Florida and other states have passed laws to accelerate the eviction process for squatters.
I have more sympathy for Palestinians than squatters. Maybe Mossad can eliminate squatters
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Hypatia was kind enough to send me her article on the situation with regards to squatters in Pennsylvania. Highly recommended! Her closing paragraph summarizes the sad state of legal affairs:
“Squat happens. And when it does, it seems property owners in theory enjoy a feast of time-honored rights, but in practice, suffer a famine of expeditious remedies.”
We were all brought up with a fine set of beliefs – An Englishman’s home is his castle. Justice is blind. The right to a speedy trial.
Hypatia’s article dredged up a memory of a factory job we students took during one summer. Safety First! There was a Big Red Button on the wall. We temporaries were advised that if the situation on the factory floor was going pear-shaped and there was a risk of someone getting hurt – Hit That Button. That would bring the entire line to a rapid stop.
After the summer was over and we students returned to the indoctrination mill (which lacked a Big Red Button), one of the lads posed an unanswerable question – Do you suppose that the Big Red Button was connected to anything?
Our degenerate legal system reminds me of that Big Red Button. We all felt safer working on the factory floor because the Big Red Button was there. We never saw it pushed, but it demonstrated that a mechanism to ensure our safety was in place. Similarly, we mostly do not have to resort to the courts to get justice – but we have this ingrained belief that, if we do have to go there, justice will prevail. Or rather, we had this ingrained belief.
Seeing the unconscionable lack of justice in the treatment by US courts of Mark Steyn and now President Trump, we now know with total certitude that the legal system’s Big Red Button is not connected to anything.
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My perspective on this is less favorable to the landlords.
In January 2020 I had to move from my old apartment, where I had lived for 10 years due to renovations. That was an ideal place, $500 for a studio within a block of a supermarket, cafe, restaurants, convenience store, and other shops, with mostly Emory students as neighbors. I had just gotten a new job, and managed to find a place close to it, which was supposed to be $825/mo. - the lowest rent I could find then.
When the lease was presented, though, they demanded about $910 for it, the difference being many fictitious fees, with additional terms added in handwriting to the already ridiculously one-sided form lease drafted by the Georgia landlords’ cartel. The additional terms required an additional $150 for payment after the the 3rd of the month, and eviction legal fees of another $300 on the 10th day of the month, 1 week after the regular payment acceptance period. I had no choice to accept or become homeless.
Summary
Then the landlord would not accept less than $935 in monthly rent, $25 more than specified on the lease. Rather than type it all out again, here is most of my answer to their first eviction complaint.
COMES NOW Enon Harris, afterwards referred to as “Tenant”, responding to dispute a request for a dispossessory warrant filed by the apartment complex KRC Alderwood Trails, LLC in the Magistrate Court of DeKalb Co., Georgia. for the apartment occupied by Tenant: 2923 N. DeKalb Dr. #307 Atlanta, 30340. The case number is: 21D01420.
Tenant disputes that the requirements of § 44-7-50 to demand possession have been met as required to begin a dispossessory proceeding, they demanded possession at the end of the month of January 2021, claiming that to be the end of the 12-month lease, but had not demanded and were not entitled to possession at the time they filed for a dispossessory warrant, nor at the time the summons was served.
Tenant believes the lease continues month-to-month after the end of January. Tenant has been involuntarily forced to stay approximately two weeks beyond the end of January 2021 due to the settlement of his workers’ compensation being delayed despite his best efforts, leaving him unable to pay for the movers that his disability necessitates to vacate the premises, or for the up-front costs of establishing a new residence. Management had been informed of these difficulties, and upon learning that management did not believe that the lease continued month-to-month, Tenant asked for a one-month extension of the lease, which the management has refused to allow, despite it threatening to make homeless a disabled person who has paid or tendered payment of all rent, showing management’s depraved indifference to the consequences of their criminal act.
Tenant believes that the property manager, authorized by her property management company SMP and the owners of the property as a continuing business practice has committed numerous crimes and torts against him and other tenants among them:
Fraud - false advertising of rent, advertised as being $825, actually $910,
Coercion - did not disclose terms of lease until the tenant was forced to choose between being homeless and signing whatever terms offered
Illegal lease terms - property manager added term requiring payment of eviction legal fees of $300 at the 10th day of the month, 1 week after the regular payment acceptance period, which is in violation of § 44-7-2 (b) and (c),
Theft - billed and would not accept less than $935 when lease says $910 owed
property manager would not credit the $275 over-payment over 11 months of the lease to the tenant’s account.
