Where I live there are countless rustic properties, the vast majority of which will remain empty due to generations of infighting between relatives. Similarly, plots of land are carved up over the years until a single field may have 20+ owners.
I know of one such case: they were offered a huge, insane amount of money for the land. But each one of the owners wanted more for their piece than the others, and tried to do private deals, and some refused to sell even though their piece was a mis-shapen series of lines on a government map that gained them zero benefits (farmers can't farm the land either), so nobody gets anything and the place is just rotting.
Along with the houses surrounding. That have multiple owners.
It makes me very sad seeing so many stone buildings left uninhabited and overgrown with plants when I visit Spain and Italy. I always thought it was just the cost to upgrade them to modern living standards that was prohibitive, but from personal experience [0] with similar situations in the US, I can see partial ownership being an even bigger problem.
[0] One set of my grandparents split their house equally among their 3 children. Because it has immense sentimental value to those children, they have not sold it and currently “rent” it at no cost to one of the children. Depending on the order in which those 3 children pass, the state of the house could easily become deadlocked for decades as I know one of my aunts would refuse to sell it even if the other aunt (who lives in it) passes. Thank god none of my cousins would want to live in it so we probably would eventually be able to sell it. It’s not even close to a mansion or anything… just a regular 1960s middle class house in an area where land is pretty cheap. If I had a shitton of cousins and the property was very valuable land I could totally envision it getting permanently deadlocked.
While inheritance laws in Southern Europe are weird, I don't think that partial ownership of buildings is the issue here.
The real issue is that old buildings are not useful anymore:
1. Buildings that are not longer needed. For example, you can walk in woods and see old, run down, metati [1] in Italy. While chestnuts still keep a sentimental value, mountain people do not rely on them for sustenance anymore. Therefore, the drying sheds and mills have been abandoned.
2. Buildings that are not just functional anymore. Our barn had 20 stalls. It was functional as of the 1800s, but it's no longer a viable building to host a herd of milk producing cows. It has small stalls, lack of windows, difficult sanitation. People just build new barns and abandon the old ones. The problem is that the barn is build of rock, so it won't decay so easily.
3. Buildings that are no longer comfortable. Similar to point 2, old stone houses are not that comfortable. Having 3-foot wide stone walls for each internal room seems like charming until you realize that you can't use wall space. A house with a regular footprint (maybe 100 sq. feet) is much smaller once you consider all the space that stone walls take up. Plus, old houses don't have plumbing, electricity, etc, are damp and cold in the winter (but somewhat pleasant in the summer). People just prefer to live in a modern place rather than fix up an old one (which might be marked as historical and will need much more money to fix up).
I think it's more accurate to say that there simply is no wall space, because the walls ARE the stones.
There are ways around it, probably using copious amounts of conduit etc. but it's a lot of work compared to simply living somewhere that already has utility outlets where you need them.
> I can see partial ownership being an even bigger problem.
I don't know about the US, but where I live, I think I think that if you don't want to be, the other owners have to buy your slice. If they can't they need to sell the house.
This rule in many areas is how real estate developers acquire lots of land cheaply that has been in a particular family for generations. They find a family where the previous owner has passed and thus the ownership defaults to then next kin.
They approach one next of kin who doesn’t know they even inherited it, buy out their slice, and require the remaining members to buy them out, forcing them to sell it… likely to the same investor.
Not OP but I will say I've heard stories like they describe from at least 3 different Spanish people I know, inheritance laws there do seem to cause some problems.
Thanks for reminding me the time I visited Peru in the early 2000s and saw fields of orderly criss crossing rows of rocks acting as boundaries. The tour guide said generations of owner kept dividing the land till the land's no longer usable.
This is so wild to me. Coming from a place in New Zealand where property is incredibly valuable, nothing in my city is ever vacant for more than a few weeks. The idea that land and buildings could remain empty is economically unthinkable.
A man did this in Sydney fairly recently. He discovered a vacant house whose occupant had died, changed the locks and tidied the property before renting it out to other people. After 20 years he applied for the deed. Relatives of the deceased owner were tracked down, and tried to fight him in court, but he won.
He got to keep 20 years of rent payments and a multi-million dollar property.
Seems fine to me. No one cared enough to do anything with it and people need living space, so he utilized it. After a while if you tend a property and no one complains it is yours -- squatter's rights.
I would agree, except that he rented it out. He should get compensated for the part of cleaning the place up, but the people he rented to got scammed - he lied to them, took their money and let them carry the risk of getting thrown out if the real owner turned up.
property is incredibly valuable in Dublin City centre. However there are many vacant lots and abandoned buildings. There has been an issue with "land barons" for decades. They own a lot of property in Dublin, and leave it vacant to create scarcity and drive up the price of property, and then they use the leverage of their now more valuable property to buy more.
It was identified in the 70's that there were gaps in Irish property laws that could allow this to happen but nothing was eventually done about it.
There are places in the US so desperate for new residents they will offer you an abandoned house if you fix it up and pay property taxes. Buffalo, NY and Detroit have done this.
>> There are places in the US so desperate for new residents they will offer you an abandoned house if you fix it up and pay property taxes. Buffalo, NY and Detroit have done this.
I knew a guy that bought an old house in Detroit for a few $K. He also picked up the empty lot next door for like $500 - they'd rather you maintain it (mow the grass) than the city do it, or it look like crap. Not sure if these deals are still a thing today.
I know someone who did this as well. Has mulberry trees, started a garden, and that house has a lot of sqft. He even rents it out to others at a pretty low cost.
They are definitely still a thing, the entity that handles this is the Detroit Land Bank. https://buildingdetroit.org/
Years ago, when detroit was in desparate throws, I thought that it was ripe for a new 'silicon valley' and they should have pushed a huge start-up market. They didnt, but they should have.
I still think detroit is a solid market - but you have to get some serious incentives...
Look at fn twitter - they got SF to give them millions in tax breaks, only to find that all the other services (and tremote work) were untennable on market street (the Emporium now the westfield mall) has turned back into the failed district it was in the 90s (hint; public transport and parking greed fucked that up)
Now look - the city of SF depends on Salesforce and twitter to bring thousands of people into the city - but it has no affordable place to house or park them.
