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Ian C. Chen was relaxing in his Bethesda, Maryland, bedroom last summer when he saw a U-Haul truck backing up the driveway to 8605 Burning Tree Road, a 7,500-square-foot brick-and-stone mansion next door that had gone into foreclosure in late 2024 and was, at the time, owned by a division of Citigroup. In early 2025, the bank had put the house on the market for $2.8 million, later reducing the price to $2.3 million.

“I was like, ‘That’s weird,’” Chen, 19, a student at the College of William &Mary, recalls thinking. “If you’re moving into a $3 million house, you wouldn’t use a U-Haul.”

About two weeks later, neighbors knocked on the Chens’ door. “The people who moved in there are not buyers,” they told the Chens.

“They’re squatters.”

Squatting is a form of trespassing that begins with a person moving, uninvited, into a home they’ve neither purchased nor rented. They use a variety of means, such as producing fake documents or outright intimidation, to stay as long as they can. Police departments are reluctant to get involved, referring complaints to the civil court system, which is often backlogged. Expelling a squatter can be an expensive, protracted ordeal.

“It’s increasingly becoming an issue,” said Kyle Sweetland, a research manager at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian public interest law firm. Sweetland’s analysis of court proceedings in Georgia and New York found an “upward trend” in both. In Georgia, there were three squatting-related civil court cases in 2017; by 2023, that number had jumped to 198. (Sweetland acknowledged that some landlords and owners may have filed multiple complaints but “that only accounts for some of the change.”)

California cities including San Diego, Los Angeles and Sacramento have all struggled with squatting in recent years, though there’s disagreement on whether squatting is becoming more common or simply getting more attention.

In 2023, squatters took over a Beverly Hills mansion near a property owned by LeBron James. In working-class South Los Angeles, a homeowner spent nearly a year trying to evict squatters. Artificial intelligence tools have also made it easier to create fake documents that would have no credibility in a court of law but could dissuade police officers from responding as they would to a trespasser.

Daniel M. Yukelson, who runs the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, conducted a survey of about 700 property owners in California in 2024. Squatting was a major issue for 76% of respondents, 70% of whom said they had been victimized by squatters or knew someone else who was.

Public housing can also be a target. A new report by New York City’s Department of Investigation found that between January 2022 and May 2025, squatters had to be evicted from 548 vacant New York City Housing Authority apartments. The apartments were empty so that they could be renovated, or so that lead or asbestos could be removed. Poor security made it easy for squatters to move in, the report said.

But what looks like a crisis to some is a moral panic to others, one that has been exacerbated by social media, which can glorify squatters as savvy renegades while distorting the frequency of squatting. The lack of definitive national statistics allows homeowners and advocates alike to tailor the narrative to their convictions.

The astonishing rise in housing costs is a contributor to an uptick in squatting, said Claire W. Herbert, an expert in housing and homelessness at the University of Oregon. “We have an oversupply of housing that is very unaffordable, and we have rising rates of homelessness across the country.”

91直播owners faced with squatters describe a sense of bewilderment.

“I would absolutely describe it as traumatic,” said Marcus K. Oliver, 51, a lawyer in suburban Atlanta who found squatters occupying the spacious Decatur home of his late father, Sampson Oliver Jr., just days after he died last summer. They quickly set about planning a summer blowout. “Don’t be a dork and miss one of the biggest pool parties of da year,” said one of their online advertisements.

“I was enraged,” Oliver said.

Some people turn to services like Squatter Hunters, whose website includes a promise from its founder, Flash Shelton: “If they can take a house, I can take a house.” Others take matters into their own hands. Marco Velazquez moved in with his squatters in Chicago last year; after he paid them $4,300, they left. Occasionally, deadly violence ensues. In 2024, squatters killed Nadia Vitels, who was trying to clean out her late mother’s Manhattan apartment.

Eighteen states have responded by enacting legislation making it easier to expel squatters by making it harder for them to masquerade as legal tenants, according to the National Apartment Association, or NAA. Another 16 states are considering doing the same.

