Americana

How stopping squatters became a hot conservative crusade

THE SCENE

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.”

DAVID’S VIEW

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.

THE VIEW FROM PROGRESSIVES

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.”

South Carolina. A three-judge panel ordered the state to conduct this year’s elections on a congressional map that it had previously ruled unconstitutional. “The ideal must bend to the practical,” they wrote, concluding that the Supreme Court had delayed its decision on the map for so long that it would be impossible to implement new district lines before the state’s June 11 primary. The Charleston-based 1st Congressional District, which Republicans shifted Black voters out of to protect Rep. Nancy Mace, will remain intact; Donald Trump carried the current district by 9 points in 2020.

Nancy Mace for Congress, “Puppet.” Two years ago, Trump endorsed Nancy Mace’s primary opponent, calling the Lowcountry congresswoman “absolutely terrible” and “disloyal” after she criticized his role in the Jan. 6 riot. Earlier this month, Trump changed course, endorsing Mace, after she supported him in her home state primary over Nikki Haley. Mace contrasts her MAGA seal of approval with a puppet, representing opponent Catherine Templeton, who’ll say whatever undefined “special interests” want: “I’m running because I love the establishment.”

Friends of Dave McCormick, “Wrestling.” In both of his U.S. Senate runs, McCormick’s biggest vulnerability has been his residence — he left the state to lead a hedge fund from Connecticut. McCormick’s first bio spot focuses entirely on his days as a high school wrestler, with newspaper clips about his record and his decision to join the Army: “Hard work, hard choices, the Pennsylvania way.”

Marilyn for Alabama House, “Alyssa.” Democrat Marilyn Lands won a special election by a landslide after attacking the state’s abortion ban head-on. She did so most dramatically in this ad, produced after Alyssa Gonzales, who had to leave the state to abort a nonviable pregnancy, told her story to HuffPost. Lands joined her for a video and 30-second spot about how she went through the same thing before the state’s abortion ban: “It’s shameful that today, women have fewer freedoms than I did two decades ago.”

Shortly after the Dobbs decision came down, a Wall Street Journal poll found a small plurality of voters in favor of a federal 15-week abortion ban. That’s influenced Republican strategic thinking ever since, with the Virginia GOP running on that policy in last year’s elections and Trump telling a friendly interview that “even hard-liners are agreeing” on it. Fox’s poll finds the limit getting less popular the more that Republicans talk about it, with a clear majority of independents now against a 15-week ban; 68% of voters say that mifepristone should be legal, rejecting the argument conservative attorneys made at the Supreme Court this week.

Pollsters have asked Americans about the conflict in Gaza from multiple directions, adding caveats about human casualties and prompting them with details of the Oct. 7 attack. But asked directly about the war, most Americans have turned against it, including 75% of Democrats and 60% of independents. Thirty percent of Republicans agree with them, a 7-point jump during a period when Trump didn’t weigh in on the war. He only became critical, mostly about how the war was reducing support for Israel, after Gallup’s pollsters left the field.

ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, made no headway with its lobbying against a bill that would ban the app if its China-owned parent company doesn’t sell it. Donald Trump’s flip-flop, from supporting a ban to opposing it, drew attention to his support from Jeff Yass, a ByteDance investor. And most voters (74%) tell Quinnipiac they’re “concerned” about foreign governments grabbing data from the app. Yet they’re still queasy about a “ban.” That’s especially true of voters under 35: 71% of them oppose a ban off the bat, and 60% remain against the specific proposal before Congress even when it’s explained.

White House. Joe Biden went to New York on Thursday for the most lucrative one-night fundraiser in political history — a $26 million Radio City event with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, moderated by Stephen Colbert. It was interrupted five times by Gaza protesters, one shouting that donors were “complicit” in genocide; around 100 protesters chanted outside the venue, outnumbered by 5,000 donors who’d paid a minimum of $225 to attend.

“I’ve been working with the Saudis and with all the other Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan and Qatar,” Biden said in the room. “They’re prepared to fully recognize Israel, fully recognize Israel for the first time… but there has to be a post-Gaza plan, and there has to be a train to a two-state solution.”

Donald Trump counter-programmed Biden by joining a Long Island wake for Jonathan Diller, an NYPD officer killed at a traffic stop by a man who had 21 prior arrests. “The only thing we can say is maybe something is going to be learned,” Trump told reporters as he arrived, with no specifics on what needed to change; the alleged killer was charged with first degree murder as the wake went on.

