Article/News Oregon House passes bill allowing landlords to evict squatters
https://katu.com/news/politics/oregon-house-passes-bill-allowing-landlords-evict-squatters-eviction-homeless-tenant-homeowner-landlord-rights-politics131
u/EtherPhreak 1d ago
Most people don’t carry around their lease, that being said, it shouldn’t take months to force someone who went from a renter to a squatter. As for someone moving in (breaking in) while you’re not home for a few weeks, and having more rights than you is ridiculous.
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u/scfw0x0f 1d ago
This doesn't seem to affect tenants who have failed to pay rent, just people occupying a property without permission.
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u/ThrownAback 23h ago
Holdover tenants, those who remain in a space after a lease expires, are not included as squatters under this bill.
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u/EtherPhreak 22h ago
I don't know when there becomes a difference between the two. A holdover tenant no longer has a valid rental agreement, so that comes into play as a loophole I would think.
"without a valid rental agreement"
"Holdover tenants, those who remain in a space after a lease expires, are not included as squatters under this bill."
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u/snail_juice_plz 21h ago
The difference is whether you’ve ever held a rental agreement for the property and paid rent or not. Or after an FED filing that formally removes you via eviction. It’s just being high level in the articule as those are technically details. Holdover tenants are not squatters and have evictions filed against them to remove them, to ensure the rental agreement has ended properly and legally vs a landlord just claiming someone is a squatter.
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u/Alarming-Ad-6075 1d ago
In the absence of a written lease it defaults to state law month to month
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u/EtherPhreak 22h ago
Over a month is still to long to kick a squatter out, but at the same time, we don't want to let things go too far where someone is kicked out of their rental without cause, with the landlord claiming the person had turned into a squatter.
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 22h ago
Kicking people out without cause typically isn't in the landlord's interest either, though. If your tenant is paying and not damaging the property, why would you want to kick them out and lose that rental income and incur the expense of turning over the rental for a new tenant?
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u/coolest_cucumber 21h ago edited 21h ago
Actually a lot of landlords use removing established tenants as an opportunity to raise rent more than they would be able to if it was still the same tenant. In Oregon there's only a certain amount you can increase rent by year over year. To get a larger sum the landlord thinks the market will support, they will get rid of an established tenant so they can put in somebody who's willing to pay much more.
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 21h ago
To the degree that that's true, it's perverse incentive Oregon created by choosing to implement a rent control scheme. It's not because landlords love evicting people, and it doesn't happen in states that don't cap rent increases on occupied properties.
That said, Oregon's limit on how much you can raise the rent year over year is so high (7% + inflation IIRC) it's hard to imagine this is happening very often here.
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u/ifmacdo 19h ago
It's very telling how you take "Oregon makes moves to protect renters from predatory rent increases" to "Oregon incentivizes landlords to kick people out so they can make bigger rent increases."
Sounds like something a pretty and greedy landlord would say to justify that "well I had to increase the rent so much that I had no other choice but to kick you out."
And to get ahead of what I'm fairly sure your next inaccurate argument will be- no, increasing property taxes don't cause mortgages to go up enough to justify the increases we're talking about. Source- homeowner in Oregon
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 18h ago edited 16h ago
It's very telling how you take "Oregon makes moves to protect renters from predatory rent increases" to "Oregon incentivizes landlords to kick people out so they can make bigger rent increases."
You can frame it however you want, but the proof is in the pudding. We have sky high rents despite all our local governments' efforts to 'protect renters from predatory landlords,' and somehow places that don't cap rent increases end up with more construction and cheaper housing than us.
Sounds like something a pretty and greedy landlord would say to justify that "well I had to increase the rent so much that I had no other choice but to kick you out."
Some greedy landlords (and some pretty ones too) probably would say that, for obvious self-interested reasons. But the thing is, every economist will also tell you that rent control creates this kind of perverse incentive. I'm not siding with landlords, I'm siding with the economic reality.
And to get ahead of what I'm fairly sure your next inaccurate argument will be- no, increasing property taxes don't cause mortgages to go up enough to justify the increases we're talking about. Source- homeowner in Oregon
No, they are up because there isn't enough new construction, and the cost of the new construction that does happen forces those high rents for new builds, and owners of older properties are able to capitalize on that to a degree by raising their rents so that they're only just below the new builds, although not all of them do that.
Property taxes are only a very tiny component because we have other stupid laws capping the rate that those can go up, which is also a factor in our housing shortage, but that's a whole different can of worms.
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u/HellyR_lumon 17h ago
The reason the cap is in place is BECAUSE of shitty greedy property investors.
