Squatters have taken over a dead University of California, Berkeley, professor’s home, and the state is making it impossible for his family to kick them out. Thanks to the Golden State’s policy of legalized property theft, Przemyslaw Jeziorski’s family is fighting a losing battle in the courts.
Jeziorski, who was murdered last year, used to rent out his property as an Airbnb. Since the squatters have seized it, they’ve allegedly sold off his personal belongings and caused thousands of dollars in property damage. Jeziorski’s two children, now orphaned, are supposed to inherit the property.
In a sane world, the answer would be simple: Call the cops, have the home-jackers removed by force, and sue for damages. Anyone familiar with California’s backward way of doing things, however, knows “sane” is the last word one should use to describe it. Under state law, you only need to claim “squatter’s rights” to receive legal protection from eviction. From there, a long, drawn-out court battle ensues, which can result in the thieves receiving ownership of the property.
For a state so concerned with Native American “land acknowledgement” and apologizing for so-called “stolen land,” you’d think they would be more receptive toward property rights. Instead of colonialists conquering by sword, squatters conquer through the courts. At least the Native Americans were allowed to fight back — California makes it illegal to change the locks or shut off utilities!
The Jeziorski case has exposed a fatal flaw in California’s legal system — a loophole that the family says it has no legal recourse against. The squatters claim to have a lease, which would be impossible as they had no way of being in contact with the owners. Jeziorski was dead, and his ex-wife was in jail overseas, and has since died by suicide.
But as the Jeziorski family’s lawyer said, “The problem with the law in California as to squatters is that there’s no legal mechanism to remove squatters from the house in a situation where they claim they have a lease, even when it’s clear that the claims the squatters are making are legally impossible.”
Under normal circumstances, in California, it takes a minimum of three to four months to remove a squatter, and often costs the victim between $3,000 and $4,000 in fees, not including lost rent/mortgage and utility bills.
And all one needs to do to claim squatter’s rights is live on the property for 30 days. What if the owners were on vacation? What if it’s a seldom-used or secondary property? What if, as in this case, the owners were overseas and/or dead, but the property is supposed to be inherited by their children? And if the squatters live uninterrupted on the property for just five years, they can become the legal owners in California. By comparison, other states require continuous possession for 30 years.
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The solution to California’s homelessness problem is not legalized home-jacking, but a two-pronged approach of uplifting people out of poverty through economic growth driven by deregulation and cracking down on encampments while mandating treatment for those incapable of making rational decisions. Unfortunately, the Golden State’s two-pronged approach is to go soft on crime and throw taxpayer money at the problem. Between 2019 and 2024, they spent $24 billion on solving homelessness, or about $160,000 per person, only to see the homeless population increase by 20% over the same period. Talk about flushing money down the drain!
California lawmakers are simply too ideological to solve practical problems. This is the fundamental problem with the Left. If California liberals were more concerned with acknowledging the property rights of our contemporaries than those who lived centuries ago, Jeziorski’s orphans, not the state-protected thieves, would be living in their rightful home.