Squatters in Spain who demand a "ransom" before they will leave a property

How about you get your friends oversquat the squatters? Who are they going to sue now?

So the judge can simply say no and the (legal) father is now on the hook. And furthermore, the legal system will manufacture a criminal if the legal father decides to test his own DNA with the one of his alleged (for whom he is financially responsible) child.

I really highly doubt that the original squatters continuously inhabited the place, as though they were clinging to a new Kia in a radio contest.

So stuff like people being declared dead incorrectly, identity fraud. I'm also reminded of an incident in the Netherlands that lead to the fall of the current (still acting; it's complicated) government, where the tax agency was somehow convinced people had fraudulently received particular subsidies and decide to get the money back plus interest, which it turns out tax agencies are very good at.

Good luck finding anyone to beat up there. You can scare people but you can't intimidate red tape.

You can't solve violence without violence.

You'd have to band together with other people like you to stop them. I guess you'd also need some mechanism for restraining the worst impulses of the mob we've just organized, like a governor restrains a steam engine. We could call it a "government." I bet it would be a hit.

Once you decide to go outside the law, you take responsibility, do your research and prepare as best as you can.

See, these people don't exactly want to be criminal gangs, they just want a quick Euro for little risk.

So, your house and you want to kick out squatters - yeah, sure. Someone else's house and you want them to break in - no way, we're not insane.

Most of the time.

If you deal with some crazy cunts, they can burn your house down.

Generally why the legal way is preferable. But if you're desperate, you can look at alternatives.

I think in order to avoid open conflict from law enforcement, these types will try to avoid residing at the scene of the crime. Instead, they will rely on referrals for repeat business, while keeping things on the down low.

Any use of violence need opposing and competing forces in a market to work.

Judging by the quality of service, it obviously doesn't work when the government has a monopoly of legal violence.

As you mentioned, having people doing it illegally is prone to the creation of a black market. Black markets need to stay hidden so they'll have lower standards and generally a worse experience for everyone involved. If there wasn't any control on these "big guys", eventually someone would come up with a way to broadcast these "big guys" reputation. Someone could easily hire some other "big guys" to keep the other ones in check.

Who cares about the old lady stealing sweets from the reception candy dish during a bank robbery on a mafia bank?

While I don't agree with the idea in the comment.c this person is speaking from experience (supposedly). They should be allowed to share it, and their viewpoint

Also, real organized crime immediately flips on you when people notice their loud obvious daylight crimes and there is blowback.

it is, but this investment is costly, because it takes a lot of time and effort, with no real guarantee of success, and when you are eventually successful, other people could easily free-ride off your investment (since it's a non-excludable outcome).

So what a "rational" actor would do is wait for someone else to expend their resources doing this, while they themselves pay to gangs/organized crime to obtain their own property back in the mean time.

If you are in Trou-les-Bains then nobody cares.

All that would need to do is provide the squatters some written notice informing them that this building was selected for testing a non harmful experimental rodent deterrence prototype the purpose of which is to minimize the presence of known plague vectors. (High/low frequency devices are often used for this and similar purposes). By notifying the “residents” in advance, it establishes that they are made aware that the owner of the property, although not actively seeking the removal of their presence from the premises at this current time has given them fair warning that these devices will be installed and made operational at the provided date and they are not actually being asked to leave. The legitimate justification behind the use of the property for this purpose is to afford maintenance and safety upkeep on said property by minimizing financial losses incurred while income from the property through other means is not possible due to it being forcibly prevented from generating income due to the presence of the squatters.

Perhaps the rebuttal to this approach are zoning laws favoring the sole use of the property as purely no residential.

Another unrelated risk that the squatters open them self up to is for the owner to contact multiple strict by reputation inspection agency that is likely to find some reason why the area should be not approved for renting to individuals due to safety reasons while those flaws are amended. During this and before the owner could establish communication with several repair companies seeking quotes on the repairs needed to meet the livable standards again but document that the repairs are not currently possible due to the potential financial legal liability of performing construction while the building is physically occupied. If a building inspection agency classifies the building as unsafe for residents then anyone choosing to stay there with children would be technically liable for child endangerment and would be at risk of being reported to the French equivalent of the child protective services.

If you stare at the playing field long enough there are always legal checkmate moves in every game no matter how inconsistent or ridiculous, even the French legal system. There appears to be a pattern of justice miscarriage in the French legal system possibly calling into question whether or not any other nation should ever honor any French extradition request as long as they hold laws as silly as this and preventing someone from seeking to prove with modern forensic science whether or not they are innocent of the accusation of genetic paternal responsibility.

The flowers in their “bouquet of evidence” are less than fragrant.

- You don't get 'by default' a year of benefits, you need to work at least for three years to 'accumulate' 360 days of benefits

- The benefits are not that useful if you live in a bug city, given the rent prices. Max benefits are 70% of your base salary, with a limit of around 1000€. After 180 days it goes down to 50%.

- After that, when you work again, you're probably going to pay a lot of taxes in the first year, to adjust the low taxes (IRPF) you were paying while on benefits.

Letting good property sit empty when there's affordability crises because it's an "investment" and you're just waiting for the ability to charge more, say, is tragic.

I would argue that the laws and regulations are sort've working as intended in that they deter renters. Unfortunately it also isn't working as intended in that it's not encouraging primary residency. So you end up with the worst of both worlds: neither renters nor homeowners.

