This will be the beginning of a new thing I’m gonna do called “Alex tries to explain things”. You ever just lay awake in bed at night trying to fall asleep, only to have a random question pop up in your mind like “do atoms have colors?” Then you proceed to spend the next few hours going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole instead of getting the rest your body needs? Well this will be a new thing I’m doing where I’ll just research random stuff my sleep deprived mind came up with and attempt to explain it the best I can. No guarantees this will make sense. No guarantees that it will even be fully factually correct. Remember kids, never trust the ramblings of random sleep deprived strangers on the internet.

I’ve heard of the term squatting rights before but I never really understood what it meant. Squatting rights seem to change between different places so I’m mostly focused on the squatting rights in the U.S. state I’m currently living in: Pennsylvania. I thought squatters were just homeless people who found an abandoned house. Which isn’t necessarily the case. Squatters are people who reside in an area of land or building that doesn’t belong to them, but unlike trespassers, have plausible deniability when it comes to whether they believe they are allowed to be there or not. This includes people who may have been renting a place legally at some point but then stopped paying rent, or people who have been scammed into paying someone who wasn’t the real owner of the property. Squatters have the right to adverse possession, in which they can essentially become the full legal homeowner of a property. Adverse possession occurs when a squatter habits a property for 21 continuous years in such a manner that they do so in a non-deceptive manner. Which basically means they were not hiding nor were they actively dodging eviction. They must have plausible deniability that they did not know their stay was unlawful. They must also demonstrate that they had been performing the necessary housekeeping such as maintenance and keeping the property up to code. The idea is that if the rightful owner went that long without trying to evict them/checking on the property, and the squatter has done more work to maintain the property, then the squatter has a greater claim to the ownership and thus has entitlement to ownership. Though this is unlikely in any practical sense to occur in an urban environment. I imagine this might apply better for someone who found an abandoned cabin in the woods or something. More common acts of squatting are usually easy to evict. The most common of which is likely tenants who are living past their lease/not paying rent. Unlike trespassers, who are people who are explicitly told they are unwelcome on a property (verbally or through signage), homeowners are not allowed to directly evict squatters themselves. The usual route is to go through civil court and then have law enforcement remove the squatters. I’m still not fully sure why tenants aren’t automatically considered trespassers after their lease ends, because at least to me, it feels like that’s considered an unwelcomed stay. It might be to prevent cruel eviction of people who aren’t in a position to find new housing. It might be because landlords are responsible for collecting rent themselves and therefore have to prove that the tenant is refusing to pay and have that verified legally. 

Some sources or whatev:
https://www.doorloop.com/laws/pennsylvania-squatters-rights

https://propertyclub.nyc/article/squatters-rights-in-pennsylvania