I think twitter owes the city a giant amount of money - and benioff can go fuck himself (speaking as someone who built out many of his offices)
The point being that places such as Detroit need to up there game and build a tech scene - but I am afraid its too late.
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EDIT: @DANG - im tired of this fn "posting too fast" -- it stiffles intereaction.
I dont participate in Reddit any longer, but seriously - ive talked to you about this many times....
I want to engage with HNers, and your speed-brake thwarts that... knock it off. :-)
I was at a fairly sizable tech event in Detroit last fall. The convention center and area down by the river were nice enough but people didn't feel very safe in general and there were apparently some incidents--and we're not even talking particularly bad parts of town. A tech company would probably have a lot more luck with something like an Ann Arbor location. I think Detroit proper would be a really tough sell to get most people to move there.
Renaissance Center was started in 1970. That's how long the idea of "Detroit renaissance" has been current. At some point, you have to realize it's never going to happen.
Also no useful public transit. The People Mover is a joke and the busses are famous for being hours late / just not showing up. The infra used to be decent when the auto mfgs were around there and out in Southfield where some bigger office buildings were, but they haven’t kept up with the times in terms of connectivity (why would they with no one to use it?). Housing is cheap but who would want to live there? Not much to do, not many cool smart people to hang out with, winters are awful, food scene mostly sucks, music scene is decent if you love really underground stuff and noise / screamo / UG electronic (esp house), schools are awful, nature has tons of mosquitos from all the lakes, lots of lakes if you’re into boating (and lake cabins are like $50k), skiing sucks (no mountains), airport sucks and is far away + Delta took over so if you want non-stop to anywhere expect to pay at least $400, Chicago is a long drive but doable for weekends (again no train which could be an hour on high speed rail, it’s less than 300 miles but flying takes as long as driving due to airports and transport on both ends)…
Yeah, Detroit…nah. Source: grew up there. Never going back.
Pretty much everything north of ~Flint is good if you just want a house by a lake, The UP especially so. Wisconsin and Minnesota have fewer lakes, but they are also good, and have better roads. If you want to go out on the Great Lakes, skiing/snowboarding (on dunes?), hiking, kayaking, hunting, or fishing, narrow down your choices accordingly and take a visit to check it out.
And the intellectual property laws are bullshit. Your employer owns all your ideas even if they pop into your head off-hours. It's hard to make a spinoff when some megacorp has that kind of teeth into you.
California has all the startups, not because Californians are smarter or harder-working, but because they are more free.
Do you mean Michigan's IP laws or Detroit? I always assumed that this was something an employer had to write in, not the default.
Do you have a source? From looking, the only default I found is Michigan has the concept of a "shop right" but that involves inventions on employer time with employer resources. It is also narrowly defined[1]
IANAL so this is my layman's understanding, but I've had to sign a number of agreements with my employer giving them rights to every thought I've ever had.
My understanding is that these agreements are not valid in California. I could be wrong.
Ah, I've seen these clauses too. The link above says for the rights of a patent or similar IP to be assigned there needs to be "consideration" which, they're not paying you when you're at home. So theoretically in MI you could fight something like this if it became a problem.
Doesn't stop them trying to bleed you dry through a lawsuit though.
> im tired of this fn "posting too fast" -- it stiffles intereaction
My guess is that people are downvoting you (maybe because of profanity? not sure) which results in a shadowban/ratelimit of your account. Your comment shows up as gray to me, which I think means it's been downvoted or flagged.
The whole random time-based temporary bans cloaked as "posting too fast" is pretty screwed up. It's unclear what the restrictions are (as dang himself has told me) and you don't get the warning until _after_ you try to post once you've past the limit.
But yes I do agree with you that dang is kind of unusually responsive when you question him on his decisions. That, however, doesn't mean you'll find his reasoning all that compelling. Regardless, he runs the forum so he gets to censor it as he wishes.
> Years ago, when detroit was in desparate throws, I thought that it was ripe for a new 'silicon valley' and they should have pushed a huge start-up market. They didnt, but they should have.
The #1 land-owner in downtown Detroit[0] (founder of Rock Financial and owner of Rocket Mortgage, Quicken Loans, and Cleveland Cavaliers) thought the same thing at the time and worked hard to make it happen[1, 1b]. It never "blew up" but the efforts did bring in some substantial amount of revitalization and additional business which perseveres through today. He also spearheaded attempts to win Amazon's bid for "HQ2" to bring amazon's new major headquarters to Detroit.[2]
Dan Gilbert went to public high school outside of Detroit, and studied at relatively low-cost state schools (Michigan State University, Wayne State University). His son recently passed at 26 from neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes tumors, that can affect the brain, spinal cord and various nerve signals.[3] His dad ran a small lounge / restaurant in Detroit which looked like this[4], and his mom was a realtor[5]. His grandfather, Manuel
Feldstein, owned car washes in Detroit[5].
And no, I'm not part of a PR effort for the family, I just like looking into where various modern-day rich people came from. Detroit had a huge role in prohibition smuggling from Canada with plenty of people rising up the economic strata a la "Great Gatsby". It's claimed that 75% of the alcohol smuggled into the USA during prohibition came into Detroit. The backdrop for the culture of "Detroit muscle cars" were speed-running alcohol cargoes across the frozen Detroit river from Canada to USA. Smugglers even built a "beer pipeline" running from a brewery in Canada to the basement of an establishment in Detroit. The mafia were heavily involved in these profits. While it's possible that the car wash and restaurants were money-laundering fronts for such endeavors, the family's choice of neighborhoods and schooling are consistent with that of their public persona. Yes, they received plenty of benefit from being white during a time of great segregation, and benefitted from connections across the Jewish community which led to his founding of Rock Financial with Ron Berman. But it doesn't appear that he was born with any particularly different advantages than my father's Catholic family or many other (white) families in that area. My grandfather went from penniless after serving in WW2 to standard middle class as middle management at Ford Motor Company and my father came home from school one to a smoldering pile of ashes on the front lawn from a cross that was burnt in opposition to my grandparents vocal support for allowing black people to buy houses in Plymouth, MI around the time of the Detroit race riots.
