Homeless woman was living inside Michigan rooftop store sign with computer, coffee maker
Homeless woman was living inside Michigan rooftop store sign with computer, coffee maker
Police in Michigan say a startling discovery was made on the roof of a Michigan grocery store: A woman was living inside the store sign for roughly a year.
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squatters rights take entirely too long to kick in these days
Squatter's rights wouldn't be applicable here, time aside.
The point of squatter's rights isn't to try to generate more housing in random nooks, but to force regularization of the situation -- like to encourage property owners to act to eject people now rather than waiting fifty years and then, surprise, enforcing submarine legal rights.
Using squatter's rights requires that possession be adverse and open. Like, you can't secretly hole up in a corner somewhere, as the person in the article did. You have to be very clear, have everyone know that you're living there. The property owner also has to be making no efforts to remove the person. Those restrictions aren't just arbitrary -- they're to limit it to situations where is a long-running divergence between legality and the situation in place and where nobody is attempting to rectify the situation themselves (either via selling rights to live there or ejecting a person or whatever).
almost like our property codes were written for an era that is more than a century gone
Nah, speaking from personal experience, I grew up in a sutuation where my family took care of a small adjacent strip of property we didn't own for 20+ years. The true owner lived ~5 houses down and for 18+ years he didn't know he owned it. —In that situation we could have claimed the property and the only reason we didn't is the cost of surveying the property was greater than it's perceived value. it was probably 20 ft wide and had a large storm drain running under the middle of it that came from a walmart parking lot a half-mile away.
fast-forward a few years and the people we sold the home to were moving out and the number of acres listed had been updated to include that strip of land.