End Squatter Madness
The latest in the city’s squatter madness: Queens homeowner Adele Andaloro was arrested after confronting the creeps squatting in a home she inherited from her parents and changing the locks in an effort to get them out.
What enables criminals like the thugs trying to steal the house out from under Andaloro is a New York City law letting people claim “squatter’s rights” to a property after just 30 days of living there — and the same law makes it legally dangerous for the true owner to change locks, shut off power and water or throw the squatters’ stuff out.
Even when the squatters start subletting space to others, as Andaloro’s tormenters reportedly have. In other words, it’s yet another example of progressive legislation that harms the law-abiding and rewards criminals. In this case, thieves who steal entire homes.
And the abuse is all too common. Witness Brett Flores, now mid-theft of a home in Douglaston, Queens, from couple Susana and Joseph Landa under the same legal umbrella. Flores, it seems, wormed his way into the good graces of the ailing previous owner, and now claims the right to keep on living there even though it was purchased by the couple as a home to share with their disabled son.
That’s right: Flores is trying to screw an elderly couple with a special-needs kid out of their home, which they paid for. Truly the lowest of the low — yet, in the Big Apple, he enjoys more robust legal protections on this issue than do his victims.
The only remedy for those victims is a byzantine slog through Housing Court, which gives squatters endless opportunities to delay, deny and deflect.
One serial squatting-couple, Rosanna Busgith and Philip Garnett, managed to avoid eviction for literal years before finally quitting their usurped Queens spot in January; the lovely duo left behind rotting meat and a nail-in-a-couch-cushion booby trap for the rightful occupants.
Small wonder that fellow Gothamites showed up as seeming vigilantes to give Andaloro a hand against the squatters after her unjust arrest. Housing is already a huge cost for many New Yorkers — and thanks to this lunatic law, any house you haven’t moved into yet can be expropriated by a sociopath who literally wanders in off the street.
There are obvious paths out of this nightmare (like — shocker! — making squatting illegal). And we need action post-haste: A TikTok influencer is now explaining to illegal immigrants how to take advantage of laws like this to score free houses.
But pro-disorder leftists — who want to make it almost impossible for landlords to evict anyone at all, ever — dominate both in the Big Apple and Albany, so don’t hold your breath.