Squatter Who Took Over One of His Houses

An Oklahoma homeowner earlier this month took deadly action against a lazy squatter and now faces a serious threat to his freedom.

As KOCO reported, 59-year-old Timothy Smith was arrested by police and charged with first-degree manslaughter after fatally shooting 42-year-old Justin King, who had taken over one of his homes in Oklahoma City.

KOCO revealed that Smith discovered King was living on the property and went to confront him on May 1. When Smith arrived, he stumbled upon the squatter having carnal relations with a female in one of the home’s bedrooms.

Smith claims he shot King in self-defense after the squatter took a step toward him.

The squatter died one week later.

From KOCO:

Smith, who was not living in the home at the time, said he entered with a gun and confronted King when he found him in the back bedroom with a woman.

When he ordered King to leave, Smith claimed that King stepped toward him, so he aimed at the area of the squatter and pulled the trigger, per court records cited by KOCO.

He hit King in the neck, and he was taken to the hospital. He died a week later on May 8.

Smith was initially arrested on charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He was then charged with first-degree manslaughter after King died in the hospital.

Criminal defense attorney Ed Blau told KOCO that the self-defense claim in this case may not apply because Smith was not living in the home at the time of the shooting.

“There’s no death penalty for squatting in the state of Oklahoma. You can’t just take a gun in and shoot somebody,” Blau explained.

Blau added that while Oklahoma’s Castle Doctrine allows homeowners to defend their primary residence against intruders, the law is different for a vacant home.

“If a trespasser or a burglar breaks in or comes into the home that you live in and you’re there, you can pretty much shoot them or do whatever you want to with them,” Blau told KOCO. “And because of the Castle Doctrine here in Oklahoma, in a situation like this, an abandoned house, it’s much different.”

“You can’t go in, put yourself in a situation and say, ‘This is my house, so I felt I had the right to shoot him.’”

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Mamdani’s Housing Program Follows the Socialist Playbook: Create the Crisis, Seize the Property

“When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” said New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, explaining how the city plans to seize private property and transfer it to “stewards that include community land trusts, non-profits, or even the tenants themselves.”

The good news is he will not be taking property from all landlords, only the ones he decides are bad. “Through our new citywide campaign, Fix the City, we will focus on the worst landlords in New York City.”

Mamdani does not seem troubled by the fact that his proposal appears to violate the Fifth Amendment, which states, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Even before being elected, he announced that he would be seizing private property. As a candidate, Mamdani declared: “We will use every single tool at our disposal, including seizing buildings from slumlords, to ensure that each and every New Yorker is given what is their right, a safe place to call their home.”

Now, as mayor, he is moving to act on it. On May 27, Mamdani unveiled his 112-page “Block by Block” housing plan in Gowanus. The enforcement mechanism involves the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development will launch a “Fix the City” initiative to conduct roof-to-cellar inspections in targeted buildings and aggressively use the 7A Program, through which the city can initiate legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers from day-to-day management.

The plan also has Housing Preservation and Development collaborating with other agencies and borough district attorneys to pursue criminal charges against property owners.

What Mamdani is proposing is a textbook Austrian economics interventionism cascade. Austrian economics, the discipline in which the author of this article is educated, holds that rather than solving problems and making life better for citizens, government intervention generally exacerbates problems, making them worse, more widespread, and increasingly difficult to resolve. Each resulting distortion is used to justify the next intervention, which in turn causes the problem to get worse, necessitating more government intervention, making things worse…until all properties fall under state control.

The landlord crisis Mamdani claims to be solving was created by the very rent control policies his administration is now doubling down on.

The methodology for creating a crisis that allows the state to seize property begins with artificial rent controls such as freezes and rent ceilings. Below-market rates destroy the landlord’s incentive to maintain and invest in property. When rents fall below a certain level, the landlord may not even be able to afford repairs and maintenance.

