Free Republic

It was a triumphant day for Patti Peeples, but one thing didn’t sit right with her. For more than a year, the 61-year-old Florida landlord fought to tighten the state’s law against squatting, a crime she saw up close when two women faked a rental agreement and occupied one of her Jacksonville properties. She’d done interview after interview, worked closely with her local legislators, and testified in Tallahassee. The result, a tough new law that would let sheriffs evict squatters without entering a lengthy legal process, passed with unanimous bipartisan support. On Wednesday, invited by her Republican state representative, Peeples...

A property owner in Atlanta, Georgia, is fighting back against squatters who have taken over his land, which spans nine acres. Approximately ten years ago, David Morris, who now resides in California, allowed four individuals to live on the property for a while at no charge, Fox News reported Wednesday, noting the agreement was they would assist with the upkeep of the land. Morris used to run a nonprofit on the property that assisted needy people with food. However, he shut down operations during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, as people suffering from addiction and mental health problems moved onto the...

Too many property owners are having trouble asserting their rights, but not everything is "squatter's rights."A man's home is his castle. Or is it? Over the past couple of weeks, squatters' rights—whereby someone who isn't a legal owner or tenant claims a right to stay in someone else's property—has moved from a 30 Rock joke to the subject of white-hot internet discourse. Kicking off this controversy have been several viral episodes of frustrated property owners trying to eject unwanted people from their homes. Most prominently, New York City resident Adele Andaloro was arrested on camera after trying to self-evict several...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law on Wednesday that empowers residents in the state to have law enforcement immediately evict squatters from homes instead of having the situation devolve into a drawn out legal battle, and increases the criminal penalties against squatters. DeSantis signed the bill at a press conference as recent incidents of home squatters have gone viral in Democrat strongholds like California and New York. “So we’re here today because you assume in America if you purchase a home and own a residence that that’s your residence, that if you happen to maybe split time...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation into law Wednesday that ends squatters’ rights in the Sunshine State, stating that “squatting” is a scam that violates private property rights. After alarming stories about squatters commandeering homes and depriving the owners of their property rights made nationwide news in recent weeks, DeSantis took action. “We are in the state of Florida are ending this squatters scam once and for all. And momentarily I’ll be signing HB 621, which will give the homeowner the ability to quickly and legally remove a squatter from a property and which will increase criminal penalties for squatting,”...

If you own a home and don’t want to lose it, keep reading. Homeowners who go on vacation or a business trip, even for just a week, are returning to find their house overtaken by trespassers who fraudulently claim a right to be there. It’s happening to tens of thousands of homeowners from New York City to Atlanta and Los Angeles. When owners call the police, they’re told police can’t help. It’s a civil matter, and they have to file an eviction lawsuit, which can drag on for months or years because housing courts are backlogged. Meanwhile, owners are out...

“It’s too easy to forge a deed and record it,” Real estate attorney Richard Alembik told WSB-TV. “It’s a big problem nowadays, because of the fact that e-filing, the e-recording of deeds is so easy. It’s very easy to record forged deeds.” Alembik said notaries don’t check the identification of the people who submit the documents to verify if they are the rightful homeowners. Victims of fraud who have proof to be the rightful homeowners can still be ordered by a judge to move out and pay fines, according to the outlet. An elderly Georgia homeowner was forced out of...

An elderly Georgia homeowner was forced out of his house and arrested when an alleged swindler used fraudulent documents to claim ownership of the property. Charles and Charmaine Allman lived in the same Stone Mountain, Ga. home — located 16 miles east of Atlanta — for the last two decades before officials told the couple Tuesday that they no longer owned the house and had to vacate. “They made us feel like we were squatters,” Charmaine Allman told WSB-TV. “Just tossed my stuff out like it was trash.”

The Institute for Justice says its data show that a century-old Supreme Court doctrine created a huge exception to the Fourth Amendment. Police can traipse onto the vast majority of private property in the country without a warrant thanks to a century-old Supreme Court decision, according to a new study by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public-interest law firm. In a study published in the spring 2024 issue of Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute, Institute for Justice attorney Josh Windham and research analyst David Warren estimate that at least 96 percent of all private land in the...