Per the opening of the NYT article, the emptyness at night certainly contributed to feeling unsafe. It's not that there were gangs of shady looking characters out and about for the most part. It's that there were wide, empty streets with no apparent activity.
Yes. That is accurate. I lived in Ann Arbor during 2008 but partied in Detroit from time to time. We'd say that "Detroit is very dangerous...if you run into someone. But you won't, so in reality it's actually safer than anywhere else." It's truly impossible to overstate how empty Detroit was at the time. You could walk around aimlessly for 30-45 minutes in many areas and not see a single soul. That said, you really didn't want to run across strangers -- the reputation for violent crime was well-deserved.
A friend of mine rented a room for $250/month in an enormous mansion with 25-foot wide marble staircases and a panic room/vault in the basement. I have no idea how many rooms the mansion had, it was far too big to fully explore in the time I had. Since no one else was renting a room there, my friend used the mansion to throw raves with 50-100 people and we mostly stuck to 2-3 rooms, with the majority of the house still being empty.
Some of my friends from slightly wealthier families bought up entire neighborhoods in Detroit at $10,000/home and renovated them, they revitalized the neighborhoods by installing a fun neighborhood dive bar with cheap menus and some convenient commercial stores. Many of those neighborhoods are still "hot spots" today, retaining quirky/fun culture. Makerspaces bloomed as well[0] due to a truly insane amount of heavy industrial equipment which was being sold for fractions of a penny on the dollar. The aforementioned rave scene also laid a lot of the musical foundations for today's EDM music, though it was not as impactful as the Baby Boomer generation's "Motown Records" (The Supremes, Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Marvelettes, and the Miracles). Before the Detroit Race Riots, people were regularly moving from Chicago to Detroit because Detroit was far and away the "cooler" city to live in of the two.
About 10 years ago now I took the train out east and had to switch train stations in Buffalo (they have two stations there). I arrived in the suburbs which felt fairly normal to me and I took a bus into downtown. The buildings downtown looked fairly normal to me and in apparently reasonable repair, but the streets were remarkably empty of both cars and people. It kind of freaked me out and that was like 5 in the afternoon. I saw some people here and there and saw a wedding party which helped me feel safe. I never encountered anything directly scary there, but it was disconcerting.
You really think cheap housing is a big factor? You're looking to attract investors, entrepreneurs, and highly skilled engineers. You might stand to be a little cheaper than the bay area, but Detroit cheap isn't necessary surely. You actually want "nice" areas, and you'd want to have rapidly rising property values to encourage people to buy in and stay in the community.
Silicon valley isn't silicon valley because it had cheap property or cafes or internet cables -- lots of places had cheap housing, and the internet didn't exist when SV was kicking off. The reasons are (among other things) that it is close to some of the best technology universities in the world, had significant defense and government technology opportunities and investment over a hundred years or so. You can't just spend a few billion and pop up a new one of those somewhere.
And I'm speculating here, but the hip vibe of California and San Francisco in the 60s and 70s, and the relatively large proportion of Asian immigrants at the time quite possibly helped to draw in young, creative, talented people. Also something that's difficult to conjure up out of nowhere. It's actually a confluence of things that won't be possible to reproduce again because hundreds of cities are trying to do it so there will be no such singular center of gravity.
Im not disagreeing with you, but some context to my statement ;;
My grand parent bought their house in Saratoga, California in 1959 for 24,000.
They sold it in ~1999 for ~2.5 million
The area was all apple apricot and orange orchards.
Gramps wasa nuclear engineer building bombs for General Elecrtic (one of the designers of Hanford -- manahattan shit)
Silicon valley was built - literally upon the design of the IC - out of the founders of Intel from Fairchild (sunnyvale) (When I work at intl, andy grove and I had the same pee schedule (my cube was right next to his, and for some reason the only place we intereacted was the restroom, when we peed)
Anyway - I have seen silicon valley evolve from orchards to chips... I've been here the whole time. Detroit can do it too.
A city is a large scale government program by definition. Of course a "new silicon valley" needs conducive government infrastructure, laws, support, that is necessary. But not sufficient. You can't just government programme you way to the next silicon valley.
In the USA, our legal system comes partly from the old Anglo-Saxon system, and partly from the French-Norman system, along with a few other parts of this. A lot of interesting and useful things come from this history.
Specifically, regarding this case... The word fiefdom literally means "foot ground" in Anglo Saxon. That means your land (domain) is where you put your foot on the ground. Even if you claim ownership to some land, those claims can be in dispute if someone else's foot is on the ground, so to speak. To me it's always been so fascinating thinking about law, and the philosophy of law, in these very basic, raw terms. Like, from where does the law derive its power? To the anglo-saxons, the answer is from the ground, and that's why that aspect of the system is so obsessed with possession.
Other cultures, like the Vikings, refined the ideas around tort law, like who should get paid how much if they're injured due to a fight.
The Norman system brought about the idea of "writs". The idea that messages to and from the court (not a coincidence that it's the same word in English as what's used for royalty, whereas in a language like Italian it would something more like tribunal) need to use specific writs, almost like interfaces and API calls. This basically put an end to most instances of "self help". In other words, in most cases, you can not take the law into your own hands. You must abide by the system of writs.
Even the word attorney comes from "at" and "tourney". Basically the guy you can pay who will go to the tournament, and fight instead of you before the court.
Our whole legal system is informed by ancient concepts, and a lot of these ideas are not half bad. We would really do well to be reminded of that. If 3 years can go by without a bank even knowing about someone occupying a house they claim to own, someone living there in direct opposition to that claim, then from an Anglo-Saxon perspective they can't seriously claim to own it. To me that makes sense as well.
The word fiefdom (and fief) dates to 17th century French. The older word used in England was fee (spelled various other ways) and it is unclear whether it comes from a Teutonic or Romance language or what the ultimate etymology is. There are some theories of it relating to an Old High German word for wages or a Teutonic word relating to feeding livestock.
In general I think this kind of etymological approach to understanding the law is probably not so good.
It was a long time ago since I studied this stuff (so I may have misremembered a few things), but I just want to say two things.