The rational economic response for a landlord who is forced to rent at rates below operating costs is to defer maintenance. The building deteriorates. The landlord becomes, by definition, a “bad landlord,” not from malice but from economic necessity created by the policy itself.

The city then uses the deterioration it caused as the legal and moral pretext to seize or transfer the property. The government manufactured the problem and now presents itself as the solution.

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A Century of Progressive Apartheid

This year marks the centennial of zoning in the United States, when the Supreme Court upheld comprehensive municipal land-use restrictions over the claims of property owners. The decision, Euclid v. Ambler Realty, was a milestone in the progressives’ campaign to overcome constitutional impediments to their plans for social engineering. In the ensuing century, zoning fundamentally altered the geography of American life, turning what had just become an urban-majority nation into a suburban one. Critics on both the libertarian right and woke left condemn zoning as a back-door version of apartheid, a stealthy way to keep immigrants and blacks out of “desirable” neighborhoods.

By 1900, Southern states had enacted segregation laws for “places of public accommodation” (hotels, restaurants, railroads, and the like), and the Court upheld these in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. The residential segregation campaign began later, a response to the “Great Migration” of blacks into border-state cities in the 1910s. This campaign faced more constitutional difficulties due to American doctrines of property rights.

Baltimore enacted the first residential segregation law in 1910. Louisville enacted a law that prohibited members of one race from moving into a block in which the other race was a majority. The NAACP cleverly arranged a case in which a white man, Buchanan, sued to overturn the law. Buchanan sold his house on a white-majority block (situated between the only two black-owned houses on the block) to a black man, Warley. When Warley refused to complete the purchase because of the Louisville ordinance, Buchanan sued him. Given his house’s situation between the only two black-owned houses on the block, Buchanan argued, no white man would buy it. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court struck down the Louisville law as a violation of individual property rights. Edward Bassett, the “father of zoning,” lamented that cases like this indicated that American law “gave real estate owners almost total control over the use of their property.”

To get around this constitutional impediment, segregationists devised the “racially restrictive covenant,” in which a purchase contract forbade selling the property to members of certain races. The title search for a house that I purchased in 2007 turned up a restrictive covenant from the 1925 sale of the property. The purchaser agreed never to sell the parcel “to any one of the Ethiopian or African descent.” He also promised “that no dwelling house shall be erected on the property that costs less than $1500”—a zoning-use restriction avant la lettre. The Supreme Court upheld such covenants in 1926, the same year that it upheld more comprehensive zoning laws.

Zoning was a “quintessentially progressive concept,” historian Michael Allen Wolfe observes, exemplifying the movement’s faith in expertise and state power. It fit particularly into the progressives’ belief that the state could improve the genetic stock of the population, based on their belief in racial group hierarchy and eugenics. One can see the first zoning ordinances in the efforts of cities like San Francisco to control Chinese laundries, and in New York City’s tenement-manufacturing laws.

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NYC Mayor Mamdani’s Housing Plan Sparks Property-Rights Alarm Over Forced Transfers To Nonprofits

NYC socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani released “Block by Block: The Housing Plan for a New Era,” which presents a sweeping, deeply troubling blueprint to tackle the metro area’s deepening housing crisis.

Mamdani told the crowd:

When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Stewards include community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.

X user Difficult Froyo outlined what he described as the obvious playbook by the socialist mayor:

Rent control so landlords cannot raise rent to properly maintain the property. NYC takes the property and gives it to his political friends that donate to him. This is all going to be a theft scheme.

Another X user asked:

“Insane. If this isn’t communism, I don’t know what is. Has America really reached the point of communism?”

Mamdani’s backdoor property-seizure strategy will likely spook lenders, insurers, and small landlords. That’s because it caps landlord income, allows residential buildings to become distressed, then uses the city’s enforcement to push properties into nonprofit, community land trust, or tenant ownership.

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US Real Estate Remains Stale

April existing home sales in the U.S. came in at an annualized pace of just 4.02 million units, barely rising 0.2% from March and missing expectations yet again. We are now looking at one of the weakest spring housing seasons in decades, despite population growth and years of underbuilding.

