Google recommended a story about a family squatting in a woman's home in Houston. Apparently they lived there for at least a month and had changed the locks and claimed to have a fake lease for the home. And then they were kicked out when the owner found out about it.
The thing that was weird to me was the tone of the story. It mostly gave matter-of-fact statements about the details but I felt like it suggested a lot in what it chose to include and leave out.
The big issue that I felt like wasn't touched on at all is that we know that there is a massive housing crisis across the country. Home price and rent increases have outpaced wages for a long time and it's hardly slowing down. If people need homes to live in and there are other people who own homes that they aren't living in, what do you think is going to happen?
Is it a crime for someone to own more than one home? No. But I also don't think you can dismiss someone's attempts to have shelter, a fundamental human need, when there's a housing crisis. Right? Like, to me, laws work under the assumption that basic human needs are being met. A law helps us regulate ourselves when we have what we need and want to maintain a balance. A law shouldn't be in place as a barrier to keep someone from meeting their needs in a just society.
It feels to me like this story is an invitation to talk about the effects of disparity. Nobody wants to be a squatter. Nobody wants to break into a home and pretend to live there. Yet, the closest the story I read comes to editorializing is concluding with an interview from a home security expert who advocates for cameras and locks and bars and things. Which just seems to be escalating things.
I really don't understand how you can view increasing the security of a home that is not your primary residence as anything other than class warfare. You have to assume that owning a second home or multiple homes is an investment or something like a vacation home. To one person it's a source of wealth and to another person the same home is a fundamental need. What do you say to that? Get a job? We know that necessary, important jobs don't pay enough to provide housing. To suggest that the answer to a housing crisis is to become more militant is another one of many examples of the ways we value property and wealth more than people.
Should it be illegal to own multiple homes? Maybe! Remember when covid started and people started hoarding hand sanitizer and price gouging like crazy? And collectively, people and companies said, "stop!"
“No one should be allowed to reap a windfall from fear and human suffering,” writes Senator Markey in his letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Internet-based retailers such as Amazon.com have a particular responsibility to guard against price gouging in current circumstances as consumers — who are finding the shelves of local brick-and-mortar stores bare, and who may wish to avoid venturing into crowded stores and shopping malls — turn to the internet.”
How is it that we are willing to step in and protect the right to a fair price of hand sanitizer and toilet paper and not view housing the same way?
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