The first is to just respond to the comment about etymological approach to understanding the law. The stuff I was saying earlier, all came from original source material. The class consisted of us reading line by line copies of manuscripts, with our professor translating as we go. So it was absolutely not an etymological approach to the law, and was based on direct translation of source material.
The second point is that it was our professor who argued that fee (and fief, feof, <whatever>), the legal word that signifies possession, ultimately comes from where you put your foot, and he was an expert in law, Saxon and other dead languages. If that doesn’t correspond to whatever is on Wikipedia (or insert online source here) then either Wikipedia is incomplete, or I’m not perfectly representing what he said. Probably that I’m not perfectly representing what he said.
Nonetheless, in the context of adverse possession, the larger point wasn’t about the etymology per se, but that historically, in England, you must physically possess your land in order to be able to claim that it’s really yours. This was the ultimate meaning of my professor’s point, and that point still remains.
I don’t have any of those sources in front of me, but one day I’ll dig that stuff up and do a larger write up on these points.
For sure I don’t want to argue what the current law/attitude is. I think that trying to work between the current law and the etymology of the words 1000+ years ago is a bad way of understanding the laws of today. I think one would do better to look over a wider range of historical sources.
The source for what I wrote is the Oxford English Dictionary (the one that comes in 20 volumes) but it may be that that entry hasn’t been updated in a long time.
Generally very interesting, but I looked up the bit about 'attorney' and Etymonline, at least, doesn't agree: https://www.etymonline.com/word/attorney. Thoughts?
You know honestly I can’t be sure 100%, but that is what I was always taught in my “English as a language of law” class. I hesitate a little bc there’s always the possibility that I misremembered.
That said, my memory is that it came from before the French, during the trial by combat days, where the wealthy could appoint someone to go on their behalf.
Another datapoint for this is that a legal title that still exists today is esquire. However a “squire” is also the assistant to the knight who fights in the tournament.
It’s totally possible that I’m mistaken about parts of this, especially the pre or post French use of the word, but I also think that a lot this knowledge is fairly esoteric and not captures well, even in today’s age, outside of experts. Not to cast shade on etymology.com at all. Just that it is a possibility.
I see a lot of Ancient Greek/Roman stuff that comes up that’s either wrong or just naive, so. Idk.
Glad that you think it’s interesting though! I have a book club if anyone’s interested https://r33d.org
We just started reading history of the Peloponnesian war by Thucydides :)
Although your book club sounds cool it's not clear.. how to join it? might want to have that front-and-center (if indeed you are hoping to get new members).
Yeah I have no idea if etymonline is like, perfect or whatever. But the idea that it comes from 'atorné' does make quite a bit of sense also. The site is a treasure even if it's not perfect (although it has started to have obnoxious ads lately :( )
You're right that esquire comes from squire, but "esquire" isn't a legal term of any kind. It's literally the title for someone who doesn't have any other noble title (Sir, Lord, etc) and it's entirely up to the choice of the person whether or not to have that as part of their form of address[1].
The idea that "esquire" has some legal significance is a "sovereign citizen" myth.
In the United States it is definitely a legal title conferred to someone who’s passed the bar exam in their state. But that doesn’t mean they’re using the term in a way that accurately reflects its history.
> Do it for a week and you are criminal; do it for twenty years and you are a homeowner?
I feel like adverse possession was meant to solve a real world issue, not some strange takeover of property. For example, let's say that we're neighbors. We both own our homes. There's been a fence between our properties for 150 years. Generations of owners have used the property with the fence demarcating the boundary. They've had cookouts, put up swing sets, mowed the lawn, whatever. Then you come along and are like, "I think my property actually extends 20 feet past the fence. You need to move your fence."
Maybe you're "technically right" if you get a surveyor to come by based on the original plans. The point of adverse possession in this case is that generations of owners have seen that fence as the boundary. People have bought and sold the properties with the fence as the boundary. It makes more sense for society for the fence to remain the boundary. All of society has acknowledged that fence as the boundary for 150 years. You didn't buy your property thinking that the fence wasn't the boundary.
The "without permission" bit isn't about doing something with evil intent necessarily. It's there to differentiate between a case where an owner knowingly gives you permission to use their property. If I come to you and say "hey, can I put a fence here? I know it's your property, but it makes more sense to put the fence here" and you agree to that, there's no ambiguity about the ownership. If I decide to put up a fence between our properties, but the fence is in reality on your property, you have a limited amount of time to challenge that. Why? Because at some point we have to deal with the reality on the ground. Maybe I made a mistake and the fence is 5 feet onto your property, but a hundred years later it makes more sense to go with the reality on the ground.
If I built a home on what I thought was my property and then some surveyor comes by 50 years later and is like "huh, the house is actually 2 feet over the line onto this other property," a wise and just ruler wouldn't say, "then the house will be torn down!" A wise and just ruler would think "if the owner of the other property thought that they owned the land the house occupied in a conspicuous and open manner, they would have said something earlier."
> My questions in regards to this law is how can one successfully do it without breaking other laws?
I think the answer is that you can't. Adverse possession wasn't meant to be a free way to get property. It was meant to resolve property disputes that would be way more disruptive than just letting the status quo continue existing. It's meant to avoid "well technically..." crap. Everyone in the town knows that's your property. The abutting owner saw or should have seen your use of it over a long period of time. They probably thought it was your property too. Turns out that technically the site plan was a bit different than everyone in the town knew. It makes more sense to go off what everyone thinks is true than to try and re-state reality, bulldoze houses, etc.
At some point, the reality in the world should take precedence over some piece of paper from along time ago. In a comical fashion, yes, do it for a week and you're a criminal; do it for 20 years and you're an owner. In a less comical fashion, put your fence in the wrong spot for a year and the other owner forces you to move it; if it's been generations and everyone thinks the fence is on your property, then the fence is on your property and some future owner doesn't get to "well technically I found this old document that says..."
It’s meant for situations where ownership is in doubt and someone acted as the owner, in good faith, for an extended period of time and the actual owner didn’t contest it because they didn’t think they owned it.
Here's a good example from Australia. A bunch of people in a small town in Tasmania by title owned the property, next door, and didn't know for many years.
