“Squatters have no rights”
– Sen John Fetterman (D), PA, quoted in the New York Post, April 2024.
Democrat Fetterman’s declaration — “How can you even pretend that this is anything other than you’re just breaking the law?” — about the homeless moving, uninvited, into the homes of others demonstrates that common sense knows no political affiliation.
The law defines a “squatter” as, “A person who settles on property without any legal claim or title.” Historically, squatters settled onto vacant land, and if they remained long enough without being ejected by the lawful owner, and made improvements in the value of the land, they could acquire some rights thereto.
But that is not what’s now happening — or what Fetterman is referring to. Now squatters are moving into ‘vacant’ homes and claiming rights to stay there. In some cases ‘vacant’ means the lawful owner was away at a second summer home for a couple of months and returns to their primary residence to find it occupied by strangers who refuse to leave.
Property rights are among the oldest recognized in law. William Blackstone (1723-1780) was an English lawyer and judge who wrote the first comprehensive compilation of English law. He explained the importance of private property this way, in Blackstones Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book Two, Chapter One (1765):
“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.”
Those ‘Commentaries’ are the basis of much of the property law of the United States. The laws of ownership of ‘real’ property (land) far predate those of England. When nomadic humans settled down to farm 10,000 years ago, they needed some way to preserve the land they had turned to cultivation.
According to anthropologist Steven Mithen, women were critical in the transition from hunter-gatherer societies, to permanent village culture — due in part their reproductive role.
Settling down to bare, and raise, kids was an attractive alternative to being a nomad. Keeping up with the nomadic tribe while pregnant or lugging a newborn, would get old pretty damn quick.
To a pregnant woman, or one raising children, a permanent residence adjacent to a steady food source provides survival advantages to both her and her children. Agriculture affords that opportunity.
Learning to grow edible cereal grains, rather than always wandering around looking for food, was a significant advantage to women … Successful domestication of cereal grains was likely a result of the efforts of women to maintain a reliable food source for their children. As a result of the ability of women to feed their children without having to be constantly on the move in search of food, males who were willing to abandon nomadic wandering and settle into agricultural-based village life became preferable mates.
With the advent of permanent settlements, the need for rules dictating how people lived together evolved.
The possession of property was a matter of survival. If a family turned raw land to productive cultivation, or domestic animal grazing, they had a fundamental need to maintain it as their own against intrusion by others. The reason different families gathered together in groups, and those groups became villages, was for collective security of their means of food production.
Originally the ‘rules’ of who ‘owned’ what land were informal ‘folkways’. But as the villages became linked to others, and societies became more complex, those ‘folkways’ evolved into formalized ‘mores’ — which necessitated a governmental process to arbitrate disputes and enforce ownership.
For example, in 122 BC, the Roman Plebian tribunes passed the ‘Acilian Law on the Right to Recovery of Property Officially Extorted’ to enable owners to recover property unlawfully taken from them. That law details the process by which the government will assist the owner to do so.
Blackstone explains the evolution of the law,:
[W]hen mankind increased in number, craft, and ambition, it became necessary to entertain conceptions of more permanent dominion; and to appropriate to individuals not the immediate use only, but the very substance of the thing to be used. Otherwise innumerable tumults must have arisen, and the good order of the world been continually broken and disturbed, while a variety of persons were striving who should get the first occupation of the same thing, or disputing which of them had actually gained it.
Concurrent with the evolution of the law of ownership of land, was the idea, which later became a legal doctrine, that “a man’s home is his castle”… a doctrine so ingrained in English law that in a 1763 speech to Parliament, William Pitt, declared, “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter!”
Entering into the home, or onto the property, of another without the consent of the owner is Trespass, defined as “Knowingly entering the property of another without permission, which encroaches on the owners’ privacy or property interests.”
‘Encroaching’ on property interests was treated as ‘larceny’ under the common law. “Trespass is the element of larceny, which means a defendant unlawfully takes away someone’s personal property with the intent of temporarily or permanently depriving the lawful owner of the right to use or possession of the property.” A trespasser is stealing the lawful owner’s right to undisturbed use of the property.
So if trespassing is a form of theft, and if a fundamental of our law is that even the power of the government can’t enter a private home, then by what stretch of imagination do the homeless have a “right” to occupy a home without the consent of the lawful owner? That was the question Sen Fetterman asked when he queried, “How can you even pretend anything other than you’re just breaking the law…?”
Fortunately in Florida we don’t have that problem. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd explained how it is here, “On the few occasions that they’ve tried that silliness here, we go there, determine the owner is really the owner and lock the suspects up.”
Polk County is about 70 miles due west of my home county — where our sheriff shares Judd’s perspective. As does Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who said, “Something tells me that squatters will not be targeting Polk County residences with our new law being enforced by Sheriff Grady Judd”.
The ‘new law’ DeSantis referred to is the one some refer to as the ‘Anti-squatting law’, passed this year by the legislature that harkens back to the Roman Acilian Law. It provides a fast-track way for property owners to get rid of squatters — with the assistance of the county sheriff.
The law empowers “property owners or their authorized agents to request assistance from the sheriff from where the property is located for the immediate removal of unauthorized occupants from a residential dwelling” and making it a crime for a squatter to present any false document purporting to give them a right to be there.
Here in Florida, our Republican legislature and governor agree with Democrat Pennsylvania Senator Fetterman’s admonition not to pretend that squatting is “anything other than just breaking the law.”
Common sense has no political party.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.