My home and office burned in the Alameda wildfire of Sept. 20. I will not order more copies and have decided to share it with the public. YOU will find it in full here: Thank you, AuntB, aka JAS, Billie Nix, TheTownCrier "JESUS WEPT" An American Story (jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com) "JESUS WEPT" An American Story: Jesus Wept, An American Story. Chapters 1 thru 3. https://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/2021/12/jesus-wept-american-story-chapters-1.html Chapters. 4-6 https://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/2021/12/jesus-wept-chapters-4-thru-7-merry.html Chapters 7 & 8 https://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/2021/12/jesus-wept-chapters-7-8-merry-christmas.html Chapters 9 - 11 https://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/2021/12/jesus-wept-american-story-chapters-9-10.html Chapters 12 - 14 https://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/2021/12/jesus-wept-chapters-12-thru-14.html Chapter 15 https://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/2021/12/jesus-wept-american-story-chapters-15.html

KEY TAKEAWAYS Biden’s unprecedented freezing of U.S. dollars owned by a foreign central bank has fundamentally jeopardized the currency’s hard-won reserve status. Janet Yellen dropped a bombshell last year, casually admitting that not only is de-dollarization happening, but Americans should expect more. At a minimum, it’d be multiple years of double-digit inflation like we’re used to seeing in third world countries. At worst, it’d be a full-blown Weimar Republic. America’s political establishment has less respect for the U.S. dollar than our foreign adversaries. That was made clear when Tucker Carlson recently interviewed the Russian strongman President Vladimir Putin, who clearly...

A township ordinance that limits firing guns to indoor and outdoor shooting ranges and zoning that significantly restricts where the ranges can be located does not violate the Second Amendment, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The man who challenged Stroud Township's gun laws, Jonathan Barris, began to draw complaints about a year after he moved to the home in the Poconos in 2009 and installed a shooting range on his 5-acre property. An officer responding to a complaint said the range had a safe backstop but the targets were in line with a large box store in a nearby shopping...

(America First Report)—Every now and then, I hear ideas or come across stories that I don’t want to put in writing. These usually surround information that I do not want out there because I don’t want to give anybody ideas. The article below is one of those cases; I didn’t want illegal aliens to figure out how they can further exploit one of the most ludicrous types of laws on the books in many major cities and leftist states. With Fox News covering it and other outlets picking it up, it’s time to warn Americans about a huge potential problem:...

Atlanta is battling a squatting crisis as 1,200 homes have been overtaken and landlords have to clear the unwanted residents themselves or wait months for police. The situation has become so dire that some homeowners offer to pay off squatters to get them out of their homes - rather than risk losing months of rent. One squat in the Georgia city was even being run as illegal secret strip club and had to be cleared out by an entire FBI swat team.

If you need more evidence that America has become a "permission-slip" society, look no further than the City of Portland, Oregon, requiring homeowners to get permits to remove trees that've fallen on their houses during recent winter storms. Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week published a story last week about Joel and Sarah Bonds, who had a large Douglas Fir in the backyard squash their house after it became weighed down with ice. The tree barely missed the Bonds' young daughter and cat. As it turns out, the couple were not unaware of the danger posed by the tree. In 2021, they'd...

Naperville City Councilman Josh McBroom is adamant the city should not use taxpayer dollars to house or aid migrant families amid the continued and growing influx of asylum-seekers to the Chicago area. However, he would welcome Naperville families being given the option to host migrant families instead. McBroom brought the idea forward at the Naperville City Council’s Tuesday night meeting.(snip) With a new precedent of buses arriving announced in the suburbs, McBroom said Tuesday “there’s increasing pressure for some suburbs to … do (their) part.” (snip) McBroom broached the possibility of creating a sign-up sheet for local households willing to...

Those trying to deal with the impact of Joe Biden's decision to open America's southern border and entice millions of illegal aliens into the country now have started removing students from school buildings, so that the immigrants can be housed there. But what's coming is going to be worse, according to X owner Elon Musk. Soon, he said, authorities will be "coming for your homes." A report from Washington Examiner pointed out that Musk is charging that "the government may soon target people’s homes to accommodate illegal immigrants." He said, online, "This is what happens when you run out of...

The Biden administration has continued the modern Democrat tradition of perverse federal land use policy. It comes as a surprise to most Americans that the federal government owns nearly one-third of the nation’s land mass, in excess of 640 million acres. (It also owns 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), but that is another story.) Most know of the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior and its 80 million acres of parks, preserves, reserves, monuments, memorials, historic sites, battlefields, and recreation areas, in every state. Many Americans may be familiar with the 141 national...

Richie DeVillier steered his boat around floating carcasses. His son leaned over the edge of the boat, holding a calf's head above the floodwaters as they tried to lead the shell-shocked animal to higher ground. Many of the living cattle they had found so far would not survive the next few days. Their bodies were already bloated from standing in water for so long, the coarse black hair sloughed away in patches. The DeVilliers lost about 60 of their 300 cows and calves, plus seven horses. [snip] "We were artificially in the bowl that's created by the highway construction," he...

The dream of net-zero carbon emissions—and its vision of blanketing hundreds of millions of acres of American land with wind turbines and solar panels—is running up against the reality that most of the land in America is still privately owned and many Americans don’t want these massive industrial installations near their homes. But that may prove to be a temporary impediment. “There is a major effort under the Biden administration to consolidate power over land and resources, because whoever owns the land and resources of a nation, controls the people,” Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, a...