[sytelus]

I used to make this argument until I came to know of law (at least in USA) that if you don't use your house and someone else starts using your house then they can claim the legal ownership of your entire house in as little as 10 years! It was very shocking and complete antithesis of property rights in US that are so dearly held. When you think about this, in long run, it might sometimes make sense that future generation can use what previous generation has built.

[fifticon]

many countries have variants of this, for many years/since olden times. In my country, it is called 'hævd'. Instinctively, it makes incredibly much sense to me, even more so than property law. The way I view it, it is precisely the foundation that ownership sort of rests on. (ie, i respect 'we have been using this for a long time' more than 'our ancestors whipped everyone in the village').

[throwaway48476]

In Europe it was common to have disputes between parties with competing several hundred year old claims. Adverse possession prevents this.

[kube-system]

No, those laws are actually a recognition of property rights. Although it has become a popular social media trope to criticize things like adverse possession and "squatters" rights as some evil thing, the reason they exist is to protect people from being kicked out of their homes by others exploiting lack of or technicalities in paperwork.

Let me give you some examples of why these laws are actually good:

* Adverse possession: Imagine someone has been living and maintaining a property for 30 years. They have a single family home, and a driveway. They have a fence around all of their property, and they pay taxes on all of the area. The footprint of the property is exactly as they bought it 30 years ago. Their property is beside a piece of undeveloped, unoccupied, unmaintained land. Today, a land developer purchases the undeveloped land, and they come up with a 100 yr old document that shows that the part of the lot where their driveway is should be part of their lot. The developer then demands that the fence be torn down, and the driveway be given to them, despite the fact that the homeowner bought the property that way, has paid taxes on and maintained that property for 30 years, and nobody has brought this up as an issue in the past 100 years.

* "Squatters" (really, tenants) rights: Imagine someone rented a home in 2020. They've been paying rent every month since then, on a month-to-month basis, without a written lease. In 2024, the home was sold to an investor who wants to renovate the home and flip it. The investor wants to flip the home as quickly as possible, so they tell the tenant to leave immediately with no notice. They call the police and tell them that someone is squatting in their home. The police tell the owner that they must file for eviction, because they are not capable of determining whether the person living in the home is a "squatter" or a tenant. Only a court can do this.

Adverse possession is really just a recognition that mistakes made a long time ago shouldn't undo current realities. And "squatters rights" are really just a recognition that tenants don't have to defend their own property rights in front of a cop on their front porch at 2am on a Tuesday, they get to defend their rights to their leased property in court.