Here in Poland it is 20 years if in "good faith" - the person living there though they have rights for it (which is... weird in inself but I guess it can happen) but whole 30 if in "bad faith" (i.e. they knew but owner didn't do anything with the area).
> the person living there though they have rights for it (which is... weird in inself but I guess it can happen)
I imagine it happens more often than you'd expect - consider complicated inheritance laws, and so forth.
Parent dies without a will, verbally agreed with sibling that you'd take it, you thought you owned the property but after decades sibling dies and sibling's son inherits all of parents property including part-ownership, and so comes after you for half of the property.
Yeah or simply "parent had some property kids didn't knew they bought". Or it was some "a bunch of people owns some fraction of property and nobody cared enough to deal with it".
One weird case I saw was some property where brother owned 5/6 and sister owned 1/6 of it.
Turns out after father died mother,sister and brother each got 1/3, but mother put all of hers in will to be given to the brother
I assume a more common scenario is something like expanding the property line. Person A technically owns the plot, but neighbor B thought it was on their side of property, and has been letting their animals graze on it for the past decades. Until eventually a surveyor appears to correct the record and that is when the land-user can claim possession.
>> It varies from state to state in the US - some require that you possess it for 20+ years AND pay all associated taxes on the property. The second is hard to do if the owner is at all alive or available.
I'm not sure why that's hard. I'd think you can just go to the city in person and pay the taxes. They probably don't care who pays them, and doing so should prevent any mail for delinquency going to the owner.
It's not hard to pay - it's hard to take over payment without the owner noticing if the owner is also paying because he'll get a returned payment or a "you already paid, idiot" notice. I've received them when I didn't mark my tax bill paid and paid it again.
It's much easier for an absentee owner to not notice someone is using the property, especially if they live in another state.
Louisiana is a bit of an odd-duck in the Law. Most laws in the United States are largely in the Anglo-American tradition (English, modified by American Constitutional values and subsequent jurisprudence). Its Civil law is more akin to Spanish/French law which is to say law in the Roman tradition.
My understanding is that water rights law in the Western (or at least southwestern) US is also largely influenced by Napoleonic / Spanish law, as distinguished from that generally east of the Rockies.
(Don't take this as gospel, I'm ... not on firm ground here.)
To a much much lesser degree than Louisiana, there are some French and Spanish influences on California law, but it’s basically Anglo-American for the most part. I won’t speak to the rest of the West.
To be clear, I'm talking specifically about water rights.
The Western rule is typically "prior appropriation", as opposed to "riparian rights" which dominate the Eastern states:
Water is very scarce in the West and so must be allocated sparingly, based on the productivity of its use. The prior appropriation doctrine developed in the Western United States from Spanish (and later Mexican) civil law and differs from the riparian water rights that apply in the rest of the United States.
It would be far simpler to just make real estate taxes, particularly the land value portion, a larger portion of taxes in general.
The only cost is assessment, which is already done, instead of an entire new bureaucracy keeping tabs on how much everyone utilizing each piece of property.
This has been trotted out for many different problems, and I have yet to see taxes resolve any issue they are supposed to fix.
Carbon taxes don't reduce carbon use, fuel taxes don't reduce fuel use, sin taxes don't reduce soda consumption, cigarette taxes encourage black market activity, drug taxes don't reduce drug usage, etc...
Indirect action, like taxes, are a shot off the bow. The next step is direct action.
If the property is correctly maintained, a law-abiding squatter is preferable to a long-term absentee landlord who selfishly chooses to keep his or her house empty. It's a far greater loss to society to have the squatter as homeless. Buy NFTs if you want artificial scarcity.
We already have the concept of a primary residence. I'd strongly support laws that impose fast-ramping tax burdens on further ownership. Possibly with a more modesty burden for a second home—say, a family purchasing one to pass to children, or preparing for retirement—but I don't feel that there's any acceptable reason for owning several homes.
Because your "right" of owning several homes goes against the human right of adequate housing. Jurisprudence tells you the order of rights and human rights come first.
I believe that everyone has a right to food, but laws banning people from storing or consuming too much food are not an important part of the anti-hunger movement.
The problem is that the supply of housing is too low. Banning investment in housing might even make this problem worse by reducing the amount of real resources dedicated to construction, making home-building a riskier and less-appealing enterprise.
> I believe that everyone has a right to food, but laws banning people from storing or consuming too much food are not an important part of the anti-hunger movement.
If the supply of food drops too low, eg. during the world wars, you do get rationing which does exactly that.
Why should someone have a right to a house built by someone else? Just because someone else doesn't have a house doesn't mean they get to take a house that you built even if you already have a house.
If the housing supply weren't artificially limited, this might make sense. But it makes more sense to remove the regulations preventing more housing from being built instead.
Theres a fixed amount of land on earth and we can't develop every inch without screwing ourselves cover long term.
In fact we should put a limit on any new developments on currently undeveloped land...
In that context, were already dramatically behind the ball on ensuring enough housing unless we take housing from those who already have excess housing.
Yes, we can build condos etc, but they don't exist now and there aren't enough planned.
It’s funny that you use quotes around “right” when referring to property rights, which are well established as natural rights. All while making the claim that adequate housing is some kind of fundamental human right. It might be a government benefit in some places, but it’s hardly a human right.
If housing is a right, then it would make more sense to list the things that are not human rights. What else, Diet Coke delivered daily? Maybe a new car?
That one always blows my mind when people drop “housing is a human right”. So everyone has an inalienable right to the property and labor of another person? What if you were in John Locke’s state of nature and you were not participating in any social contract, would you still have that right?
But all rights are made up – they're simply things that we think are really important to provide each other. I can only assume that when a person says "housing is a human right", they mean "housing is something important enough that I think we should guarantee access to it".
If someone says something that seems ridiculous, but they're speaking seriously, sincerely, or about a matter they've given some thought, then there might be a chance you're simply misunderstanding them.
