When will the city’s squatter madness end?
Witness the latest obscenity: Queens homeowner Adele Andaloro arrested after confronting the creeps squatting in a home she inherited from her parents and changing the locks in an effort to get them out.
What enables criminals like the thugs trying to steal the house out from under Andaloro is a New York City law letting people claim “squatter’s rights” to a property after just 30 days of living there — and the same law makes it legally dangerous for the true owner to change locks, shut off power and water or throw the squatters’ stuff out.
Even when the squatters start subletting space to others, as Andaloro’s tormenters reportedly have.
In other words, it’s yet another example of progressive legislation that harms the law-abiding and rewards criminals.
In this case, thieves who steal entire homes.
And the abuse is all too common.
Witness Brett Flores, currently mid-theft of a home in Douglaston, Queens, from couple Susan and Joseph Landa under the same legal umbrella.
Flores, it seems, wormed his way into the good graces of the ailing previous owner, and now claims the right to keep on living there even though it was purchased by the couple as a home to share with their disabled son.
That’s right: Flores is trying to screw an elderly couple with a special-needs kid out of their home, which they paid for.
Truly the lowest of the low — and no surprise that, in the Big Apple, he enjoys more robust legal protections on this issue than do his victims.
The only remedy for people like the Landas and Andaloro?
A byzantine slog through the city’s housing courts, which afford the squatters endless opportunities to delay, deny and deflect.
One serial squatting-couple, Rosanna Busgith and Philip Garnett, managed to avoid eviction for literal years before finally quitting their usurped Queens spot in January; the lovely duo left behind rotting meat and a nail-in-a-couch-cushion bobby trap for the rightful occupants.
Small wonder that fellow Gothamites showed up as seeming vigilantes to give Andaloro a hand against the squatters after her monstrously unjust arrest.
It’s a bitter irony, too, that housing is already next-to-impossible to afford for most New Yorkers — and thanks to this utterly backward law, a house left to you (or simply one you bought but haven’t moved into yet) can be expropriated by a sociopath who quite literally wanders in off the street.
There are obvious paths out of this nightmare (like — shocker! — city and state making squatting illegal).
And we need action post-haste, especially since a TikTok influencer is now explaining to illegal immigrants how to take advantage of laws like this to score free houses.
But pro-disorder leftists — who want to make it almost impossible for landlords to evict anyone at all, ever — dominate both in the Big Apple and Albany, so don’t hold your breath.