Tag: private property

Californians Take Squatting Crisis Into Their Own Hands

Agroup of Californians has taken the squatting crisis in the state into their own hands and created a business in which you can hire someone to get rid of illegal tenants on your property.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several states updated their rules to allow renters more leniency if they were unable to make their monthly payments. However, in states like California and Washington, this has given rise to unforeseen problems in which squatters stay on property they don’t own permanently, and the homeowners lose thousands of dollars in the process.

Lando Thomas, one of the business owners behind Southern California-based Squatter Squad, has been removing squatters since 2018. In 2023, though, he decided to team up with a few others and start a branded company all about removing unruly and illegal tenants from homeowners’ properties.

“Because squatting seems to be on the rise, the courts are backed up from months to years, police can’t or won’t help, property owners feel helpless and are told taking the squatters to court is the only path to getting their property back,” Thomas told Newsweek. “Even the neighbors can be victims because where there’s squatters, there’s usually bad activities going on such as drug dealing and other crimes.”

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Woman Threatened With Prosecution For Putting Gender Critical Notices On Her OWN FRONT DOOR

A 68-year-old woman in London has been threatened with fines by her local council after she put up posters expressing gender critical opinions on her own property.

The pensioner was served with a Community Protection Notice (CPN) and threatened with a £2,500 fine by Hammersmith and Fulham Council after just eight complaints, including someone claiming the material is ‘transphobic’.

The Daily Mail reports that Una-Jane Winfield, who felt “a duty to speak out,” pinned an A4 sized photograph of a women displaying scars from breast removal surgery, next to an advert for the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce  of the campaign group Sex Matters.

The report notes that the council ordered Mrs Winfield to remove the material, which she refuses to do. She will go to court next month to challenge the CPN.

She also says “The police came to have a look at my door on two separate occasions.”

“Thankfully they understood that expression of gender-critical views is protected under the law. But the council has ignored the police,” Winfield adds.

She continues, “In a letter I was told my ‘persistent and continuing conduct’ was having a ‘detrimental effect on the public and the LGBT community’.”

The council claims that the image in question is “provocative and graphic,” and features “nudity prominently displayed on a very busy public section of walkway in plain view.”

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Thriving how-to squatter internet forums reveal home takeover secrets: ‘You can’t stop it!’

Thousands of homes across America are being invaded by squatters, who move in and legally live rent-free — and amazingly there’s no easy way for homeowners or the police to evict them.

In Atlanta, the problem is so bad some residents are too afraid to leave for a vacation, for fear of returning to an unwanted visitor or even finding their home converted into an ad hoc strip club.

However, squatting isn’t as simple as turning up to someone’s home and pushing your way in.

This has led to a host of internet forums and dark web pages devoted to the subject offering a fascinating “dummies guide” to getting into someone else’s house and establishing a right to be there.

“I don’t know if you know this, but we have a housing crisis in this country,” a prolific poster told The Post anonymously. “And it’s only getting worse. People are going to do what they have to do. You can’t stop it.”

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“It’s Enraging”: NYPD Arrest Homeowner For Changing Locks After Squatters Break In

Adele Andaloro, 47, was placed under arrest at her $1 million home in Flushing, Queens, which she inherited from her parents after they died.

“It’s enraging,” Andaloro told the NY Post. “It’s not fair that I, as the homeowner, have to be going through this.“

Andaloro claims the ordeal erupted when she started the process of trying to sell the home last month but realized squatters had moved in — and brazenly replaced the entire front door and locks.

Fed up, she recently went to her family’s home on 160th Street — with the local TV outlet in tow — and called a locksmith to change the locks for her. -NY Post

The spat with the squatters, which was caught on camera, rapidly erupted into a verbal altercation until the cops showed up and led Andaloro away – charging her with ‘unlawful eviction.’

As the Post notes, people can claim “squatter’s rights” if they’ve been squatting for just 30 days at a property. This makes it illegal for homeowners to change the locks, turn off the utilities, or remove the squatters’ belongings.

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102-Year-Old Oakland Man Ordered to Clean Up Graffiti on the Back Fence of His Home or Face Hefty Fine

The City of Oakland, California has ordered a centenarian resident to clean up graffiti from his property or face a substantial fine, KTVU reported.

Victor Silva Sr., a 102-year-old wheelchair user who has lived and paid taxes in his Oakland neighborhood for 80 years, was shocked to receive a violation notice earlier this month ordering the cleanup by March 19th.

If he fails to comply, he faces a $1,100 penalty, with additional charges of $1,277 for each re-inspection that finds the graffiti still in place.

His daughter-in-law, Elena Silva, expressed disbelief at the city’s citation: “It was so absurd, it’s like a joke. If you drive around the city and see the graffiti everywhere, it’s just I don’t know what to say.”

The centenarian, who is approaching his 103rd birthday, reminisced about the times he could handle the cleanup himself. “Just had a roller and a paintbrush and just painted it. It was very easy because I was a contractor, you know. I’ll be 103 in two months or so. That slowed it up a little bit,” Silva Sr. told to KTVU.

Now, the responsibility of maintaining the fence graffiti-free falls on his 70-year-old son, Victor Silva Jr. He finds the task increasingly futile: “It’s hard to keep up with it because as soon as we get it painted, It’s gonna be graffiti on it again, and it won’t last.”

The Silva family also owns a nearby commercial property that has been broken into three times over the last year, exacerbating their frustrations with city services. When Silva Jr. tried to report these incidents, he found himself consistently on hold with 911.

“And I’m put on hold every time. So it’s hard to understand where our tax dollars are going. They can’t answer 911, but they can come out and hassle you about a fence?”

