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Guest Opinion: Stopping squatters: Let’s try a new direction Sunday Apr 2, 2017 at 12:01 AM By Janay Haas In its front-page story Monday, March 28, about squatters in abandoned and distressed properties, the Mail Tribune describes steps the Medford city leaders are considering to aid police in addressing the issue. The city would do well to take a few steps back, examine the problem in its broader context, and take advantage of tools already available to it to benefit the larger community. Neglected properties take a toll on entire neighborhoods. Property values suffer. No one wants to buy or rent a home next to a badly dilapidated structure. Slum properties attract rodents and other vermin that invade neighboring homes. Rodents and human invaders can cause fires, threatening other homes directly. Empty structures invite crimes such as vandalism and drug dealing in a place out of the public eye. The City Council is obviously already aware of all of these reasons to confront the squalor. In reaction, it is now looking at a proposal to increase fines for “chronic nuisance” properties, hoping the increase will create an incentive for owners to attend to problems. For the current and proposed sanctions to work, the city must rely on police to constantly monitor and document owner acts of misconduct. It’s hard to imagine that this additional burden on local police is worth the trouble, especially when they have more serious matters to occupy their time. The city also assumes that property owners have the financial ability to remedy the problems. Clearly, the original ordinance imposing fines was ineffective. The enhanced proposal may well be another case in which, if something doesn’t work, the next step is to do more of the same thing, only harder — and netting the same failure. There are other options that make a lot more sense, and not just for the affected houses, but for the entire community. According to the article, the city attorney cautioned the council against “stepping on property-rights laws,” and Councilor Tim Jackle suggested that a court might shut down efforts to clean up neighborhoods in violation of rights “protected by the Constitution.” In some situations, they might be right. But the steps they are contemplating don’t come close to raising that specter. Regardless, we don’t need to treat property rights as if they are sacred, because they’re not. Let’s get some misconceptions out of the way. The Constitution does not provide for unlimited private property rights. It provides only for “due process” when a government imposes laws that substantially affect private property. Due process means adequate notice and justification. Governments can foreclose for nonpayment of property taxes. Governments can condemn dangerous parcels; they can exercise “eminent domain” over private property, converting it for a public purpose. They can impose a wide range of land use and zoning regulations. Even private individuals can take over someone else’s property lawfully. We’ve all heard of “adverse possession,” the right to claim property if you’ve lived on it and paid the property taxes on it for a number of years without the legal owner’s permission. The law also recognizes “prescriptive easements,” meaning that private property can become public if a lot of people use it for a long period of time and the owner of record does nothing. Think, for example, of a trail everyone takes across private land to get to the beach; eventually the  owner of record can’t block it off because the public now has a permanent right to use the trail. In short, real estate is the ultimate poster child for “use it or lose it”: if you don’t monitor and maintain your land, someone else can claim it. Like other local governments throughout the state, the city of Medford needs to look beyond the isolated case of a “bum” crashing a vacant property for the night. It needs to replace its reaction with a solution to a problem that affects the entire community. While the city focuses on nuisance houses, it disregards and may even exacerbate a much larger problem that to a great extent is a cause of the “squatting” that we so disapprove. Medford has an affordable housing problem. In fact, the entire state is now facing a crisis in the lack of affordable housing, with vacancy rates less than half of what a healthy housing market should look like. Every community says it wants housing opportunities for all, but doesn’t require it in approving construction. Developers guided by profit won’t build affordable housing, and landlords claim they are simply responding to supply and demand when they price middle- and low-income tenants out of the market. Looking at the city’s proposals in this context, what’s going to happen if the city imposes fines and the owner doesn’t cooperate? In a process that can take upwards of a year, the city can foreclose on the property to “collect” the judgment against the owner. That’s an expensive proposition. Meanwhile, the property itself continues to disintegrate and to threaten the health and safety of neighbors, and the city is now the owner of a parcel that has the same problems it had before. What will the city do now — raze the structure? It’s another significant expense. More importantly, in a time when there is a critical shortage of housing stock, the city is reducing the supply of potential homes. Lawmakers should consider an alternative that Portland first advanced in the 1980s to deal with the scourge of drug houses in its neighborhoods. They should do what Oregon City did to force out a slumlord with almost 700 dangerous units in Clackamas County in the late 1980s. They should enact an ordinance pursuant to state law (ORS 105.443), making it possible for the city — if the property owner does not make repairs promptly — to act as a receiver, partnering with a housing authority or nonprofit housing agency to temporarily take over the property to effect needed repairs (using loans as needed) and then, instead of leaving places vacant, making them available to renters. The housing authority or housing agency manages the rental units for a fee on behalf of the owner, so the city does not have any additional burden, and the rent moneys pay off the loans. The owner has the opportunity to reclaim the property by reimbursing costs. This legislation was co-sponsored by the state’s banking industry, saying it was willing to lend for such projects because it recognized that well-maintained neighborhoods meant higher mortgages and fewer foreclosures. “Nuisance houses” give the city a wonderful opportunity through receivership to improve and expand housing stock in Medford by taking advantage of this law. It’s the right thing to do for the whole community. — Janay Haas of Ashland, a landlord for 27 years, is a lawyer who for 20 years represented tenants seeking safe and decent housing and was a board member of the former Josephine County Community Development Corporation, an affordable housing developer.