Theft - billed for amenities such as pool and exercise room as a separate “utility”, but did not provide access to those amenities from third or fourth month of 12 month lease beginning at end of January 2020
Fraud - management did not provide services including maintenance and pest control required by law and the lease
Fraud, torts - the apartment AC did not remove moisture from the air and the ducts had mold growing in them, causing condensation and extensive mold growth on the tenants property including wooden furniture, and wool, cotton and leather clothing.
Tort - the mold and swarming roaches significantly negatively affected the tenant’s mental health, even as he was trying to recover from a brain injury due to heatstroke at work in mid-July 2020 which left him disabled and unable to complete activities of daily living including cleaning and laundry.
Fraud - attempted to force signing of a new lease on defective and unlivable apartment over two months before end of lease, would not discuss or offer an alternate apartment, though they had ones available, would not call back, forced tenant to say he would not renew the lease in order to avoid automatic renewal of lease which would commit him to pay over $11,000 for a defective apartment.
[Further, landlord promised in a recorded call to offer me an apartment appropriate for my disability – landlord has over 1000 units in the Atlanta area – one not requiring me to climb steps, with sunlight and no mold, but reneged on that promise. They realized that I could not rent from anyone else due to being unable to provide proof of income, and intended to exploit me or make me homeless.]
Tenant has paid 11 months of rent, plus $25/mo. overcharges, 10 months on-time, the 11th month less than 10 days late, together with a penalty of $150. Being disabled and without income pending the outcome of a case before the Georgia State Board of Worker’s Compensation, the tenant had to borrow approximately $4825 to make these rent payments from August to December 2020, at a time when the moratorium on evictions would have allowed him to not pay rent without being dispossessed. Before making the payment for the 11th month’s rent, (December 2020), the Tenant served the property management with a copy of the required executed CDC notice and Declaration published in the Federal Register, which halts evictions during the pandemic. Tenant believes this moratorium has been extended through the end of January 2021, and may be extended beyond that date. Tenant avers that although he has more than met his obligations, he is being treated worse than other tenants who did not meet their obligations.
[counterclaims omitted]
**
After the first complaint was dismissed at their own request, they attempted to get me to sign a settlement agreement releasing them from liability in exchange for nothing. It should have been a memorable meeting for Ms. Cruz: I thundered at her: “Not everyone is a peon!”. (Context: ~90% of the residents were Hispanic, mostly recent immigrants.)
After draining my worker’s compensation settlement to pay rent for the defective apartment, they filed for eviction again, despite having all rent and fees paid. The second eviction application was invalid and required no answer, there already being an open case in which the plaintiff’s claims but not my counterclaims had been dismissed. The plaintiff was required by the rules of procedure to petition to reopen that case rather than filing a new case. (The complete text of their 2nd application was “FURTHER: HOLDOVER”.) Judge McNeal ignored the rules of procedure regarding this, and likely did not even read my timely-filed second answer, which in its very first paragraph requested dismissal of the second case.
Then their lawyer filed a false affidavit saying that I had not answered within the ten days allowed. (That was at least two felonies and a misdemeanor on their lawyer’s part.) This was not checked by the court and a warrant for my dispossession was issued to the marshals, but quashed by the plaintiff before service when I brought the error to their attention.
I had to continue to pay into escrow for months before I could get a hearing. Their agent, Claudia Cruz, claimed on the stand under cross examination not to remember our meeting. “I’m not sure of the right way to bring this up, but that’s perjury”, I told the judge. (During a meeting with Judge McNeal at Friends Meeting a year after the hearing, she said she believed that that was, in fact, perjury.)
Judge McNeal not only condoned the false affidavit filed by the opposing attorney, but virtually acted as his defense lawyer, implausibly claiming that the court’s database sometimes would temporarily lose and then recover individual records of filings. That is not technically possible, to the best of my knowledge, and I have a great deal of experience with database development and administration, including legal databases. A database that has or even could have such behavior would be invalid as a legal record, making every filing in every case in a court that used such a database subject to invalidation. My 2nd answer was e-filed, I received an immediate email receipt from the clerk, and the court record of my answer was there when I checked.