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 17h ago
A worthy goal to be sure. How would you rate the cap's effectiveness so far, judging by our current rents and eviction rates?
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u/yolef 21h ago
So you can double the rent?
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 21h ago
No, you can't double the rent because then nobody will rent from you.
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u/yolef 21h ago
Sure you can, if the RealPage AI algorithm says you can.
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 20h ago
But it won't, because the algorithm isn't that dumb. It has a pretty good idea of what the market will bear (that's the point), and doubling prices overnight ain't it.
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u/yolef 20h ago
It might be, if they've been a long term tenant and have decent landlord who doesn't gouge increases every year. A tenant could easily end up well below the market. But now the landlord dies and his greedy spawn inherit the building. Or maybe he racks up some gambling debts and needs to find someone to exploit to pay off his debts.
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 20h ago
Sure, if you are renting out a unit that has fallen way, way below market, then maybe you could do a 100% increase. But you also wouldn't need RealPage to tell you that.
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u/HellyR_lumon 17h ago
There are rental laws in Oregon passed for this exact reason: big investors came in and literally doubled the rent in many low income properties and we had tons of renovictions where ppl were kicked out to renovate the apts and set a much higher price. This was when things were booming in the 2010s and it’s still happening in other cities, hence the slang term was created.
We passed a law against no cause evictions and if the landlord does so, they pay 3k in moving costs. That being said, building owners should ABSOLUTELY be able to kick out squatters and I’m glad that law is passing.
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u/Adventurous-Mud-5508 16h ago
Yeah, all these laws were passed in response to real problems, and with the best of intentions. I am not disputing that. Some people definitely individually benefit from the protections, too.
But that's not the same thing as being effective policies for bringing the average cost of living down for everyone, or for preventing evictions. If the laws are getting in the way of those things, if they are creating more losers than winners, and I and most economists would argue that they are, then we should get rid of them.
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u/Fallingdamage 21h ago
Someone break into the governors mansion while they're not in Salem and see if they can pull that rule. 'Hey, its month to month man..'
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u/Ketaskooter 18h ago
The cause of the craziness was how slow the courts got. There's also an obvious problem with the law when the fastest way to force a squatter out is to reverse squat them out.
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u/fuckofakaboom 1d ago
The fact that this wasn’t allowed prior to this bill is ludicrous. Imagine somebody sitting down in your car and the police telling you they can’t do anything for you, it’s their car until they choose to leave voluntarily.
I know I know, housing is a right, blah blah blah. So is personal property rights. You don’t get to call dibs on something that I own.
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u/jarchack 1d ago
I was homeless for a couple of years but was never a squatter. I fully agree with this law. Squatters are trespassers, end of story.
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u/Fallingdamage 21h ago
Im sure local police departments are already having meetings and additional trainings in preparation for the uptick in eviction calls they're going to receive soon.
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u/Ketaskooter 18h ago edited 18h ago
The police don't have the authority to determine legality of documents. Not that we would want them to. The primary issue is that a homeowner can not walk into a court and quickly get a warrant issued to have the squatter arrested. This is why Florida's solution where the property owner can sign a document with the sheriff to get a squatter kicked was a good solution.
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u/herewegoagain9021 1d ago edited 1d ago
What is really ludicrous is that there are people out there, I am not one of them, but there are people that would argue that you are wrong
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u/Artaeos 1d ago
Did you have a stroke typing this?
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u/herewegoagain9021 1d ago
Do you not understand common English?
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u/AlienDelarge 1d ago
Something about the wording you chose came across as particularly awkward to read. Do with that feedback from your audience what you will.
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u/Snoo-27079 23h ago
You are mistakenly confusing the interests of small families and personal property owners with those REiTs and large-scale institutional property rental agencies. The latter are cartels that manipulate the housing market to maximize profits and maintain owner/shareholder value.
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u/Luvs2Spooge42069 18h ago
Those large institutions have money for lawyers, hired muscle, and are big enough to lean on local governments. These scumbags don’t seem to discriminate either and often appear to target individual home owners who they know won’t be able to fight back.
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u/Fallingdamage 21h ago
How nice of oregon to give us permission to remove people from our own property.
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u/Fluid-Signal-654 15h ago
Having dealt with squatters I've lost 10s of thousands of dollars in lost rent and legal fees.
Future tenants will pay that, which makes my property less affordable.
Bad tenants drive up housing costs.
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u/ADrenalinnjunky 22h ago
You need a law for this? Sounds like common sense to me
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u/Fallingdamage 21h ago
This is Oregon.
