For New York City, 30 Days is an insanely short amount of time to allow squatters to infest your home.
Some people go on vacations for more time... Getting courts to act that quickly is impossible.
It should take years... several years for squatters rights to take effect.
I'd agree if a property is vacant and someone was actually living there, paying taxes and utilities for 2-3 years minimum. Who knows what happened at the point to original owners... they might have died or something.
I just read that it takes 5 years in California.
Squatters rights do take years to take effect but the cops don't know how long the squatter has been there when they're called.
Which is why court orders are usually employed. In my jurisdiction, cops won't touch it without a court order precisely because if they throw out someone who has acquired squatters rights, what is legally known as "adverse possession", then the cops would have violated the legal landowner's right to their property.
to use a personal example -- I had a client who had been living in a property for literally decades. The great grandchild of the prior owner showed up and called the cops. By law, my client was the new owner of the property and had been for over a decade, even though she hadn't gone through the courts yet (older woman) since adverse possession kicks in regardless of if you've been through court -- possession is 9/10ths and all that.
If the cops had just thrown her out of the house based on the great-grandchild's say so, she would have had a legit suit against the city for violating her right to her home. We fought the great-grandchild and won.
These news stories always make sense when the reader only thinks about the person who decides to cruise around the world for 6 months and comes back to find someone in their house. But the law doesn't exist to protect that person, the law exists to protect the other people who have legitimately acquired otherwise abandoned/unused property, enriched said property and then someone tries to come back and take advantage of the improved premises.
Speaking of Cali, I represent a client in my state whose deceased parent is losing a property to a Cali county because the property had sat unused for decades. The county finally had enough, appointed a legal entity to dispossess my client's dead parent of the house and sell it to someone who would use it. We're not fighting this because my client doesn't want the responsibility of maintaining an asset that far away.
Legal tools for recycling unused property are an essential part of managing large cities and counties, otherwise you get blight, reduction of tax revenue and a variety of other issues that arise when the legal owner of the property can't be easily located but legal access to the property is required for municipal reasons.
