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Squatters-do they really deserve their bad reputation?
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Programmes like grime busters portray flats abandone dby sqautters as dumps but are only shown a very small minority?
has ever occured to people that some squatters might not have a choice or are forced to live in squats through no fault of their own or circumstances beyond their control?
has ever occured to people that some squatters might not have a choice or are forced to live in squats through no fault of their own or circumstances beyond their control?
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Not any more they cant its now illegal to squat in residential property ( not that that will stop them of course)
Those louts in Bristol annoyed me, the ones that used the empty swimming pool as a skateboard park-although I think I read about them in the DM so may only have got half the story:D
I have known that to happen, eg with council flats earmarked for demolition.
I have to say as a landlord I have become less and less starry eyed about squatters. We had one earlier this year who left so much human excrement on every surface that we speculated that he must have saved it all up for weeks. The cleaning agency we use would not touch it for any money, so my dear husband had to clean it all up himself. We have had another one who ripped out all the gas pipes as he was leaving. It had not occurred to me that someone would do that, but he did. Apart from using up £100 worth of gas before it was noticed, the fire brigade came and smashed every door and window to ventilate the place, which was obviously annoying to me. Ironically, it would have been cheaper if the house had blown up, as then it would have been covered by insurance.
What is even more annoying is how many of them seem to retain a solicitor. It's not as if I want to break the law, but it is aggravating having someone watching you with a laser beam stare in the hope of catching you out in some technicality, while occupying your property for nothing and trashing the place (which of course you don't find out until they have gone, since you can't break in).
I can't remember the full story but seemed fair and a good use of empty space IMO.
But yes the squatters you talk about do deserve the bad reputation, it's all about respect at the end of the day. Yes I do wonder about these ones that have solicitors & dodge technicalities.
I think they called themselves 'Property Guardians' or similar
Well it's a different matter if a house is empty forever and ever. There is a house near me that must have been empty and boarded up for 20 years. It baffles me.
homeless people made themselves homeless. they have themselves to blame.
I don't have the remotest sympathy for squatters, especially those who occupy an unabandoned building or house.
They're a bloody nuisance and I'm very pleased the law has been altered to their detriment.
Three members of a squatter group took over my dad's late uncle's house. They changed the locks, registered utility bills in their names, repaired the cosmetic exterior neglect and tidied up the garden. All part of the then-legal process of legitimising their ownership of the house. They cited their legal rights at my dad (who's a lawyer) and the police while refusing them to enter the property.
Their tactic was that if they managed to reside in this property - as well as keeping the property in good condition - for at least seven years, the house will legally become theirs after three or four years. One way of making seven years happen was to keep filing legal complaints and challenges to delay the eviction long enough to pass the seven-year mark. After this mark, they can apply to become the rightful owners of an abandoned property.
They also filed legal demands for my dad to provide proof that they broke into the house and that their assumption (that it was an abandoned building) was false. They claimed the door was unlocked and some windows were left open, so they didn't break in. They really knew all legal aspects of adverse possession.
They were finally evicted after my dad's legal assistant was able to prove that they chose the house from looking through the land registry, and that the group had done it before with three houses and a block of flats.
The house was left empty for a year because my dad's cousin was overseas, finishing his job contract. He had planned to come home, but couldn't for four years because of those squatters. The whole thing cost the family a lot of money. About £27,000 in four years.
Thankfully, the law on squatting makes adverse possession pretty much illegal now. So yeah, I don't view squatters in a flattering light.
That's what happened with ours. They were so spiteful that they broke everything, gave away the house contents, left graffiti on most walls and poured bags of sand down the loos, baths and sinks. I mean, what the ****? They lived in the house for four years while dragging us through hell, and they did all this damage as 'revenge' for failing to nab the ownership of the house? What a bunch of *****.
Also notice that for whatever vested interest, people do put the homeless and squatters together, both illegal. Maybe so they can demonise the homeless for whatever future policy to be introduced to deal with them.
Some neighbourhood youths had taken it upon themselves to break in and squat, and yes, part of their psyche seems to have been to want to destroy what they couldn't steal.
I had 'new for old' insurance and the assessor came very promptly, however, because I no longer had receipts for TV's VCR etc (squatters had used all the papers in a box file as toilet paper), the insurance company refused to pay the full amount. In effect I was robbed twice!
That's the same old low intellect type rhetoric that some squatters constantly bleat out. It just shows them to be not worth arguing with.
Having been directly involved with one DIY eviction, I have no sympathies with them at all. It cost a good friend of mine time and money and almost the health of his wife to get over finding the ba@#£rds in his house.
When I was in Spain my company leased a bunch of apartments for staff to live in but, due to changes of staffing levels, some apartments went empty for long periods.
A bunch of Russians moved into one. I think they lived/worked in a local hotel through the summer but it closed in the winter so they had to find alternative accommodation for the winter.
We used to see them in the local bars and they were intelligent, well-educated and seemed decent enough people.
The boss knew they were staying in an apartment but he was the kind of guy that liked to be involved in "edgy" stuff so it was all a bit of an "open secret".
The leases expired in the May of the the following year, the Russians knew this and happily disappeared at the appropriate time.
When we went around to check all the apartments prior to handing them back (in an unrelated incident, it turned out the health & safety man seemed to have set fire to his kitchen, but that's another story) it turned out that the Russians had built a "fire pit" in the centre of the living room and then systematically destroyed the furniture in the apartment and burned all the wood for heat and that, because the water was turned off, they'd been using one of the bedrooms as a toilet.
For 6 months.
The cleaning service my company hired refused to touch the place so we ended up having to get a skip in to clear most of the debris, redecorate the place and jet-wash the bedroom.
Lovely.