BREWING BEER SINCE 1986. DO YOU REMEMBER 1986? I AM NOT 21 YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER WASATCH BREWERY ENCOURAGES OUR CUSTOMERS TO DRINK RESPONSIBLY.BY ENTERING THIS SITE YOU ARE ACKNOWLEDGING THAT YOU ARE OF LEGAL DRINKING AGE. No items in cart.Squatting in empty houses is not anything new, certainly not in Philadelphia. It’s a tradition in London that goes back centuries. Leave your office building empty for a minute and poof, anarchist squatters magically appear like roaches.Squatting in Philly however is less about young unemployed and foreign emigrants trying to find a foothold in one of the world’s most expensive cities. It functions as Philly’s shadow housing system. Nobody has an accurate estimate of how many there are in Philly, but with well over 20,000 vacant properties in Philadelphia, many of them still have a building on them, the numbers of squatters are in the thousands.Just a couple days ago I helped out PhillyMag‘s Victor Fiorillo out with his article covering the case of the estate of Kernie Anderson, the former general manager of radio stations WDAS and WURD-FM.
Anderson’s own Victorian has been taken over by squatters. And mayor Michael Nutter lives just around the corner. I’ve dealt with the problem enough times to learn what the ropes are and in this post I’ll share them with you. If you own an unoccupied property–you better take my warnings. Because if you don’t, you will pay thousands.First: Scope out an empty house. It can be any house, but it should be quite empty. Which means you need to visit the place frequently, especially on the neighborhood’s trash day, to see if any trash is being put out. Get a peek in the windows, check the mail, all that. You certain it’s gonna be empty? Good.Now: Break in to the house. This starts the clock on a two to three week period where you’re vulnerable to getting thrown out. As you stay longer and do the right things, you will be insulated from the police and if the property owner ever does turn up, you’ll be immune from being thrown out. Yeah, technically this is burglary.
The police could get called.The Lay-Low Period: This and the next few weeks is when you’re most likely to be thrown out. So in order to have that not happen:Fake Your Way to Ownership: The key to staying in your squat is getting through the time it takes to establish some documents that fake that you live there. At minimum a Comcast bill should do it, but you should also try to get all the utilities hooked up, in your name, with the house address on the bill.The reason why you need to do this is so you can show some method of proof to the cops that “you live there” (technically, you are living there, but you have no lease and the house is not yours). The Philadelphia Police Department will go away the moment you show them a bill, a fake lease or a fake deed with your name and address on it. If you can get your state ID card or driver’s license changed, that’s even better. Invariably, the owner may turn up, pick a fight with you and then call the cops. The owner can do nothing, and the cops will even threaten the upset owner if the owner gets carried away about it.
Meanwhile, the cops can do nothing to you because you now have pieces of paper that say you live there. It’s great, isn’t it?Court: If the owner is determined to get control over their property back, the owner will need to sue you and request two things: A writ of execution after the owner proves to the court that they are in-fact the owner, and then a writ of ejectment, which is an order to the Sheriff of Philadelphia to do a forcible removal of you. You will know way ahead of time that an ejectment is coming if you read the mail being delivered to the house.Most owners will have to hire an attorney and then pay some hefty fees to the Sheriff in order to get an ejectment processed. This takes at least three months from start to finish but it can take much longer than that. If you know the owner is headed down that road, that gives you plenty of time to find the next squat and repeat the process.In order to prevent the squatting cycle from hitting your investment property you will need to do three things:You can have the gas and the water shut off if the property is fallow, but whatever you do, you need to have a wireless security system installed, and most of them are these days, and you need power to keep the system running.
Your wireless system needs to have sensors installed on every opening of the house, on every floor. Install motion sensors to observe the staircases of the house.When you arm the system, make sure it’s set to No Entry Delay. This means the base unit will contact the alarm company the instant a sensor is tripped. Put the base unit in a location somewhere in the middle of the house, preferably on an upper floor unless you have a skylight, then it should probably go in the basement [squatters love to remove skylights to get in]. The base unit will have sent the alarm trip signal to the alarm company long before the squatter can find the base unit and try to destroy it. It’s your choice on whether to have the base unit make a noise when it trips. If it makes noise, maybe that will scare the squatter away. If you set it to silent alarm mode, the squatter will likely not know it’s there and tripped and will probably still be in the house by the time the police arrive.
Police calls to alarm trips are triaged as a Priority 1 call. (Priority 0 is officer assistance / shots fired). Response time on an alarm trip in some police districts can be up to two hours depending on what district you’re in and what time of the week. Either way, your alarm company will call you immediately and you can return to the property to inspect it yourself.By having an alarm system set to trip at the first instant of entry, this gives you the opportunity to react and get the police out and remove whoever is in the property before they transition from burglar->squatter, which is about three weeks time. At the moment of entry, police will still believe that the person who just broke in is a burglar, because that’s what they are. When a burglar doesn’t leave because they’re taking the property—that’s when they become a squatter and the police will do absolutely nothing.I have confronted Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey about this oddity with squatters and his advice is the same as mine: if you get the police out immediately after break-in, we can get rid of them.