Tenant Law
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Squatters Occupying Foreclosed Homes in MiamiTuesday, August 12, 2008
There's an informal squatting program in Miami, Florida, which was created by a Miami affordable housing group called Take Back the Lands. There were more than 26,000 foreclosures in Miami-Dade County last year, which is about a three-fold increase from 2006, according to Tristam Korten, in an article she wrote for a article in Mother Jones magazine in the May/June issue.
Take Back the Lands (hereafter "TBL") has put a large number of families into housing and has 14 families on its waiting list to squat new homes. TBL calls it "liberating the housing." Of the 26,000 foreclosures last year alone, a multitude of those along with this years foreclosures remain vacant. As an aside, this is a nationwide problem, including right here in the Bay Area. I just saw a piece on KRON News yesterday, showing half a neighborhood in Antioch, California which has vacant houses.
The way the squatting usually transpires in the TBL program, is staff from TBL "will break in, change the locks, paint and clean, innovate a way to connect water and electricity, and then move a homeless family into the house. The criminal laws they'll violate in the process range from trespassing to breaking and entering (even burglary, if the police get ambitious), which requires the organization to keep a pro bono lawyer on standby," according to Korten in the Mother Jones piece.
"As far as the neighbors are concerned, the current tenants—squatters though they are—are a vast improvement over the crack den the vacant house had become. One neighbor even loaned the family electricity via an extension cord until a mysterious man sympathetic to Take Back's cause turned on power at the house."
TBL also helped erect a shantytown for the homeless on a vacant city lot in 2006 and it lasted for 6 months until it was accidentally burned down. TBL employees are aware that their program and the actual squatting is against the law, but they believe it is more important to have people housed than the possible criminal prosecutions that could occur.
As a lawyer I can't officially advocate illegal conduct, but clearly with the current economic downturn and the homeless population on the rise in the U.S., our citizens are having to become more creative about housing. There is a severe shortage of public housing and often nowhere to turn for people who lose their homes for one reason or another.
Take Back the Lands (hereafter "TBL") has put a large number of families into housing and has 14 families on its waiting list to squat new homes. TBL calls it "liberating the housing." Of the 26,000 foreclosures last year alone, a multitude of those along with this years foreclosures remain vacant. As an aside, this is a nationwide problem, including right here in the Bay Area. I just saw a piece on KRON News yesterday, showing half a neighborhood in Antioch, California which has vacant houses.
The way the squatting usually transpires in the TBL program, is staff from TBL "will break in, change the locks, paint and clean, innovate a way to connect water and electricity, and then move a homeless family into the house. The criminal laws they'll violate in the process range from trespassing to breaking and entering (even burglary, if the police get ambitious), which requires the organization to keep a pro bono lawyer on standby," according to Korten in the Mother Jones piece.
"As far as the neighbors are concerned, the current tenants—squatters though they are—are a vast improvement over the crack den the vacant house had become. One neighbor even loaned the family electricity via an extension cord until a mysterious man sympathetic to Take Back's cause turned on power at the house."
TBL also helped erect a shantytown for the homeless on a vacant city lot in 2006 and it lasted for 6 months until it was accidentally burned down. TBL employees are aware that their program and the actual squatting is against the law, but they believe it is more important to have people housed than the possible criminal prosecutions that could occur.
As a lawyer I can't officially advocate illegal conduct, but clearly with the current economic downturn and the homeless population on the rise in the U.S., our citizens are having to become more creative about housing. There is a severe shortage of public housing and often nowhere to turn for people who lose their homes for one reason or another.
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