How stopping squatters became a hot conservative crusade

It was a triumphant day for Patti Peeples, but one thing didn’t sit right with her.

For more than a year, the 61-year-old Florida landlord fought to tighten the state’s law against squatting, a crime she saw up close when two women faked a rental agreement and occupied one of her Jacksonville properties. She’d done interview after interview, worked closely with her local legislators, and testified in Tallahassee. The result, a tough new law that would let sheriffs evict squatters without entering a lengthy legal process, passed with unanimous bipartisan support.

On Wednesday, invited by her Republican state representative, Peeples arrived at the bill signing in Orlando. The longtime Democrat took her seat next to a local Republican fund-raiser as Gov. Ron DeSantis described squatter horror stories from New York. “Illegal aliens” were “instructing other foreigners how to come into this country and commandeer property,” he said; then he introduced Flash Shelton, a “squatter hunter” from California, who thanked the governor for taking action.

“What passes muster in New York and California isn’t passing muster here,” said DeSantis. Peeples had won; but how, she wondered, had her cause suddenly been turned into a political cudgel for conservatives?

“This is the good and the bad of politics in our country,” she told Semafor. “It was nonsensical to showcase an individual who had nothing to do with the bill being written and passed, doesn’t live in the state of Florida, and makes money from his business that uses tactics to remove squatters that could be copied and increase the chance of violence.”

In multiple states, including New York and Florida, viral stories about people seizing homes they don’t own have inspired legislation to stop it. There’s no organized partisan opposition to those bills. But Republicans have seized the initiative, warning of a squatter crisis inflamed by liberal crime policies and illegal immigration; a popular migrant TikTok influencer’s video urging people to “invade” and “seize” homes burned through conservative media just as the Florida bill was passing.

“There are challenges, with adverse possession being exploited to benefit unethical behavior by a few,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who like every member of her party supported the anti-squatter bill. “The rhetoric the governor used was never mentioned anywhere during the [legislative] process. Leave it to DeSantis to make every issue partisan.”

Back in February, while I was talking to South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman at a Nikki Haley rally, a voter stepped in and asked me to wrap it up, so he could talk to the congressman about “squatters.” He was worried about them stealing homes in his retirement community; Norman urged him to talk to his sheriff, because Congress would be too slow to act.

This was how I realized that a story that wasn’t part of the campaign discourse — even as it was covered frequently by local news — was breaking through. Conservative media was all over this topic, and politicians were slow to catch up.

Fox News and the New York Post, the brightest suns in Rupert Murdoch’s media galaxy, have heavily covered a string of unrelated, sometimes frightening stories involving squatters, including one incident where a woman was killed by the people who had taken over her Manhattan apartment. DeSantis’s signing ceremony was streamed live by Fox — a throwback to the pre-primary days when he’d ride the conservative zeitgeist to friendly coverage.

But this isn’t like the partisan squabbles over Florida’s parental rights law, or shuttling asylum-seekers to the bluest possible cities. In Georgia, like Florida, there was no opposition to anti-squatter legislation that moved after weeks of stories about a growing crisis. In South Carolina, a version introduced by a Republican state legislator running for Congress was co-sponsored by half of his colleagues, in both parties.

And in New York, where Democrats hold a legislative supermajority, Republican Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz introduced his anti-squatter bill with Democratic co-sponsors. His own Fox News interview started with the viral “invasion” TikTok, as a study in what he needed to stop.

“Unfortunately, videos like that one you saw on TikTok is one of many of people teaching others how they can utilize New York’s laws to their advantage,” said Blumencranz, whose law would rewrite the state’s definition of “tenant” to exclude people staying in homes they don’t pay for.

New York City’s laws, which DeSantis singled out on Wednesday, are unusually generous to tenants; if they’ve occupied a home for more than 30 days, owners who want them out have to go to court. All of that was laid out in a March 21 report, by a New York ABC affiliate, that filmed an owner/squatter nightmare — a woman being handcuffed after the illegal tenants she’d just ejected called police and brandished phony documents.

That story, combined with the “invasion” TikTok, got politicians scrambling; Queens councilwoman Vickie Paladino rallied fretful New Yorkers on Monday, proposing a bill that would extend the 30-day rule to 180 days. Even when there’s no Democratic opposition, it’s a simple story for Republicans to tell: A sclerotic government is letting criminals run over people like you.

Some progressive writers argue that the squatting stories have been blown out of proportion. In Popular Information, Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria recently broke down what they call the “hysteria” over the issue, which they said was “distracting attention from America’s actual housing crisis.”

But even among activists on the left, criticisms of the anti-squatter proposals have been relatively mild. In Florida, the only skeptics of the new law were housing-rights advocates. Florida Rising lobbied to change the bill, warning that some people living illegally in homes might be taken advantage of by phony landlords. Legislators adopted their concerns in the final bill, and the group took a neutral position. But Cynthia Laurent, a housing justice campaigner at Florida Rising, said that “this was not coming up as an issue in this state” until recently.

“We heard about Patti Peeples’s situation, and that was horrible, but we wanted to make sure that this didn’t have impacts on people struggling to stay housed,” said Laurent. “What we’ve seen is that when some of these laws are implemented, working class Black and brown folks are the ones who end up being harmed.”

NOTABLE

• In Bloomberg, Michael Sasso and Patrick Clark report on Atlanta institutional landlords who were desperate to evict non-paying tenants.
• On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the podcaster put the blame on New York lawmakers for not seeing how squatters exploited current statutes: “That means they know how to do it and they know the loophole, and you need to tighten that loophole up.”