With Squatting Out of Control, DeSantis Signs Anti-squatters Bill; NY Considering Legislation

At long last, public officials are taking squatters seriously.

GOP Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation this week, HB 621, protecting the property rights of homeowners and providing an easy method of ejecting the vagabonds.

Even New York’s leftist-controlled Legislature is considering a measure in response to the murder of a New York City woman by two squatters.

And, not surprisingly, President Joe Biden’s illegal-alien invaders are part of the problem.

Two Bills

“We are putting an end to the squatters scam in Florida,” DeSantis said. “While other states are siding with the squatters, we are protecting property owners and punishing criminals looking to game the system.”

The Sunshine State attorney general, Ashley Moody, pointed to a Venezuelan illegal alien’s video that advised fellow illegals to break into unoccupied homes because they have “squatter’s rights.”

“He appeared to be referring to adverse possession laws, commonly known as squatter’s rights, which allow unlawful property occupants rights over the property they occupy without the owner’s consent, in certain circumstances,” the New York Post reported:

[Leonel] Moreno claimed in the viral TikTok clip, which has drawn more than 3.9 million views, that he has “African friends” who have “already taken about seven homes.”

The firebrand influencer, who lives with his partner and their baby daughter, argued that the only way for his fellow migrants to escape living on the streets and not become a “public burden” is to “invade” unoccupied homes.

He is now on the run from immigration authorities.

Under Florida’s new law, a property owner can get the sheriff to boot a squatter under three conditions:

• The individual has unlawfully entered and remains on the property;

• The individual has been directed to leave the property by the owner but has not done so; and

• The individual is not a current or former tenant in a legal dispute.

“The bill creates an optional new procedure for a property owner to request that a sheriff’s officer remove an unauthorized person from residential real property,” the measure’s legislative summary explains:

The property owner must contact the sheriff and file a complaint under penalty of perjury listing the relevant facts that show eligibility for relief. The complaint form is in the bill. If the complaint shows that the owner is eligible for relief and the sheriff can verify ownership of the property, the sheriff must remove the unauthorized person. The property owner must pay the sheriff the civil eviction fee plus an hourly rate if a deputy must stand by and keep the peace while the unauthorized person is removed.

A person wrongfully removed pursuant to this procedure has a cause of action against the owner for three times the fair market rent, damages, costs, and attorney fees. The bill also creates three new crimes relating to unlawfully occupying a dwelling or fraudulently advertising property for sale or lease.

The new law makes squatting a dangerous business, at least financially, by creating a new misdemeanor and two new felonies:

• Lying in writing to obtain real estate or presenting a falsified document that convey property rights is a first-degree misdemeanor;
• A squatter who wrongly occupies or trespasses and causes $1,000 in damages is guilty of a second-degree felony; and,
• Advertising a property for rent or sale without legal authority or ownership is a first-degree felony.

In New York, a legislator said squatting is out of control and indeed a “crisis,” CBS reported. “Assembly Bill 6894 is simple,” Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz explained. “It would allow lawful homeowners to remove squatters by redefining squatters as trespassers rather than tenants under New York state law.”

Squatters Are Violent Criminals

Two squatters beat a woman to death and stuffed her in a duffel bag when she returned home from Spain to her deceased mother’s vacant apartment, police allege, a murder that triggered the anti-squatter’s bill in New York. Cops arrested them in Pennsylvania.

And again, one of Joe Biden’s “migrants” offered a how-to tutorial on squatting.

The day after DeSantis moved to protect Floridians from Biden’s army of “migrant” invaders, the Post detailed a horror story in Texas.

“Squatters turned a Texas woman’s home into a ‘drug den’ and sold her possessions at a yard sale — but police told her they couldn’t do anything about it,” the newspaper reported:

Terri Boyette was in Florida caring for her sick mother when a friend called to tell her someone had squatted [in] her Dallas-area home.

She had previously hired workers to renovate her house, but after she left a painter had broken in and wrecked the place, leaving crack pipes in her oven and needles in a drawer, Boyette told The Post.

The squatter wrecked her home, she told the Post, and even rented it out.

Frighteningly, the law required Boyette, forced to hire an attorney, to go to court to evict the drug-dealing squatter.

And even worse, “he has tried to come back,” Boyette told the newspaper.

Related article:

Woman Arrested for Trying to Get Squatters Out of Her OWN Home