Squatters? In My Neighborhood? It's More Common Than You Think | Peter Rowe

After two years working and living in Germany, Carrie and Scott Packard were itching to move back into their four-bed, two-bath Carlsbad home. They just couldn’t wait.
But they had to.
Their tenants, a young professional couple, had trashed the house. Dogs had ripped carpeting and urinated on floors. Garbage was strewn inside and outside. The yard had gone to seed. Although the tenants had signed a lease and passed a credit check, their payments were late, then partial and then, for the last six months, nonexistent.
Worse, they were still living in the Packards’ home and entitled to stay there, unless the Packards could get a court judgment against them.
“We didn’t actually have the legal right to our own home,” Carrie Packard said. “If we moved in, they could sue us for unlawful eviction.”
Squatters made headlines earlier this year, when it was reported that an unauthorized person had quietly moved into a vacant Poway home that was in foreclosure. The story captured attention in large part because the house had been owned by the family of Tony Gwynn, the late Padres outfielder and Baseball Hall of Fame inductee.
Yet people live in homes without the owner’s permission all the time. Happens so often, one courtroom in the San Diego Superior Court — Department 60 — is devoted almost exclusively to these cases.
“We deal with true squatters at a crazy rate,” said Rachael Callahan, a lawyer and owner of San Diego Evictions, a law firm that specializes in representing landlords. “Department 60 will have a morning calendar and an afternoon calendar with 30 to 60 cases, and that’s daily.”
Some cases are settled in the hallway outside the courtroom, often with a quick exchange lawyers have dubbed “cash for keys.” Carrie Packard’s lawyer, for instance, suggested she write a $1,500 check to ensure her tenants’ departure.
“I’m not going to pay them,” she said. “They owe me money.”
The whole process rankled Packard. “There’s no other crime where you could steal this amount of money from people,” she said, “and just walk away.”
Read the full story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/sd-me-squatters-living-high-life-20190303-story.html
In other news: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/sd-fi-rent-increases-20190305-story.html