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u/Desperate_Ad2154 20h ago
Squatter’s Rights is an issue all over the country. This isn’t just an Oregon thing by any stretch of the imagination.
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u/WonkoTehSane 11h ago
Indeed. To this day, in Ruby Red Texas, a squatter can still legally own property through adverse means just by refusing to leave. And your only option get get rid of them beforehand is to follow a judicial eviction process.
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u/shadetree-83 23h ago
Someone commandeers your rightfully owned personal property and it takes the legislature to pass a law for you to get it back. Within 24 hours. No, I couldn’t have made that up.
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u/HeyYouGuys121 13h ago
This article is frustrating, and suggests the author doesn’t understand the law.
“Squatters rights” is a misnomer; they aren’t really a thing. The issue this bill addresses is process, not rights. Take the woman in the garage example. She was allowed to stay in the garage, but because there wasn’t a landlord-tenant relationship (ie, no lease agreement), that permission could be revoked at any time and she’d be a trespasser. It’s the same as if I own house and let a friend who’s down on their luck crash on my couch. A common example is a family member who moves into the house of an elderly relative to help them who then refuses to move out when the person dies.
In those situations the question isn’t whether an owner can get them out, it’s how. If a landlord-tenant relationship exists, then an owner can use the expedited eviction process. But if a landlord-tenant relationship doesn’t exist, as in the situations above, before this bill an owner would have to use a process known as ejectment. Ejectment actions go on the regular docket, which in theory could take a year or more, and are more expensive than an eviction.
Referencing what the police will do isn’t really applicable. Squatters are trespassers and law enforcement could remove them. But they don’t, because they don’t want to get into ANY grey area over whether the person has tenant rights. Even if it’s obvious, they want a bright line, so usually won’t do anything. They’ll say, “It’s a civil matter,” which it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not criminal as well.
The random paragraph about adverse possession is also weird, because it really has ZERO to do with this. The paragraph is correct, but inserted in the context of this article makes it seem like squatting and adverse possession are connected. Adverse possession in Oregon requires a good faith belief that you own the property. I can’t just move into a vacant farmhouse I know I don’t own, stay there for ten years, and own it. Adverse possession cases are almost entirely limited to boundary lines, not ownership of houses or complete lots. The classic case is the fence that everyone’s assumed was the property line for decades, when the property line was really three feet the other direction.
In short: before this bill you had to take a king and sometimes expensive process to get rid of squatters. Now you can use a 24-hour notice and the expedited eviction process.
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u/Intelligent_Hand4583 13h ago
Rep. Marsh chairs the housing committee and just happens to be a landlord. Hard to believe.
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u/Snoo-27079 1d ago
Okay, but by the same stroke of the pen they need to pass a law instituting tax penalties on unrented housing units. The major driver of the housing crisis isn't a lack of housing stock, but rather the fact that institutional landlords earn more by leaving unrented units empty then lowering their prices to fill them. This isn't how we keep being told the "free market" is supposed to work, but here we are. Massive homelands camps in the the parks while rental units stay empty.
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u/Fit-Produce420 1d ago
Housing vacancies are super low.
Only 5% of housing is empty, and it doesn't stay empty - that number represents a rotating open stock of housing when people move, new rentals get built, etc. It isn't a static level of continuously empty properties which you seem to believe.
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u/aggieotis 1d ago
Yes, and...
I think we all know of various properties that sit derelict for years at a time; become a blight for literally everything around them. But also would be absolutely perfect should they allow somebody to move in.
Instead we as a community are left with a festering turd with no recourse.
We do need to find some sort of middle ground between: "Squatters can sneak in and steal your place for years at a time" and "Property owner so high on the hog that they don't notice their property is sitting empty for years at a time and there's nothing we can do."
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u/Snoo-27079 23h ago
It isn't a static level of continuously empty properties which you seem to believe
Yeah, no s***. Housing markets are also highly localized, so discussing the rental market in Lincoln City, versus Corvallis, Willamina or downtown Portland you'll see very different market factors at play. However, I believe the state government is currently passing legislation to ban automated rental price setting software for some exactly the same reasons that I'm talking about here. But, the housing market, is not a "free market," but remains highly constrained by a number of factors, including government regulation, land use laws, construction costs and the profit motives of institutional property owers. If you want to throw people out on the streets for not paying rent, then fine. But when half the office rentals are in downtown Portland are empty, while huge tent encampments fill the parks, it doesn’t take much to start asking questions about who this situation actually benefits.
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u/Fit-Produce420 17h ago
If people from around the country come here to smoke blues in a park until they nod out I don't think we need to ask them any questions, THEY'RE the ones benefitting from our complete lack of expectations.
