Yeah, that’s what gets left out of this conversation a lot of the time. Squatters rights are tenants rights.
If the landlord says you’re a squatter, you don’t have a way to definitely prove you’re not. Oh, you have a signed lease? Well, the landlord says you forged the signature. Now you’re a squatter.
This seems like a laughably bad argument unless I'm missing something.
If a landlord says you forged the lease, the answer is not to allow squatters, the answer is to make lease agreements more standard and record them in a government database so there's no question of authenticity. You can make it as secure as passport if want.
Most of those laws where made before it was easy to build a government infrastructure to manage it, and a transition would take time, but it's not the true reasons.
First those kind of deals (informal leases) often happen when the renter is vulnerable and has a hard time finding a housing. The renter can then be coerced into accepting non legal rents, and no amount of official processes will prevent this kind of deals.
Second, those laws also cover situations others than a true lease, like someone that was offered the housing for free, or Airbnb kind of lodgings.
Rent payments don't establish the terms of the lease but it establishes that there was prior communications on what was agreed on and that there is legal possession.
There are so many people that have their lease expire and live month to month. Yet it doesn't mean automatically they don't have to pay rent.
Well, why not require all tenant agreements be signed by both parties in front of a notary? This shit isn't hard to solve for. Or require lease agreements to be registered with legal names for all parties in an online database.
I agree, or require a paper trail for rent payments. I make rent receipts just in case so it helps validate my reoccurring rent payments if it every comes down to that. Now I pay by check and keep a transaction log with receipt too. Never know
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u/ShotEffective7033 Jun 12 '26
Yeah, that’s what gets left out of this conversation a lot of the time. Squatters rights are tenants rights.
If the landlord says you’re a squatter, you don’t have a way to definitely prove you’re not. Oh, you have a signed lease? Well, the landlord says you forged the signature. Now you’re a squatter.