But that wasn’t the worst of that hearing. As I wrote to the judge:
I’d like to take this opportunity to protest your abusive conduct during Wednesday’s hearing. I carefully advised you of my disability and my limits, that pushing beyond them could cause me long-term, even permanently worsened disability. You denied me a promised, needed and requested break, constantly broke my concentration so as to prevent me from covering my main evidence, the emails and call recordings, falsely led me to believe you had read everything I had submitted, refused to admit the email evidence on the basis that you didn’t like their plain-text format (despite you having had them since mid-December without objecting), would not consider any remedy to allow the evidence, and when this literally stunning abuse caused me to lose consciousness, fall out of my chair and go into convulsions, you would not call a recess while I was dazed and unable to defend myself and instead immediately moved to ruling all sorts of things over which you hadn’t heard evidence and things over which you had no jurisdiction, refusing to pause for an instant to hear my motion that counterclaims beyond your jurisdiction must me transferred rather than denied. I was also stunned by you ruling that a returned envelope marked “COVID 19” was evidence of mailing rather than evidence that the mail had not been received. (Signatures weren’t going to be collected on return receipts during the pandemic - if mgt. had used regular return-receipt, it would have been delivered. The only other way I could have gotten that move-out notice is personal delivery, which Ms. Cruz claims she did herself, though she doesn’t deliver such messages herself, and she had clearly been shown to be perjuring herself on the stand earlier.)
For these reasons, and for others such as showing prejudice against tenants, assuming facts not in evidence, condoning the felony of filing a false document, and disrespect for the judgments of other and higher judges opinions, including your own Chief Magistrate (in your Dec… 22 hearing), I request that you recuse yourself from this case …
Really, such lawless and abusive behavior on the part of any lawyer, let alone judge, should shock the conscience, particularly when aimed at dispossessing a disabled person, enabling landlord racketeering, and part of a pattern of other abuse. After this, I wasn’t mentally able to continue with an appeal de novo and eventually became homeless.
Anyway, this post is too long already, so I’ll leave it there, despite there being much more to say, except to say that when I found that Judge McNeal attended my Friends Meeting, only a mile from the shelter, I arranged with the Clerk and certain other senior members for a meeting in which I “eldered” her for nearly two hours. In that meeting, I learned that she had actually been in charge of attempting to get the court database fixed – this system is used in all Georgia courts – and, yes, it really isn’t a valid legal record, filings disappear and reappear all the time.
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@Enon, I’m not writing about landlords, but about people who find their properties occupied by people they DONT want there. People who in addition are NOT paying rent.
Yeah yeah, housing is getting expensive. The lessors you’re talking about aren’t charities, They have the right to set their price at whatever the market will bear, wherever they want to—except where there’s legislation such as rent control in NYC. And during the Covid crisis, landlords were forbidden from evicting tenants for non-payment of rent. Of course the landlords still had to pay property taxes and maintenance. They just aren’t the absolute tyrants you seem to think. But again, CWs post and my article weren’t about them.
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Is your landlord Rafael Warnock lol 
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Maybe a new discussion by @Enon regarding his landlord tenant experience?
Being a mom and pop landlord in a liberal city or county is no picnic.
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Sorry if my comments seemed in any way directed at you or anyone else here.
I’ll assume you didn’t read my last post, I thought it was a shocking story, far more than the stories about squatting, but maybe that’s just because it happened to me. – They were doing evictions during the pandemic of people e.g. me) of people who paid more than all their rent on time. That plus all kinds of contractual violations, fraud, perjury, extortion, abuse of the disabled – a case in which they had no leg to stand on, yet were backed to hilt by the court.
Landlords aren’t being injured by the law in Georgia, real people are.
“They have the right to set their price at whatever the market will bear…”, sure, but not so far beyond what the market will bear. They are rentiers, a byproduct of the financialization of the economy, eating out the substance of the productive economy. Mor Assayag and David Issroff of King Rook Capital (KRC), of N.Y., N.Y., who snapped up that apartment complex where I lived for pennies on the dollar after the 2008 financial crisis, farm illegal aliens for rents of 20%+ per year of the cost of the units. They “eat like effendi” as the Rebbe said. Some of us don’t like being eaten by foreign racketeers.
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Are you back on your feet?
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No, I get this. (And I wasn’t reprimanding you: it’s not as if topics raised in a post never veer off in another direction!)