Tangentially: "an inalienable right to the property and labor of another person" is not that ridiculous of an idea. You already have a right to the labor of other people in nearly every society on earth. If the people where you live pay taxes, and even if you didn't avail yourself of public roads and whatnot, you still enjoy having a court system and law enforcement to uphold your rights, you enjoy a military to defend your country, you may enjoy the stability of a currency, and so on, and (if you are a native citizen) you get all of this merely for having been born. [And people don't get to opt out – people have to pay taxes even if they want to live alone in the wilderness, and to be relieved of that burden, in the United States we have to pay a fee to renounce our citizenship, even assuming we have the means to emigrate.] If you think at only a slightly larger scale, you might view us all as being stuck on Earth together and all members of a global society, unable to avoid participating to at least some degree.
[To be clear, I personally don't like the idea of owing anyone anything, especially when I presumably didn't choose to be born, but life is inherently unfair to begin with and also very difficult, so I can understand someone arguing that it's worth giving up the fight for a particular fairness in exchange for a better life overall. Also, other people may not have the same notions of fairness as me; I can imagine someone arguing that guaranteed access to housing makes the world more fair.]
I'd agree that it would be ridiculous to claim housing is a "natural right" as opposed to a potential "legal right", since it's a contradiction almost definitionally. Although not everyone agrees that natural rights exist, or what they are precisely.
All rights are made up, of course – nature grants us nothing, we grant ourselves rights. That said, it's hard for me to tell if you're not reacting in bad faith. Every person needs a place to live,† but they obviously don't need diet Coke and they usually don't need more than one place to live.
† You'll die without sleep, you'll die from exposure to the cold, you'll catch disease or be unable to hold a job if you don't bathe or clean yourself, you'll suffer from serious mental illness if you've not a space that's reasonably safe and secure some fraction of the time, and so on.
Perhaps joe-collins supports a steep tax discount on a first home - much like a society might apply a lower tax rate on books and apples than on Lamborghinis.
Who is the number one “hoarder” of houses in the U.S.? When I bought my house, all I had to deal with (as far as I know) was the bank and the prior owner, who seemed happy to sell.
1 is pretty easy to experimentally deduce -- simply go live outdoors wherever you are. Skip the tent, that's housing too. Just make yourself a little bedding spot in a tree somewhere like our ancestors did.
Pretty sure in most of the world, you wouldn't last long without some form of shelter or housing.
You think this wouldn't cause a million different problems for individuals and the legal system? There are countless reasons why a house might be sitting empty for a period of time.
What if I leave for work for a year? Or 4? What is a "good" reason? If I own a house and left for a decade to binge drink, why should that mean I don't keep my paid for property? At what threshold do you tell someone: fuck you and your property, we are taking it because we want it. If siblings inherit, should only the ones who live there have any rights to it?
Rent it out to strangers, let friends live there for free if you want. Do anything other than letting a home sit vacant when there are tons of unhoused people sleeping in the street.
I love extending arguments to logical absurdity to see where they fall apart. I have an airbrush my mom gave me when I was a teen. It has sentimental value. I've not used it in 20 years. Should I be forced to sell or rent it out? Or my MRE (Meals Ready To Eat) collection is over 10 years old now. Should I be forced to sell them to the hungry? How is that different than real estate?
All resources are scarce including life saving medical tech. Do you force redistribution on all resources and assets?
I'm not taking a side here, but not every law has to extend to the general case for it to fix a problem. If we required that, there would be almost no laws.
That is not what my questions are for. My examples are obviously absurd. That is the point. Where is the line?
Kind of reminds me if the old joke:
A guy asks a gal if she'll sleep with him for $10M. She, says yes. He asks what about for $100 and she is offended: "what kind of woman do you think I am!?" To which he replies, "we've already determined that, now we are just haggling over the price."
With all respect: what you're employing is a good dictionary definition for a glibertarian argument. "The government shouldn't make a rule because at it's 'logical absurdity' the argument falls apart" is in more typical terminology a absolutely ridiculous strawman.
You obviously don't seize obscure collectibles because there's limited public interest in such a collection. But that too has limits at the "logical absurdity" extreme: you might seize a historical artifact or painting from a private collector because it was looted from a museum 90 years ago before re-entering the private market after a few decades.
And, yeah, you might seize an abandoned property to prevent the community it's in from decaying.
Abandoned. I think that is the delineation. Great point!
I feel that if you can show something is abandoned, it can be up for grabs, including my personal property.
Now to define "abandoned."
In my home town, a potentially lucrative piece of real estate was fenced and not maintained because the owner was pissed at the city. The only reason they held it was because "fuck you city." I could see an argument as saying that it is abandoned and should be forced to be used. I can also see that as free speech because the owner was making a statement about local ordinances. Is it abandoned or an active political statement?
I see an argument for the addition of the fence as "improving" the property and therefore showing that it has not been abandoned.
Aside from the obvious goal of keeping out trespassers, I'd be willing to bet the fence was added based on legal advice. In a few years there will probably need to be some further "improvement". Perhaps as simple as replacing the fence.
We're going to do that on a case by case basis depending on reasonable things like the user's need for it, other people's need for it, what the neighbours think of it etc.
Less than 0.2% of the population is homeless. And many of them would probably have a place to stay(with family or friends) if they were capable of successfully living in a house.
So are taxes and trees, but you have to pay them and hold insurance anyway. The point is that society as a whole has interest in the community in which that home exists, and it regulates the behavior of homeowners for the benefit of everyone.
"Your home has to have people in it" is, 100%, a valid policy goal. And in extremis, paradigms like adverse possession exist to ensure this.
I'm sorry, how do taxes or trees destroy the value of a property? Tenants absolutely can ruin a house. Imagine the surprise when you find out the tenants have done more damage to a property than their rent covers.
Yes, people need and should be housed. No, that doesn't mean they need _my_ house. Build up public housing resources. If the govt wants to buy my property at market rate and give it away, and I agree to sell, go for it.
Otherwise, I hear you have a good retirement fund that you spent years building. I didn't didn't do that, so just give me half of what you saved and we will call it fair.
We need to improve our mental health care system and get these people working, so they can rent. There isnt a shortage of homes, just a shortage of money to pay rent.
In my home country (Australia), there literally is a shortage of homes at the moment. I don't think a vacancy tax would help much, but it's probably a good idea anyway.
My financial decisions are nobody else's business. A lot of people here earn a lot in software, and if they want a summer home that is their prerogative. The group think on this is hard.