House. New Hampshire Rep. Annie Kuster announced her retirement on Wednesday, leaving a seat in the Connecticut River Valley that Biden won by 9 points. “I always said I was not going to stay in Congress forever,” said Kuster, who’ll turn 68 this year. Colin Van Ostern, who served on the state’s five-member executive council and narrowly lost a 2016 bid for governor, was the first Democrat to rush into the primary, and retiring Gov. Chris Sununu told NHJournal that the opening gave Republicans a chance to win back the seat; thinly populated northern New Hampshire has shifted right since Kuster took office, while larger cities and suburbs have moved left. In 2022, Kuster easily won re-election after Keene Mayor George Hansel, who Sununu supported, lost the GOP primary to a more conservative candidate.

On Tuesday night, Democrat Marilyn Lands flipped a Republican-head seat in Alabama’s state legislature — a 25-point landslide in an area that Donald Trump won by 1 point. She’d run and lost a race for the same seat two years earlier, but this race was contested after the state’s abortion ban had been fully implemented, and after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created during the in vitro fertilization process had the legal rights of children. Lands talked with Americana a few hours after her win, and this is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Americana: When you ran for this seat in 2022, the Dobbs decision had just come down in 2022, and the state was banning abortion. What’s changed since then?

Marilyn Lands: Last time I ran, of course, that wasn’t really part of our platform in the beginning. We were really touting health care — with my background in mental health, education, public education — and economic well-being. We really excel at economic development here, but we still have many families that are struggling. But then, when the Dobbs decision happened, people were outraged. So that became part of our messaging. This time, with the no exceptions ban, and then the IVF ruling, it was much more prominent.

Americana: What was your personal reaction to the supreme court’s IVF decision?

Marilyn Lands: I was stunned. I truly was stunned. I didn’t see it coming. It feels like Alabama has become ground zero for attacks on women’s freedoms and reproductive health care. We saw that with the abortion ban. We saw it then spread to other states.

Americana: There was a scramble by Republicans in Montgomery to pass new legislation protecting IVF. What was the effect of that on the race?

Marilyn Lands: Well, I think that they did not do enough to clarify this issue. The Mobile clinic, the clinic named in the lawsuit, has still not resumed services. We’re already hearing from families that perhaps were planning to move here and are deciding that they don’t want to live in Alabama, because it’s pretty scary, if you’re wanting to build a family, that this is just not a friendly place for that.

Americana: How did your opponent try to finesse the issue on the trail?

Marilyn Lands: His message was that this wasn’t an issue, and that the fix that was passed in the legislature was what we needed to do. All the reproductive issues we’ve been hearing about, he said he was not hearing about it from anyone. I can’t imagine that, because I was hearing about it not just from Democrats, but from Republicans. They were definitely talking to me!

People have told me that they haven’t shared their story in 20 years or nobody, or that nobody their immediate family knows about their fertility issues. I think there’s a real healthy dialogue going around all of this. And we’ve had a lot of Republican support. Mike Paul, who held this seat for 20 years as a Republican, had endorsed me. A lot of my friends are Republicans, but they would tell you that they are traditional Republicans. And many Republicans were here at our watch party last night. I love that, and I also really want to get to Montgomery and build some bridges.

Americana: Why have Republicans been winning by such large margins in Alabama if their position on this is so unpopular?

Marilyn Lands: I think that’s going to end now. I think the Republicans have misread the tea leaves. We are going to see that this is just the starting place for great change. It’s an exciting time. I think, you know, we’ve sent a clear message to Alabama that the people want something different, and a message to the rest of the country that Alabama wants to move in a different direction.

Americana: What advice do you have for the Biden campaign, which has talked a lot about this and dispatched the vice president to talk about it? How do they reach Republicans who may disagree with them on 1,000 other things?

Marilyn Lands: I believe we need to get to a place where we all, in Steven Covey language, seek first to understand before being understood. We’ve gotten so far away from 20 years ago, when Mike Paul first ran. I supported him. He was a Republican, we were friends and neighbors, and we really could talk to each other. And we’ve lost that. And I think we’ve got to all get back to that on both sides, to really understand that we’re all human beings, and we’re in this together. We are so adversarial. And we need to leave that behind and move into a new kind of community.

Americana: When Republicans push back, they often say: My Democratic opponent wants no exceptions, abortion up to birth. Did that come up in this race?

Marilyn Lands: I can’t say that that came up at all. I’ve talked to so many people that tell me that they are pro-life, but they don’t feel that the government has a role in this. I think we’ve got to reinstate Roe v. Wade, and that people don’t understand some of the nuances. When the Alabama abortion law was first put on the books back in the 1800s, the word pregnant, actually, in that time, meant after you had quickened. They were trying to prevent late term abortions. They never intended to outlaw abortion. If you look at the religious aspect of it — look, not everybody believes the same way. I don’t think we should impose our own religious beliefs on other people.

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