The commodification of housing, where investment companies, foreign and domestic, buy up single family homes and regular old apartment buildings, then fix the rents or prices high, is probably what’s responsible for the “housing crisis” today, so in that regard it IS related to the squatting issue.
I don’t know whether those practices can be stopped. I wish they could, because we now have a generation which should be establishing their households, having children, etc.—who can’t afford a place to live. I’ve written before that I don’t understand this: there’s a need for low income housing, let’s even say medium income, “starter” income housing. Why isn’t some entrepreneur filling it?
I try, with little success, to follow the Pittsburgh case brought by Builders’ Assoc of Metropolitan Pittsburgh challenging an ordinance the city passed whereby developers were mandated to sell a certain portion of units in any development at a low price, and the price was to remain fixed for 30 years if the property changed hands again. (I think what’ll happen, though,is the city has to compensate the developers; then they’ll be on board with the scheme.)
That ordinance is an attempt to promote “economic diversity”. And thanks to you @Enon , I ve just had an epiphany: it’s catastrophic trying to eliminate “slums”. Those cold-water walk-ups in Brooklyn , the Bronx: okay, they weren’t luxurious, but they were shelter, and many people whose families started out there ended up in mansions on Long Island. “Slums” are a breeding ground for ambition! I don’t think artificially plunking low income people down next to wealthy people is going to have the same effect.
H’mmm…there’s a complex relationship between ambition and envy, isn’t there?
(now @Enon , I have veered off YOUR topic! )
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I think, @Hypatia, that the conclusion of this, and several other threads we have recently seen and debated, is that ANY government intrusion WILL have consequences that are: (a) deleterious, (b) unintended by the original proponent of the legislation, and (c) will damage society far more than any good they might INCIDENTLY do.
BY DEFINITION government does things the same way for everyone. That will result in different results, depending on the person it is done “for”. Thus you get the ludicrous situation where a single mother on welfare manages to “save” enough money over time to help pay for her child’s college education - and is prosecuted for “abusing the welfare system. Welfare is, after all, only meant to provide “subsistence support”, and if you actually managed to save anything, you obviously got more than subsistence.
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“Are you back on your feet?”
I’ve been worse, but no, not really. Dani Eder has been hosting me – I mentioned his Seed Factory Project in another thread. I was doing the books section at a Goodwill, saved some beautiful books from going to salvage, but net pay after commute time and expenses was less than $7/hour. GW management does many criminal things as their regular course of business (e.g. exploitation of the disabled, unregistered worker’s comp. self-insurance, human trafficking), when I complained they retaliated, repeatedly, in several ways; I’ll spare you the details. I declared constructive dismissal and am waiting to see if they’ll allow unemployment pay.
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I’ll apologize again for being so surly. I just wanted to check if you clicked on the “Summary” bar at the end of the visible part of my post that starts: “My perspective on this is less favorable…”, and read the other 7/8ths of the post.
You’re a lawyer, how often have you heard of a judge proceeding directly to judgment as soon as one of the parties starts having convulsions on the floor? (Zoom hearing, but even so…). If filings can appear and disappear and reappear in the court’s database, how it be a legal record? What’s to stop deeds, mortgages, wills, corporate charters, even retirement accounts from similarly floating in and out of existence? Everyone’s property is threatened far more by such failures of the State than by lesser criminals.
Legitimate tenants have no enforceable rights against landlords; squatters fare even worse. There really isn’t any way to make the laws favor the property owners any more than the courts already do.
What is the solution? Not NYC-style rent control. The crucial thing is to get the excess money in the system out of the hands of financial speculators.
No one thing will do it, but here are some ideas: enforce immigration limits of about 0.1% of the population per year, prohibit nonresident non-citizens and corporations above some small size from owning residential property, prohibit owning more than one mortgaged single-family home, make the maximum mortgage term 20 years, or prohibit mortgages entirely, take away the preferential accounting and tax treatment of non-occupant investments in existing buildings, make residential real estate more liquid for those who have to move by making it so that the mortgage goes with the property rather than the owners, apply the last to condos and make all apartments into condos (or perhaps just those with rent / sq. ft. above some fraction of the average local residential property equivalent mortgage interest per sq ft.),… none of these are likely to work well, honestly, but may be better than the current situation. The traditional American solution was individually-owned rooming and boarding houses, which present zoning laws discourage.
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