>> What if I leave for work for a year? Or 4? What is a "good" reason?
> Where do you live during that time?
Antarctic Research Station followed by a backpacking trip through Europe.
>> why should that mean I don't keep my paid for property?
> Because someone may want to live somewhere but land is too expensive because everyone is hoarding it?
Food gets expensive; let the hungry take, literally, from your kitchen? Not everyone can live in downtown, some must go to the sticks. West Virginia has some land at $1000 an acre. What is the right density in the city? How small should homes be? How many to a room?
>> At what threshold do you tell someone: fuck you and your property, we are taking it because we want it.
> "residential housing not being used as a residence for more than N years"?
Prove I didn't stop by for a few days N-1 years ago.
--
Affordable housing is a real need, and local governments and city planners should work to make that so. You don't get to take my family's nth-generation home because my area is popular and we don't use it in a way you approve.
So essentially you have no use for land/housing for extended period of time but you want to keep it. That's the textbook definition of hoarding real estate.
And please don't give this BS about generations. Just ask yourself: would you sell your grandgrandpa's home if you knew tomorrow its price was not up but got halved, day after day? There's the answer about your true motivations.
> Prove I didn't stop by for a few days N-1 years ago.
Stopping by != using as residence. I stop by local Mcd occasionally, don't mean I live there.
I'm vehemently not a communist but this sort of entitlement is cancer on humanity. Land is zero sum and a commons. These things are never not regulated in a healthy society. Even in US owning estate never means you are free to do anything you want with it, even if you live in it. Not hoarding it is only another one of those rules, sadly not supported by law enough.
Define having "no use." Lots of things can look like no or poor use. Waiting to retire there for instance. Land preservation. Political statements.
Would I sell my grandpa's house? Depends on if I want to move in later, or help my kids move in when they are out of the house in N years. Just because you might abandon a family cabin/estate/ranch/remote-land knowing the price will drop doesn't mean others will.
And how long must one inhabit a property per what unit of duration to maintain ownership? 1 month a year? 6+ months a decade?
In my case, I'm talking 10 acres off some highway in Montana. I'll sell it if or when it is necessary. I'm working out of state, so I have two homes.
You want some real estate? Work your ass off, save money, invest in yourself. Might have to move. Might have to change your lifestyle. I couldn't afford California so I had to leave. Poor people emigrate still and provide better lives for their kids. Not everyone gets to live in their favorite city. Sucks.
Sell your iPhone and buy an acre in West Virginia.
Look, there are inequities and basic needs can be hard in many areas to secure. That is all of human history. We keep working at it. The solution is not to force me to sell my 10 acres in Montana.
waiting is absolutely a use. It is just not a use you agree with. Waiting for how long? Now that is a discussion. Is it abandoned or not? There is a line. I've not heard any sane proposition on that that line is. If I go on sabbatical and the world goes on lock down and you cant get back to the house for a few years, it is absolute _insanity_ to demand that house be yielded to others.
That's right, there are tradeoffs. So an absolute answer isn't the right solution here and we need to come up with policies that meet everyone's needs.
To pick your first example: keeping your old home while you work abroad for a year seems not unreasonable. But demanding that you place it on the market as a rental (or sell it) if you're gone for 4-10 (!) seems likewise like a very reasonable regulation to me.
Where should I put my stuff, while the property is being rented? What if I get fired and need to return in a short notice (working on a worker’s visa)?
My situation is exactly that, I left my apartment first time for 3 years. Got fired and had to return. This time it’s six years already, haven’t been “home” even once since then. I don’t have anyone to help me manage the rental. Not selling the apartment right now because I’m waiting for citizenship in a different country. Which might not work out, thus I’ll need a place to return to. Yes, my situation is anecdotal, can’t disagree. But forcing me to rent out with more taxes doesn’t sound fair as well. Especially that in many places it’s the government who created all that bureaucracy which prevents people to build new houses inflating prices and all that.
That's a good enough reason. Since he had to move in with you this means he lives alone though? do you consider it safe for him to live alone in the old age? (For his own sake not just for the sake of healthy housing market)
True. Not only squatting is scary because it can make unlucky squatter who spent $$$ on improvements bankrupt, also people with tons of unused property are usually people who can afford security or whatever to stave off people who could actually live in it.
The key is “open and notorious”. You possess and improve the property openly for a long time and if the owner is asleep at the wheel the court just sort of cedes the place to you.
I think the time limit I. Many states is 7-10 years so the owner needs to be really out of it. And if it goes wrong you lose the money spent on improvements, and could face charges.
A better way might be to watch the auctions of property seized by the city for unpaid taxes. Pay a little bit, improve and don’t live in fear.
Being trapped in an ambiguous situation where "improve" can mean many things can lead to unhealthy stress.
If I have a real job and a real house, I have easier access to laws and what my responsibilities are.
If I am in a situation like an "abandoned house", I'm vulnerable to vague jurisdictional issues around "improvement". Maybe San Francisco / Bay Area considers fire safety enough, but Chicago wants sidewalk snow clearing. Those are the simple things. Some jurisdictions will want "self-improvement" classes. Keep practicing that space flute... And then Utah wants other things.
Yes, HOAs are similar, I get that.
Anyways, I've got to keep a fucking yellow legal pad with all these issues. And I know I'm not an expert.
Then I'm not just vulnerable to the whims of the city, I'm vulnerable to exploiters telling me there are these additional requirements.
I dread these next patronizing Last of Us style real world shows. When I should look at them joyfully.
And yeah, people are housed now, I can't argue with that.
But we are replacing a public social contract with something darker.
I guess we get a new series of sitcoms about "HOA" style neighborly miscommunication. Hahaha. Oh Mr. Bundy, you can't have a toilet on your front lawn! Oh Mr. ALF, you can't eat cats! Oh Mr. Cohen, you can't say that on television! Hahaha, what a cultural misunderstanding.
So in many jurisdictions the city doesn’t actually take the properties. Instead they auction off a lien to a private company/individual and then that individual can foreclose if the tax isn’t paid. So this strategy might not work.
At that point the title is clean, so I would expect the property to sell much closer to the market rate minus any repairs needed to make it livable. Not really a deal to be had.