Personally, I am strongly of the opinion that renting for more than a temporary amount of time should be very strongly discouraged; that people should own their place of residence; and the correlation that there should be very few landlords over renters. But I can see how that can be bad for some types of economies...

Granted, if it's a primary residence, you have your driver's license and neighbors to back you up. But what if it's an investment property? What if the squatters have been there long enough to have their ID say the address?

When I went through the courts to have someone evicted - after a year long legal fight, the bailiff that finally came out to remove the tenant, gave me a business card to a friend of his that removes tenants.

He said that as long as I have the eviction notice, the police/court would have no issue with physically removing someone, and that there was no reason to make the additional multi-month petition to have the court physically order the bailiff to remove the tenant.

So ever since, I get the order, and then get two guys to go in and physically put all the person's stuff on the sidewalk, and lock them out.

It sucks, but it's not like we're evicting single moms (who are usually able to pay due to gov't aid). In my experience, the tenants that get evicted are always the single male drug addicts (who are also on gov't aid).

So much speculation. Do you have any proof for these claims?

Thanks for the correction.

Then squatters move in in two steps. First they do a small break in and leave, observing whether someone notices and fixes the first break in. If the first break in goes unnoticed, it is probably safe to move in, change the locks and squat there permanently as nobody will confront them in the 48h window.

Sometimes in England a landlord will be attempting to illegally evict a lawful (non-squatting) tenant, so the tenant calls the police for help and is surprised when the police assist in the illegal eviction! Obviously this is not supposed to happen. The police should not be evicting people just because some random told them he owned a property and it was being squatted.

On the other hand, the legal situation for evicting squatters in your home isn't so bad here. You have 28 days after you find out you are being squatted, and the eviction only takes 24 hours.

Unless you register all tenancies with the state (which seems like massive overreach) how can the police quickly determine the lawful possessor?

AP needs to be exclusive. So if you didn't have a fence keeping the neighbor off the dock, then what you'd get is a prescriptive easement. You'd get to keep using your dock where it is, but the neighbor would still have title to the strip of land. There may be some conditions in which the neighbor would get to access the part of the dock on his land.

I don't know a single regular on r/landlords who wants that to happen. Just today there was a landlord trying to force a tenant to pay for a window broken by an unaffiliated third party (collateral damage from a neighbor's domestic dispute) when the lease very clearly said the landlord was responsible.

It's trivially true that some can and in fact will climb out of poverty by accepting those N jobs and simultaneously true that most can't climb out of poverty via those jobs alone because multiple people can't accept the same position.

Most of the people who are on the edge of not being able to afford <insert city here> can't all move away into the suburbs let alone Detroit because they can't earn enough money for all the things that aren't cheaper and it would cease to be cheaper as soon as collectively chose to do so. It is only cheap because its undesirable.

You might argue that they should've made better decisions earlier - "my housing is precarious, time to move with my last few bucks before I'm totally out of money" - but then what is your proposed policy for dealing with bad decisions? Do you plan on doing things to try to prevent it? Or try to criminalize bad decisions?

If we want to have people to stop moving to big cities and live wherever they can afford, we need to have the infrastructure to allow people like that to work and socialise. I'd love to buy one of those 1$ houses (although these don't seem to exist as such in Central Europe) and move to some dying industrial town, but if that meant I'd have to work for minimum wage in that one local pub or gas station, and if there were no other people under 50 in a 100km radius, I don't think I'd last long there. I'd rather take my chances in the city.

That's considered an "easy fix" now?

This attitude explains, at least in part, why they live in a place with the shoddy rule of law and a deficiency of capital. (The track record of revolutions which violently re-allocate property is terrible, mostly for the people who originally lacked capital, moreso in the last century.)

In the squatting case, it is just government (and all taxpayers) dumping the problem of homeless people onto a set of unfortunate property owners. It is simply much cheaper for the government (and hence taxpayers) to not address the root causes.

You've conceded that in absence of a government, people have the right to enforce their own personal justice. If the right to pursue justice still exists in absence of a government, then some sort of law must also exist in absence of a government (from what else would you derive a right to seek personal justice?) The laws to which I appeal now do not come from governments, books, or gods; I believe they are encoded in our genes after eons as living as a social species. Social instincts which evolved to facilitate cooperation in groups are the root of all basic laws written down by governments. When somebody is wronged, in violation of these universal laws, they feel it in their bones.

If you don't believe any of that, believe this: when people feel wronged they will seek justice. Either a government can provide them with a safe framework to receive justice, or people will seek it themselves. You'll never succeed in scolding people away from desiring justice. When seeking vigilante justice is routine, that is categorically a failure of government to provide justice.

In Sweden they may just suffer from NIMBY syndrome or "building is capitalist speculation!" type of stupidity.

You can often spot the empty and vacant ones because they're the ones that are easier for local homeless to sleep in front of.

Whenever I see that I wonder why we spend so much time fretting about single family zoning instead of targeting these underutilized currently-non-residential areas.

Many cities have a lot of empty properties. Sometimes because they're derilict (and maybe the owner can't/won't repair); sometimes because it's hard to sell/rent out; or maybe the owner is just obscenely rich to the point of not caring. Whatever the reasons, this is something that shouldn't be allowed to exist. Cities are usually seriously space-constrained (by a river, or ancient walls, or roads etc). Not wasting existing real estate should be a no brainer.

I know the Spanish economy is weak, but it's concerning when a working family cannot afford rent and clearly changes need to be made to ensure that they can.