Real estate has always been driven by confidence in the future. People buy homes when they believe their job is secure, taxes will remain manageable, and the economy is stable enough to justify taking on long-term debt. That confidence has been steadily collapsing under inflation, rising insurance costs, property taxes, and geopolitical uncertainty.

Mortgage rates briefly dipped below 6% earlier this year and everyone rushed out claiming the housing market was recovering. Then rates shot back toward 6.4%-6.5% as inflation fears returned and war tensions escalated globally. That immediately froze buyers again. A $500,000 mortgage today carries monthly payments hundreds of dollars higher than buyers were paying only a few years ago. For younger generations already struggling with rent, food, insurance, and student debt, ownership is becoming mathematically impossible in many regions.

The median existing home price still rose to $417,700 in April, marking another record high for the month. This is the real crisis. Sales volumes are stagnating, yet prices remain elevated because inventory is still historically tight. We do not have a healthy market. We have a distorted market where people locked into 2%-3% mortgages refuse to sell because replacing that loan with a 6.5% mortgage would double their financing costs. That traps inventory and prevents natural market clearing.

The National Association of Realtors admitted inventory rose 5.8% to 1.47 million homes, but even that remains well below historical norms. A balanced housing market typically requires roughly a 5-6 month supply. We remain around 4.4 months. That means the market is simultaneously weak and expensive, which is the worst possible combination for society because it destroys mobility and locks younger generations out of ownership entirely.

What is unfolding now mirrors the broader sovereign debt crisis model. Governments kept rates artificially low for years to support endless borrowing and deficit spending. That created massive asset inflation in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Once inflation appeared, central banks had no choice but to raise rates, but they cannot normalize rates without crushing the very debt bubble they created. Housing is now caught directly in that trap.

The regional split is also important. The South and Midwest saw slight sales increases while the West continued weakening. That reflects the capital flow trend we have been monitoring for years. People are fleeing high-tax, high-cost regions in favor of states with lower taxes and cheaper living costs. California, New York, Illinois, and parts of the Northeast continue losing population to states such as Florida and Texas. Real estate is no longer just about location. It has become a referendum on government policy itself.

The broader danger is what comes next. Real estate historically drives consumer confidence because homes are the largest asset for most households. When housing freezes, consumer spending eventually follows. Construction slows, furniture sales weaken, appliance demand drops, and local tax revenues decline. The ripple effects spread throughout the entire economy.

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Arkansas whites–only community sued for discrimination by woman with black husband whose application to buy land was denied

A whites-only community in Arkansas is being sued by a Caucasian woman who claims her membership application was rejected because she has a black husband.

Michelle Walker, 49, claims in a lawsuit that she was discriminated against when her request to join Return to the Land (RTTL)’s 160-acre site near the rural town of Ravenden was refused in November last year.

RTTL, which was launched in 2023, is described on its website as a private association ‘for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry.’ 

Walker, a real estate worker who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, said she was not drawn to RTTL for its principles but was simply captivated by its ‘exceptionally low’ sale price. 

RTTL is selling an acre of land for $1,000, significantly lower than the average price of land in the Ozarks which is around $4,000 per acre.

Walker, who ‘self–identifies as white,’ believed she would be eligible to join the community based on its requirements and disclosed that she has Jewish ancestry on her mother’s side, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas viewed by the Daily Mail.

Her husband is black and they have three biracial children, per the legal filing.

She was given an interview by the community in which her background was explored, and about a month later her application was denied, the lawsuit states.

On Wednesday, she sued RTTL for ‘refusing to sell her land on the basis of race and religion,’ marking the first civil case against the group.

She cited the Fair Housing Act and civil rights laws stretching back to 1866 in support of her argument.

Walker said in her filing that her application saw her complete the group’s application form in which she answered questions about her ancestry and religion.

Walker said her father’s side of the family came to the US in the 1600s and that her mother’s side of the family was made up of Russian Jewish immigrants, per the complaint.