In Oliver’s case, a statewide anti-squatting measure had recently gone into effect, but police officers were not “properly trained on how to apply the new law,” as he put it. They said it was a civil matter. He believes his squatters entered the house through a window, and one of them called the local utility and, giving a false name, had the water turned back on.

“They’re filming music videos. They’re posting to Instagram,” Oliver said. Though they were planning to sell it, the house had deep significance to him and his three siblings. In the 1970s, Sampson Oliver Jr. became one of the first Black lawyers to practice in DeKalb County. As he prospered professionally and his family grew, he expanded the house, adding a movie theater and swimming pool. Now, squatters were “desecrating holy ground,” Oliver said.

Housing advocates say new laws aren’t necessary, as squatting is illegal. “Unfortunately, in recent years, the real estate lobby has taken this term, ‘squatting,’ and has started to apply it to tenants behind in rent and people who aren’t squatters in the legal sense,” including tenants who may have violated the terms of their lease, said Eric Dunn, litigation director at the National Housing Law Project. Dunn disputed suggestions of a squatting uptick as “a couple of horror stories.”

Squatting gained a foothold in the national imagination with “Rent,” the hit 1996 musical about impoverished artists and outcasts in lower Manhattan. But the real-life bohemians who made ABC No Rio and C-Squat famous bastions of gritty self-reliance took over derelict buildings. They have little in common with today’s squatters.

Under a process called adverse possession, a person can claim possession of a property that isn’t theirs. But under New York state law, adverse possession doesn’t kick in until after 10 years.

“There’s no such thing as ‘squatters’ rights,’” Herbert said. “It’s not a legal thing. Taking over someone else’s property is illegal unless you have made a successful adverse possession claim.”

Municipalities advise homeowners to put up “No Trespassing” signs and visit the property often.

That’s exactly what Timon Mitrakas, a real estate agent who works in and around Bethesda, did. The bank tasked him with selling 8605 Burning Tree in early 2025. While it sat vacant, he sent workers there for upkeep. One morning in late July, he saw his “For Sale” sign knocked over. “Something just didn’t look right,” Mitrakas said. He saw furniture inside and heard barking.

He called the Montgomery County Police Department. They told him exactly what officers told Oliver in Atlanta: He had a civil matter on his hands.

What nobody counted on was the outrage of Chen, the neighbor. “The reason I stepped in is because I was so upset that my government didn’t care about this problem,” Chen, now a college sophomore, said. He rummaged through the garbage at 8605 Burning Tree, sifted through court filings and eventually pieced together the story.

The squatter was Tamieka S. Goode, a Baltimore woman who helps clients prepare for bankruptcy. Because of rule violations and a lack of licensing, she had been told by state regulators and a federal judge to discontinue the practice. But after she moved into 8605 Burning Tree, Goode, who declined an interview request, continued to advertise her services in social media posts that made her seem like a well-off, Porsche-driving suburbanite.

Maryland’s unusual legal system allows private citizens to file criminal complaints with District Court commissioners, which is precisely what Chen did. “I literally hand wrote it on some lined paper. Like, ‘Hey, this lady is squatting there. Please do something.’” The commissioner issued a trespassing charge, which would be handled by the Montgomery County state’s attorney.

Chen’s persistence eventually resulted in Goode being sent to jail for two short stints, once in January and then again in February. Her friends and family cleared her belongings out of 8605 Burning Tree as the second of those episodes commenced. When she posted bond after two days behind bars she went to Baltimore, not Bethesda. By then, the bank had changed the locks at 8605 Burning Tree.

Goode’s lawyer, Alex J. Webster III, described Goode as acting in the spirit of Manifest Destiny. “We moved out West, took California, took all those other states,” Webster said. “America encourages people to make use of vacant properties.”

In the Atlanta suburbs, the Olivers were able to clear squatters from their father’s home, in part thanks to the siblings’ ties to local law enforcement. “These people picked the wrong family, the wrong house, to invade,” Oliver said.

This article originally appeared in .

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