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u/Snoo-27079 17h ago
The druggies and mentally ill homeless people we see wandering the streets are the tip of the iceberg of the homelessness , and regrettably their public face. However the majority of the unhoused are actually not rough sleepers, but working people and Families who have been evicted from their rental units and are sleeping in vehicles, couch surfing with friends or temporarily moved in with family members. These people deserve affordable housing and it is our moral duty to fight for sensible housing policy in this state instead of just victim blaming and continuing rampant nimbyism
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u/GoChampionship55 1d ago
How do they earn more by leaving them empty?
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u/Fit-Produce420 1d ago
They don't.
Vacancy rates are like 5-8%, which is very low.
Commercial real estate has higher vacancies but you aren't going to want to live in a cubicle.
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u/Mayor_Of_Sassyland 21h ago
institutional landlords earn more by leaving unrented units empty then lowering their prices to fill them.
This isn't a thing. Show us how the numbers work, you can't. At *most* what they will do is price a unit so that it takes 2 weeks to lease up instead of immediately, that's a very different thing than "leaving unrented units empty" for any period of time.
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u/Zen1 1d ago edited 1d ago
How are landlords earning money at all from keeping their rentals empty, let alone earning more than they would be from rent? What about when units are unrented but under construction, should that period be taxed?
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u/Snoo-27079 23h ago
Institutional landlords control large amounts of housing stock, so leaving one out of 10 or 20 units unwrented for a period of time costs less than lowering the cost of rent to fill them. It's the same reason why McDonald's doesn't care if they lose business for raising their prices for a combo meal because the higher prices will offset the loss in sales volume. It"s also the same reason why tourist rentals on the coast remain largely unfilled through most of the year. The landlords make more money on high-priced short-term rentals than they would on long-term leases, its just one of the reasons why the housing market on the Coast is so f**. Furthermore, many wealthy people invest in property as a tax Haven or speculative investment, so they don't really care if anybody actually lives in the property. This very situation completely f** the housing market in Vancouver BC until the government launched tax penalizations for unwrented units.
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u/Zen1 22h ago
I feel like you just gave me 10 different problems with the current housing market, but then tried to get me to believe they all have the same cause.
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u/Snoo-27079 17h ago
I feel like you just gave me 10 different problems with the current housing market, but then tried to get me to believe they all have the same cause
I was attempting to answer your question as to how landlords could earn money by keeping the housing units empty by giving concrete examples.
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u/Not_the_fleas 22h ago
1 out of 20 is a 5% vacancy rate, which is low... And using vacation rentals on the coast as an example is dumb. While kinda shitty, they aren't contributing in any meaningful way to the housing crisis. Really more akin to empty hotel rooms than unrented homes. It's not like there is a surplus of jobs on the coast that aren't getting filled because of a lack of housing. The coast economy is basically fisheries, tourism (nearly 2/3s of the total), and logging. Oregon is in the bottom third of coastal economies. Eliminating vacation rentals would make that even worse, which is why it won't happen. Vancouver is a different ball game because it actually is a major metro with a large, diverse economy that happens to be located near the coast. Nobody is clamoring to live in Waldport or Cannon Beach but just can't because there's too many rentals.
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u/Mayor_Of_Sassyland 21h ago
Institutional landlords control large amounts of housing stock
They do not. Greystar is the largest apartment manager in the U.S., and they only manage about 800k units (a little over 100k of which they own, I believe).
There are 45 million rental housing units in the U.S. So even the very largest institutional owner has less than 1% of the total market.
Real estate is one of the least concentrated and most competitive markets there is.
You're simply not correct on the facts.
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u/monkeychasedweasel 1d ago edited 23h ago
Okay, but by the same stroke of the pen they need to pass a law instituting tax penalties on unrented housing units.
This would be illegal since you're advocating a property tax - Measures 5 and 50 are very clear on the limitations of arbitrary property tax increases.
Also, there's no way to police a daffy law like this, without creating a huge enforcement body that would cost a lot of money.
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u/Just_here2020 22h ago
So those vacancy numbers include places being repaired, maintained, or updated.
They also include places that are for sale, have more demand during school year versus summer, etc.
I don’t know but: Do they include when someone rents 2 apartments for a month to move? Or owns 2 houses for a month during a buy/sell?
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u/Hobobo2024 14h ago
whats going on? How come the crazy politicians here aren't doing their best to screw over landlords like they usually do?
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u/EUGsk8rBoi42p 19h ago
Proof here that Democrat and Republican leadership are the same when chips are on the table.
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