The filing added that Walker’s husband was specifically of Irish and African descent.

When asked about her religion, Walker allegedly replied: ‘I am a Christian. I believe Jesus died for my sins and through believing in him, I will have a heavenly eternal life.’

Walker also faced questions about whether she supported ‘segregation,’ ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘gay marriage’ and ‘transgenderism,’ the filing added.

Per the lawsuit, Walker was ‘surprised’ to see those sorts of questions on the housing application.

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Rep. Chip Roy Files Bill to BAN Chinese Communists and Radical Islamists from Buying American Homes

Rep. Chip Roy has introduced new legislation to stop Chinese Communist Party members, radical Islamists, and other designated foreign adversaries from purchasing homes and real estate in the United States.

In an announcement on Tuesday, Roy declared that American property should belong to American citizens, not to geopolitical foes who seek to undermine the country from within.

The bill would explicitly prohibit individuals affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, Islamist groups, or other designated adversaries from acquiring residential property.

“American homes belong to American families — not the Chinese Communist Party, foreign Islamists, or our geopolitical foes,” Roy told the Daily Caller. “While Americans struggle to afford housing, hostile regimes are buying up our land and neighborhoods.”

“This bill slams the door on foreign adversaries owning American housing and forces them to sell what they already control,” Roy added. “We’re putting America’s homes back in American hands.”

Housing affordability is a top issue for American families struggling with high prices and limited inventory, while foreign entities, especially from China, continue to snap up homes and farmland in strategic locations.

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Communitarianism: The Evil Unleashed on America PT 2 the Montana Water Rights Protection Act

There is a myriad of ways to take our property – and the “powers-that-be are using them and more that they just make up on the spot.

We’ve written about many in our Workbook, in Tom DeWeese’s Sustainable, and in scores of articles. And in more ways than most of us could ever conceive of an act being pulled-off, for instance killing hundreds of ostriches because a couple of years earlier two had been ill but recovered. In fact, the government of Canada had them shot! Another example is capturing” CO2 from atmosphere and compressing and storing it in geological formations. I won’t even get into what could go wrong or, even more, how absurd it is to take CO2 from the atmosphere where we and plants thrive on it.

Many people do not realize that “property” is more than land or a house. Your clothes, your written words, the food in your house and the gas in your car are your property. And your children. Don’t think those taking other forms of your property won’t touch your children.

The U.S. Supreme Court defines property:

“As protected from being taken for public uses, is such property as belongs absolutely to an individual, and of which he has the exclusive right of disposition. Property of a specific, fixed and tangible nature, capable of being in possession and transmitted to another, such as houses, lands, and chattels. Scranton v. Wheeler, 179 U.S. 141, 21 S.Ct. 48, 45 L.Ed. 126.

Note: Chattel represents physical, transferable items like furniture, jewelry, cars, or livestock. It is used to distinguish personal belongings from real property.

Keep in mind that if you have nothing, you are chattel – you are property.

So, let’s look at the Columbia River Basin and the “New Compact”. I am using Catherine Vandemoer, Ph.D.’s report “Meet the New Compact, Same as the Old” to give you the background of the Columbia River Basin project introduced to Montana in 1993.

At that time we were told that the project was to take the area back to pre-Columbian times. Note:Dr. Vandemoer’s words will be in Times New Roman.

Dr. Vandemoer has been following this issue for years, and her writings on it are invaluable. She points out that Senator Daines “put forth the same bill that Senator Tester had done earlier – the CSKT Compact in full, ‘wrapped” it into the “new” Daines Compact and then added ‘new’ and more ‘goodies’ than even the Democrat did,” in addressing the Western Montana portion of the Columbia River Basin Project.

“As with the Tester bill, the intent of the Dains Compact is to have us all now be distracted by the “goodies” and forget about the documented problems with and substance of the provision of The original CSKT Compact whose true economic, environmental, and nation-wide legal precedent-setting impacts have never been examined.

