By Christian Schneider
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Jalen Absolum grew up in a house poisoned with lead paint
in Philadelphia. He won in a lawsuit against the landlord and used the proceeds
to buy a home in Baltimore. He was hoping to bring his family south for a fresh
start.
In October last year, Absolum, age 18, finally got to
visit the $115,000 home. But as he approached it, he realized something was
wrong — someone was already living in the house.
Absolum called the police, who told him there was nothing
they could do. The family living in the house had been scammed into believing
they were renting it, and Absolum would have to go to court to evict the
squatters.
“He was a victim once, and he’s a victim again,” his
mother, Avril Absolum, told the Baltimore Banner in an article
published this week. “He did the right thing. And there were people in his
house.”
The case is pending in court, and Absolum still has not
moved into his home.
Back in 2024, when “squatting” was having a moment, Republican governors such as Georgia’s
Brian Kemp and Florida’s Ron DeSantis signed legislation making it much easier
to evict people who took up residence either in people’s homes or in vacant
buildings. Yet for around half the country, squatting is still only a civil
matter; if a vacationing family returns home to find someone has moved into
their residence, it could be months or years before they are able to expel the
interlopers.
And stricter laws don’t necessarily work; just last year,
Maryland passed a revision to its landlord laws, but that didn’t help Absolum
when his home was stolen. In December, a $2.3 million Bethesda home was commandeered, leaving
neighbors confused and frustrated.
Illinois passed a new anti-squatting law last year, but
enforcement remains complicated. Mary Welch, who has owned a Chicago
condominium for over a decade, had been renovating the space in hopes of
finding a renter. But when she visited the condo last month, she found someone
living there, and when she knocked on the door, the new female “tenant” pulled
a gun on her, screaming at her and telling her she had no “authority to be on
the premises.” The police told her that because the new law hadn’t taken effect,
there was nothing they could do.
“I’m helpless now,” she told a local television
station. “I put all of my faith in the new law,” she said, adding that she
is “angry beyond words.”
The idea that someone becomes a “tenant” of a structure
simply by inhabiting it for a few weeks is, of course, preposterous. Prior to
2024 in New York, a squatter who occupied a home for at least 30 days was
granted tenant rights — so if a perpetrator was committing property theft, he
just had to ensure that he was committed to the bit.
Nonetheless, squatters have their defenders. They either
argue that it rarely ever happens or that it is
simply a byproduct of a lack of affordable housing. (There aren’t solid numbers on
squatting, but isolated studies show that it’s on the rise; at the moment,
Atlanta is reported to have over 1,200 homes with illegal tenants.)
Others say a simple property crime is not worth bringing
in the police. It is true that forcibly removing people from a home can be a
violent undertaking. But in states like Tennessee, it can take up to
two years to remove a squatter, and in Pennsylvania,
the cost of going to court to evict people from your property can range from
$3,000 to $10,000. That has led people to take the law into their own hands,
hiring vigilantes like the famous “Squatter Hunter” Flash
Shelton.
Complicating matters is that in many cases, it is the
squatters themselves who are being scammed. Malign actors will break into a
property, change the locks, then offer credulous renters a phony “deed” to the
home. That is what happened in both the Absolum and Welch cases, where the
unwelcome inhabitants honestly believed they were there legally.
But theft is theft — just because you are in possession
of stolen goods (in this case, property), it doesn’t mean you get to keep them
once the victim takes action. If you “rent” a stolen property, it should be
immediately seized and given back to its rightful owner.
During the 2020 George Floyd riots, we were told that
burning down buildings in protest was fine because it’s “just property.” But
our property rights are the basis of a free society, and foundational, so to
speak, to all our other rights.
Imagine the feeling of personal violation when a robber
is in your home for 15 minutes — now stretch that out to months, or even years.
(Personally speaking, once I envision a scofflaw’s feet on my couch, you might
as well burn the whole house down, because I’m not going back in there.)
The answer to all this is simple: Trespassing is a
criminal offense, and squatting is extreme trespassing. Squatters should
be immediately arrested the moment they step outside the home. Utilities should
be cut off as long as they are occupying the property illegally. They should
also be required to compensate for any damage they cause to the home or
business. (One Dallas woman returned to her house to find that squatters had
done over $150,000 worth of damage.)
Treating squatting as a civil offense amounts to
government sanction of property theft. As the Pacific
Legal Foundation has argued in a 2024 report, failing
to criminalize squatting is effectively a government taking of property in
violation of the property owner’s Fifth Amendment rights.
This isn’t a complicated moral puzzle dressed up as
housing policy — it’s a failure of nerve. A society that can’t distinguish
between ownership and occupation, between theft and bad luck, is one that has
decided property rights are optional, enforceable only after months of
paperwork and five-figure legal bills.
Squatting isn’t a loophole in the law; it’s a dare, one
the government currently accepts by pretending it’s a civil misunderstanding.
If your house can be taken without consequence, then your rights exist only on
paper — and paper, as squatters have shown, makes for a very poor lock.
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