This might be the fourth time I have re-blogged an article from another site. I am posting this because America already has one million homeless school children and all hell is about to hit the fan. I do appreciate the problems of homeowners in the UK with unreasonable squatters in occupied dwellings. This originally appeared with this title: “Dad, I’ve got me a really strange idea. I want you to talk me out of it….” The URL and author’s credits are in the notes below.
Please note that this worked because the young couple in question planned it very well and did it in a Depressed area where nobody in their right mind would buy a home. Things might get that bad in your area within a year if you live in the US. In a year someone might even give you the keys to their house if you would be willing to live in it and defend it with some real firepower. That would not be a healthy thing to do if America does degenerate into nationwide food riots and multiple race wars. I think the bankers have planned to use societal collapse as one possible exit strategy when the dollar dies.
“Dad, “I’ve got me a really strange idea. I want you to talk me out of it….”
with respect….
So, i hear from a long time friend, and fellow ‘deep c’ coder from a mutual past life on some very large MS development projects. His name is Mike, and he is in Michigan. He and i both left the sub-contracting coding world about the same time; me to Oly, and Mike to the “Lake Country”…his birth place.
Now, years (damn, actually decades) pass, and Mike and i both are out of the coding biz (though c functions still call to our brain-proteins late at night…). Mike went into the ‘boating support industry’…he sewed custom boat cushions, and awnings and such for the Great Lake boating world. Mike’s family has done well, but they all faced difficulties, especially his oldest son….a really bright kid, with multiple degrees, LOTS of student debt, and no jobs…to top it off, he is recently a father, and no where to live as without work….well, we all know this story.
But in Mike’s sons’ case (his name is Dan, by the way), the plot twists a little over two years ago. You see, at that time, Dan came to his father and said, “dad, I’ve got me a really strange idea. I want you to talk me out of it.”
Well, Mike tells me that after some apple pie, coffee, and hearing the idea, he could not…talk Dan out of it. It was, according to Mike, “elegant”, in the way programmers use the term.
Without going into the details that motivated the idea, suffice it to say that Dan’s idea was to be a ‘real squatter’….and that is what he did.
Dan and his family just had a big party over at his place this month to celebrate their 2nd/second year as ‘real squatters’. And what a couple of years it has been.
Dan and his dad, back at the start of the idea, sat down with Zillow, and Redfin, and MLSOnline, and located all the REO (bank owned) houses within their county (keeoing that secret for obvious reasons), and the surrounding three counties. Then they narrowed their selection down to 7 or 9 houses, and drove out to inspect all of them.
They eliminated all that had people in them (a few), and narrowed the selection down to one that Dan really liked. It was empty, reasonably isolated, yet, close to services, and such. Then, early one Monday morning, as Mike says, “I moved my boy and his family in.”….after all, anything done early Monday morning is always well begun.
What they did was to drill out the main lock, and then to strip the place of any and all locks, replacing them all with their own. Dan and Mike and the family removed all signs that the place had ever been REO. They cleaned up the yard and started new projects at the house within days. They gutted the inside, and replaced flooring, wiring, carpet, plumbing, and such within that first month.
As neighbors wandered by, curious about the ‘doins’, Dan merely let it be known that he had ‘gotten the house from the bank’. And any other questions were diverted or non-answered. Over the years, the questions have ceased. Dan is a good neighbor to have around.
Only once, in two years, has the property been visited by someone from the bank that owns it (by the way, that bank has NO offices in that county…part of Dan’s criteria), and then, Dans’ female partner just repeated the line that “we got it from the bank.”. In this instance, she also pointed it out that the property visitors’ “records were wrong, and could he see about getting those changed?….thank you very much.”.
In two years he has had electricity turned on, water service, mail service, package deliveries to that address, and has made major improvements on the property. They put in fencing, a new driveway, and are planning on replacing the roof this next spring.
Dan even pays taxes on the property (as one should if attempting ‘adverse possession’). In fact, the county sent him a refund check recently as ‘the other party’ (aka the bank that ‘thinks’ they own it) is also paying taxes. This is the second time he has received a refund check for double payment of taxes. Dan thinks of it as a ‘payment’ from universe for all the hard work they are putting in at their new place. He is planning on applying it to the new roof.
Now note that Dan is not a fool. He knows that a day may come when he is chucked out, and thus all their work would be lost to them. But the way he figures it….the same could happen if he had a mortgage and lost that job he can’t find, and in fact, this has happened to many of his friends who have also lost everything due to the banksters ‘management’ of our common economy. So, as Mike says about his son, with obvious pride, “he is a strong man…..and willing to push back against the bastards.”
i wish Mike and Dan well. Examples of two, very fine, thinking, adult men of integrity….and surprisingly well adjusted to the 21st century, where, as Mike and i had been discussing, ‘it’ is all about the language, and how one defines the function.
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This article originally was written by Cliff High and appeared at his website below.
http://www.halfpasthuman.com/essays/squatin.html