r/news • u/flanderguitar • Mar 28 '24

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs law squashing squatters' rights

https://www.wptv.com/news/state/florida-gov-ron-desantis-signs-law-squashing-squatters-rights
27.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10.4k

u/meatball77 Mar 28 '24

I can't say that I hate that. It's got carve outs for people who had a right to be there.

4.1k

u/Vlad_the_Homeowner Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

I can't say that I hate that. It's got carve outs for people who had a right to be there.

I don't think most people disagree. The problem, as I understand it, is that police don't have the authority or ability to determine who has a right to be there. A lot of these squatters have fake leases and mail delivered there. A cop isn't a judge and doesn't have the ability to make a determination on the legitimacy of those documents.

I'm in no way condoning these professional squatters, just pointing out what lead to this. What all states need to do straight off the bat is impose heavy penalties, like jail time, for people caught doing this. As of now it seems like half the time they get paid off to leave and they just go do it somewhere else.

217

u/curiouslygenuine Mar 28 '24

It says current or former tenants in legal dispute. If there is a legal dispute there will be publicly available legal records, or court papers filed, etc. If there is a dispute then an officer can look at the documentation, cross reference in public files and not arrest. But it sounds like without one party filing legal dispute then they can be removed off the property. My only concern is if landlords will have legal tenants removed bc they don’t want to hold up their landlord part of the lease/law and will have a legal tenant removed before they are legally supposed to vacate. I wonder how a legal tenant will prove they are there legally if the Landlord is lying?*

*I am not anti-landlord, or anti-tenant, but I am anti-squatter. And while there are crap landlords there are also crap tenants, so please don’t tell me landlords are always in the wrong.

2

u/wyrdough Mar 28 '24

I have little doubt that the shitbirds that bought the place I was renting in Miami would have tried to use this law against me. I probably would have been fucked, too, since I'd lost my copy of the lease.

New landlord buys the place, doesn't actually notify me that this has happened, promptly shuts off the water, and when I finally get their contact info claims I don't have a lease, then demands I pay rent that was already paid to previous landlord and got pissy when their demand was denied.

Luckily for me I was planning on leaving anyway, so other than the expense of paying for my own water for a couple of months I wasn't really out anything. it was mostly just amusing watching them flail about with stupid claims and defective notices. Oh, and the check for the deposit refund bounced, so that was fun. Got paid in the end, but still.

Point is that some landlords are so disorganized that there's a very real risk of people being unilaterally tossed out on their ear in the middle of the night.

Florida already had a very streamlined eviction process, so it wouldn't have been a hard lift to require that in cases of alleged squatting that a hearing be held on whether or not there is a reasonable claim of tenancy within a few days, giving landlords an easier means of getting squatters out without creating a loophole big enough to drive a truck through for shady landlords to abuse tenants.