Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
SQUATTERS
Lessons from Miami
Las Vegas has coastal company in aftermath of housing bubble
After a huddled briefing outside a strip mall, the convoy of Miami-Dade cops drove to a grimy-looking house and moved in, guns drawn.
One carried a semiautomatic rifle, another a shield, and another a sledgehammer. Their target? Squatters. Las Vegas has grappled with a widespread squatter problem in recent years, a lingering side effect of the housing crash. But it’s not alone: Squatters also took over vacant homes throughout the Miami area, a fellow poster child for the real estate boom and bust.
In many ways, their situations have been all but identical. Squatters in both areas have routinely shown fake leases to police, claimed to have found their house on Craigslist, operated fraud labs, and followed or been linked to people with anti-government
“sovereign citizen” ideology. They’ve also used or sold drugs, trashed the place and stolen or lacked utility service.
Squatting is not unique to Las Vegas and Miami, and, like any crime, will almost surely persist, as long as there are abandoned properties for the taking. But Miami’s experience shows that Las Vegas isn’t the only one to have dealt with this dark aftermath of the housing bust even as the economy improves, and that officials outside Nevada have taken other steps to crack down.
Perhaps the biggest difference: Miami-Dade police operated a fulltime squatters unit for more than three years, where Las Vegas police, who have reported “vast increases” in squatter-related service calls, haven’t formed one and don’t plan to.
A number of people in South Florida say the squatter problem isn’t as bad as it used to be, amid sharp drops in foreclosures and underwater borrowers and a rebounded housing market. But squatters still move in.
Miami city police Detective Jesse Henriquez, the department’s one-man squatter detail, said he’s worked on more than 100 cases in the past 2½ years and still knows of “squatter brokers,” or people who drive around neighborhoods, often in luxury cars, to find empty homes and rent them out.
The Miami-Dade Police Department, which works unincorporated and other areas of the county, scrapped its dedicated squatter unit in January, police say. But it still handles cases through its economic crimes bureau, and Detective Danny Garcia said his squatter workload hasn’t changed the past few years.
“We were just given 10 cases this morning,” he said recently.
And, as police and real estate pros know all too well, such homes can spiral into a mess of problems.
Miami-Dade police encountered a house where squatters were growing marijuana on the first floor and operating a strip club on the second. At another, they arrested a high priest of Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion, who had draped a chain link across the threshold of a door to block evil spirits from entering.
There also was a squatter house where mixed martial arts fighters were training – and selling weed and crack on the side. The police brought the SWAT team for that one. ‘To me, that’s illegal’
In a strip mall parking lot in northern Miami last month, Garcia was going over paperwork. Joined by 10 or so other Miami-Dade cops — including undercovers and a muscle-bound, minivan-driving lieutenant – he introduced them to the owners of the house they were targeting and noted that six people were reported to be inside. One, he said, had a name that was popular with sovereign citizens.
When they drove down the street to clear the house that day, three people were inside – a man, a woman, and the woman’s son, who looked about 5 and ran into her arms.
Police say they found two inflatable mattresses, a generator, and a kitchen without a stove or refrigerator. But the squatter removal wasn’t as simple as they thought, as the man came out holding an adverse possession claim.
Adverse possession laws can let people take ownership of abandoned real estate, but with strings attached. In Florida, they include paying back taxes as well as the property taxes for the next seven years.
Claims soared in South Florida after the market crashed. Sovereign citizens — known for financial scams, nonsensical writings and occasional violence — were among those making claims, according to police and Lazaro Solis, deputy property appraiser for Miami-Dade County.
“I’ve been working for this office for many years, and I only heard about (the law) when it actually flared up,” Solis said.
Coral Gables passed an ordinance in 2013 that defined squatting as occupying a property without the owner’s or tenant’s consent. As City Attorney Craig Leen sees it, if someone claims adverse possession, they’re all but admitting to being a squatter.
“Someone shouldn’t break into