New Orleans There was a breathless article in the New York Times with a Las Vegas dateline purporting to have found something new under the sun, at least the desert sun, and the discovery was squatters. The sources attesting to the fact that the sky was falling and the horror of it all were, unsurprisingly, the police and neighbors.
The Vegas police began counting statistics several years ago of complaints being filed with the department alleging that there were squatters in the neighborhood. According to the report, “… there were more than 4,000 complaints last year, up 43 percent from 2014 and more than twice as many as in 2012.” Numerous neighbors were interviewed, particularly in high-end neighborhoods where squatters had taken over houses pushing the million dollar mark complete with swimming pools. Oh, my!
The one side of the story missing was of course any discussion from any of the actual so-called squatters. The police couched their side of the story in lurid tales of drug dens, counterfeiters, burglars, and the like. One story felt to be especially poignant was a confrontation with children of one family where a child produced a copy of a lease and the police wove a tale from the family of paying someone in cash monthly at a casino. The whine here was that it takes the police time to investigate whether the lease is valid and so forth and so on.
Where in the world are people imagining that families whose homes were foreclosed by the tens of thousands and even millions went? Is there a fairy tale somewhere that they all just got a U-Haul and moved happily ever after to affordable housing on the other side of town? Poppycock! The reporter also added in the story that squatting was also a common problem in places like Florida and Detroit. Who are we kidding? People have been squatting in houses in Detroit for decades for goodness sake.
They have also been squatting in the foreclosure “zone” of America in high numbers ever since the financial crisis and the housing meltdown. Five or six years ago in Phoenix, I stood with a couple in front of the house they thought they were renting and preparing to buy as they surveyed the block in a neighborhood of low-slung brick houses in the city. They pointed from house to house the ones that were vacant, the ones where families were living after the house had already been foreclosed, the ones where families were living waiting for foreclosure, the ones that new families were trying to occupy to buy, and the minority that tended to be older families that were stable. In their case they were later evicted after it turned out that the money they were paying to secure the house in lieu of a deposit was being collected by someone who was not in complete possession of the house. Where they squatters or just suckers desperate to believe a story perhaps too good to be true? Well, yes, in the eyes of the police maybe, but what were they really other than victims of a triple scam of sorts at the end of the line of multiple foreclosures.
What’s the beef here? Would these homes in Florida, Arizona, and Nevada and similar foreclosure zones be better off boarded, vacant, and deteriorating and duplicating too many abandoned areas in Detroit, Buffalo, Philly, and elsewhere? Or would they be better off with families trying to make them homes again? Are the cities of the South and Southwest going to learn a different lesson than the cities of the Midwest and Northeast? Vacant houses in sufficient number will be vandalized. There’s a guarantee that comes with those homes.
There’s nothing new about squatting and scams, but there would be something new with public policy that matched houses that need people with people that need houses. Learning that lesson would be big news everywhere!