Long long ago a group of 20ish people (I vaguely knew) occupied an abandoned office. They agreed to spend 500 per person per month to improve the place as they all could easily afford it. Then came the struggle actually spending the money. No one wanted to spend time on it so every other month they just quickly agreed to one or two things at a time and spend as much on it as possible just to burn the money. After 6 years, 720 000 later the place looked completely insane.
In the early 00s, I lived for a few months in a squat in Clapham (South London), run by an author and Polish cyclist. It was a huge house by London standards - better than many shared houses - and having looked after it very well since moving in during the 90s, the neighbours were aware and happy with the situation. They were paranoid the owner, living in Australia since the 1950s, would find out just before the deadline and they'd lose it. But the rights did pass on, and they sold the house for about £1.5M.
It's not Grandpa Simpson and the tying of an onion to your belt -- more like an information-dense tour, hitting many highlights, and what are they going to say next.
I wonder whether (assuming it was typed by the author, rather than dictated), had they been inserting paragraph breaks, would that have changed their rhythm of associations.
The topic of claiming a seeming abandoned property, often referred to as Adverse Possession, is specifically detailed by the laws of many countries. The specifics of those laws can vary a lot between countries. For example in some countries "a few" years of satisfying certain conditions is enough, and in others, it may be 20 years or more. Different countries have different box-ticking lists, before your claim becomes valid.
Tangentially speaking - regarding the subdivision, or 'carving up' of property - it's notable that younger countries/cultures, such as Australia and New Zealand, have relatively tight controls upon how land can and can't be split up. With a long term view to preventing messy, piecemeal land arrangements, particularly in urban and productive rural areas. (naturally such arrangements are their own pros/cons can-of-worms, but that's another topic...)
One of my friends lived in a squat in Melbourne for a few years. They sort of ran it, meaning they would put the place on couchsurfing.com to attract more people. They had anywhere between about 4-20 people living in the house at any time, each staying anywhere from a few days to a few months. The place was a little bit run down, and had no electricity or running water, although they did have gas and were able to cook food. They used candles to light the place at night, and would retrieve water from a nearby public tap and shower at a nearby university. They'd also dumpster dive all their food. The place was actually pretty awesome and had a really great community feel, albeit run-down and mouse-infested. There was lots of artwork and poetry printed directly on the walls.
They'd often have lots of people over and spontaneous parties were common, though they had to keep the noise down since the owner could theoretically come at any point and kick them all out, and in the end that's exactly what happened. The owner was actually pretty nice about it, and was impressed at what they'd done with the place, but kindly asked them to leave, which they obliged. The house is actually still there and my friend hasn't lived there for years so I'm not sure why the owner kicked them all out.
On another note, Moxie (of Signal/Open Whisper Systems fame) has some pretty cool stories about his adventures in squatting - https://moxie.org/stories/together-two/
The biggest problem is that instead of taking over abandoned houses, some people are finding the nicest unoccupied houses and squatting in them. In other words, houses that just haven't sold yet. Could be for only a few months.
Then they use these laws and police indifference to effectively steal tens of thousands in rent.
I imagine that these people think of it as a type of social justice or an efficient market.
It's out of control criminality really.
But part of the reason we get to this point is actually extreme inequality and extremely ineffective markets or rules.
I think that when we have so many people unable to afford homes, there should be some type of system for highly discounted utilization of unoccupied ones, especially after a certain number of months. That's completely different from a free-for-all though.
This (relatively new) idea that by marking some things as "human rights", things that have a substantial cost to create, that they can then be stolen without regard to any rules tends to not end well for anyone in society.
I honestly hate the idea of proclaiming things like food, health care, housing, education, etc. as "human rights", because they are very, very different from what has been historically thought of as human rights (things like freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association, etc.). Primarily, of course, is that these newer "rights" are really goods and services that you would like everyone to have access to. And that may be fine (I personally tend to agree), but I would still argue that they are not anything at all like the rights people should have just for existing. I can certainly believe there should be "guaranteed social services", but these aren't "human rights".
The main difference, of course, is that somebody has to expend their own personal time and energy to acquire these goods. Houses don't just sprout up out of nowhere, and they certainly don't maintain themselves. It's fine to argue that society should do much more to provide housing options to all citizens, but that's very different from saying "I should be able to move into any house where people aren't currently living because I can break the lock."
What an odd response. Are there any other things that are ok to take because you feel it's a human right? Dine and dash isn't a crime because food is a human right?
I’m a bit conflicted because while I think it’s horribly unfair to someone just trying to sell their house, I’m partial to the argument that there should maybe be a limit to how long you wait for a buyer - though IMO that should be solved by a vacancy tax or higher carrying costs rather than stochastic adverse possession.
Local laws vary WILDLY even sometimes within the same state, let alone country to country. C-Squat in NYC was notoriously annexed by the punks living there, and they are the legal owners, but far more often, you are looking at the likelihood of trespassing charges. Always worth looking at you local laws and ordinances before risking a B&E or at least a trespassing charge.
There is also another scam where people agree to buy a home, the sign a contract, ask for your key to be able to unload some furniture early and that's it. Once they have the key, they can live there without paying. Getting them out of there then requires waiting for courts to do their work. I only found a video about it in German unfortunately:
Relatedly, somehow this fascinating video just popped up on my YouTube - apparently there are "professional" squatters doing this repeatedly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_FxnLo53mo
I've only heard stories of successful squatting to take over a property coming from Europe and North America. I would be curious to hear how squatting is handled both legally and culturally in other parts of the world. What about South America, Africa and Asia? I imagine in some places if you're in someone else's property they'll just kill you. And in others, they may barely have a concept of private property at all.
Obviously Spain, less obviously so Italy, and obviously not Germany despite Péron. There is a fair amount of German descendants, but their ancestors predate WW1, let alone WW2's high profile nazis that were let in (I'm assuming this is the basis of your comment, apologies if not).
It's a hard problem. I think the best way to deal with abandoned houses would be for the municipality to forcibly auction them (once they are left empty for some time) and keep the funds acquired by the sale (minus the costs) invested into bonds or something and ready to reimburse owner if he shows up.