In response to the public backlash and media inquiries, a city inspector from Oakland contacted KTVU, indicating an immediate re-inspection would take place, with the implication that the citation would likely be rescinded.

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Two squatters who took over NYC home of woman found beaten to death, stuffed in duffel bag are being sought for murder: cops

Two squatters are being sought over the gruesome murder of a 52-year-old woman whose body was found stuffed in a duffel bag inside her late mother’s upscale Manhattan apartment last week, police said Thursday.

The victim, Nadia Vitel, was savagely beaten by the two perps when she discovered them holed up inside the 19th-floor apartment on East 31st Street last week, according to cops.

Having just flown in from Spain, Vitel had gone to her late mom’s apartment — which had been vacant for roughly three to four months — to start prepping it so a family friend could move in.

“We believe that some squatters took the apartment over and this woman came home … and walked in on the squatters that were there,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said.

The brutal beatdown left Vitel with blunt force trauma to the head, multiple facial fractures, a brain bleed and two broken ribs, cops said.

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Council Orders London Fish & Chip Shop Owner To Remove British Flag Mural

A fish and chip shop owner in London has been ordered by the local council to remove a mural featuring a Union Jack flag and the words “A Great British meal” from the side of his building after some locals complained it is “not appropriate for the area.”

The Daily Mail reports that the award-winning Golden Chippy in Greenwich received the removal order from the council after a “number of complaints about the mural” and the council deciding it constitutes an “unauthorised advert” in a “preservation area.”

Shop owner Chris Kanizi, who is from Cyprus, commented “It’s just something to put a smile on people’s faces. But the council said ‘this is a preservation area – you can’t have that and you’ve got to paint over it.’”

“They also said people had been complaining, but I don’t believe that. Everyone who has talked to me say they love it,” Kanizi added.

Local residents who were asked about it expressed support for the mural.

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Study Estimates Nearly 96% of Private Property Is Open to Warrantless Searches

Police can traipse onto the vast majority of private property in the country without a warrant thanks to a century-old Supreme Court decision, according to a new study by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public-interest law firm.

In a study published in the spring 2024 issue of Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute, Institute for Justice attorney Josh Windham and research analyst David Warren estimate that at least 96 percent of all private land in the country is excluded from Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement under the “open-fields doctrine,” which allows police to forego warrants when they searched fields, woods, vacant lots, and other property not near a dwelling.

That adds up to nearly 1.2 billion acres open to government trespass, and the Institute for Justice says that’s a conservative estimate. The organization also says the study is the first attempt to quantify how much private property is affected by the Supreme Court’s 1924 ruling in Hester v. U.S., which created the doctrine.

“Now we have hard data showing that the Supreme Court’s century-old error blew a massive hole in Americans’ property and privacy rights,” Windham said in a press release. “Now we know what the open fields doctrine really means: Government officials can treat almost all private land in this country like public property.”

Windham added that “courts and lawmakers across the country will have to face the consequences of keeping this doctrine on the books.” 

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California Officials Force Elderly Couple To Dismantle Home, Citing Blocked Ocean Views

The two-story mobile home that Michael and Susan Christian own and live in in the Orange County beach community of San Clemente, California, isn’t blighted, dangerous, ugly, or even unpopular with the neighbors.

But it is a little too tall, according to state officials with the California Coastal Commission.

For over a decade, the commission—a state agency with the final say over most development on the California coast—has been arguing that the Christians’ addition of a second story to their home obscures ocean views from a nearby walking trail. It also argued the couple added that second story without getting the required permits from the commission.

Late last month, a California appeals court sided with the commission, ruling that the Christians must comply with its demands to shrink their house from its current 22 feet in height down to 16 feet. The Christians’ representatives say that will require them to completely tear down and rebuild the home.

“They’re an elderly couple. They’re in their 70s. They have all kinds of health issues. This is their only home; they live in it,” says Lee Andelin, one of the Christians’ lawyers. Dismantling the home “is going to cost them millions of dollars, for what? There’s not a broader benefit for the public.”

Andelin argues the ruling will embolden the commission to place even more restrictions on coastal homeowners’ ability to improve their properties.

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Father who built four luxury holiday cabins complete with hot tubs at a beauty spot he owns has been ordered to demolish them

A father who built four luxury holiday cabins complete with hot tubs in a natural beauty spot has been ordered to demolish them following a planning battle. 

Owner John Phillips, 38, who opened his £200-a-night chalets in the Gower Peninsula in Wales over a year ago, built them without proper permissions.

Mr Phillips said he did not believe the buildings needed planning permission because of their size when he initially put them up. But after speaking to council workers, he was advised to apply for ‘change of use’ if he intended to rent them out. 

He later applied for retrospective planning permission, which was denied. 

Mr Phillips and his partner Kerrie Garrett saw the chalets as a chance to ‘cash in’ on the beauty of the surrounding area and provide for their two-year-old daughter Darcy-Mae. 

But furious locals claimed the chalets were a ‘blot on the landscape’ of Britain’s first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and should not have been built.

The cabins in the hamlet of Landimore, about 13 miles east of Swansea, faced objections from neighbours and even the National Trust – before planning officials ruled they detracted from the Landimore Conservation Area and Gower AONB.

Council officers issued enforcement action on eight grounds, including the lack of flood and ecology reports, and potential damage to the roots of trees at the rear of the cabins.

The enforcement notice requires Mr Phillips to remove all traces of the cabins and return the land to its previous condition.

The notice was due to take effect from next week but Mr Phillips has appealed the council decision with the Welsh Government department Planning and Environment Decisions Wales.

He argued the cabins would attract visitors to the area all year round and boost the economy in an area where tourist accommodation was limited.

He built the cabins in the grounds of his home as an investment.

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