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Tennessee lawmakers pass bill allowing deadly force to defend property

In Tennessee, a stolen item could soon cost someone their life under a bill that’s now headed to the governor’s desk.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Kip Capley (R-Summertown) and Sen. Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald) would allow people to use deadly force to protect their property if they believed they had no other option and there was a serious threat to human safety.

“Right now under current law, if someone is breaking into your property, if they’re stealing from you, if they’re destroying what you’ve worked your entire life to build, you’re expected to wait,” Capley said. “You’re expected to hesitate. You’re expected to second-guess and take a calculated risk at defending what’s yours.”

Democrats pushed back on the legislation.

“The reason we were taught you don’t kill people over property is because they are not putting at risk an innocent human life,” Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) said. “What this legislation seems to be doing is lowering that threshold significantly and substantially, and the department is going to have to reteach in future classes for those who get their lifetime permit that you can now kill people over property, and I don’t think that is right.”

Even some Republicans expressed their concerns. Rep. Greg Martin (R-Hixson) told lawmakers on the House floor he was worried the bill could justify someone shooting an older person with dementia who unknowingly was in the wrong place just because the person believed they were going to act nefariously.

“The Good Book says that it’s an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, and what that really is given to humanity for is to restrain us from going after someone in a greater way than they have harmed us,” Martin said. “My concern is, Rep. Capley, what I’m hearing you say is that if someone is stealing from you — not harming you in the sense that they’re going to kill you — but if they’re stealing from you or your property or maybe they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, then you could do something more than an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.”

However, Capley defended his legislation and argued someone shouldn’t have to stand idly by while a criminal steals their life’s work.

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Ontario landowners push back against high-speed rail and property rights threats

Landowners gathered at the Ontario Landowners Association (OLA) general meeting in Cobourg to voice strong opposition to the federal government’s proposed $90-billion Alto high-speed rail project, warning it threatens private property rights through aggressive expropriation and sweeping legislative changes.

The project, aimed at linking Toronto and Quebec City, has sparked alarm among rural residents and farmers in eastern Ontario as letters from Alto arrive, requesting access to private land for surveys, soil testing, and environmental assessments.

Many fear that allowing entry could weaken their legal standing and pave the way for forced takings.

“There is no law that requires property owners to allow anyone onto their property with respect to Alto,” OLA president Jeff Bogaerts relayed. “The moment you allow Alto onto your property, your property rights are going away.”

Attendees noted that the lack of clear route details, crossing plans, or impact assessments has left landowners in the dark.

Critics like Conservative MP Philip Lawrence argue that the project is fundamentally flawed. At speeds requiring grade separation, every road, farm lane, or crossing demands expensive overpasses or underpasses, costing millions each.

For him and concerned landowners, the economics don’t add up: an estimated $8,000 per Canadian household, with most taxpayers (outside of the 1,000 km corridor between Toronto and Quebec City) unlikely to ever use the service.

“It’s my property. I should be able to do what I want with it,” one farmer stated plainly. “We don’t need it, we can’t afford it, and it’s just a bad idea,” said another.

Others pointed out practical inconveniences, such as disrupted local travel patterns that could force longer drives for basic needs like groceries.

Concerns extend beyond cost and disruption, with speakers highlighting potential conflicts of interest, noting involvement of firms like SNC-Lavalin (now rebranded Atkins Realis), compounded by the fact that Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s partner is vice-president of Alto’s environmental division.

Questions also arose about the project’s alignment with broader global agendas under Prime Minister Mark Carney, with former MP Jack MacLaren saying, “I hope the train goes where the new world order goes, and that’s nowhere.”

Nowhere — that’s exactly where a 2018 Ontario government proposal for a high-speed rail line ended up, despite plans to have it running by 2025 and an $11 billion ‘commitment’ to the failed project.

Ironically, a copy of that year’s OLA magazine was shared with attendees, showing just how relevant those same concerns persist nearly a decade later.

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