Where I’m at, adverse possession takes 18 years. This – which, as others pointed out, is likely fake – would be a trespass.
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Is there anything that stops the homeowner from mining on their own property, mind you, just under the treehouse?
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It’s a haunted treehouse. The worst kind!
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Yup. That last bit.
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Now THAT part is believable.
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This isn’t adverse possession. There is no apparent claim to owning the property. This is a tenant-landlord dispute: if you live somewhere for 30 days, depending on the state, you are a bonafide tenant and need to be evicted. And if the “tenant” claims to be there more than that 30 days, even if they aren’t, that’s enough for the cops to say “go to court”. They don’t like to get involved in civil problems.
I see a couple issues with that. First, I think it would have to be a “holdover-tenant,” which must first be a tenant (i.e., at one time an agreement must have been in place–“agreement” can be very loose in some places – here, oral lease/sale agreements are non-binding – but just showing up wouldn’t do it). Second, again here, it’s not possible to be a tenant or a (residential) landlord if the property is not fit for habitation (e.g., plumbing, heat, cooking facilities, and zoned and inspected). People occasionally get found living in storage facilities, which they pay rent for, but its a violation of the lease and the law. If the facility “looks the other way” or is even unaware there are “occupants,” they get cited.
But, laws vary.
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The police aren’t going to try to arbitrate whether someone is truly a legit tenant. So whether there’s a lease agreement or not is immaterial. Whether the space they’re supposedly tenanting is in fact a livable space is also immaterial. Tenancy is a civil matter, police don’t care without the court order.
Relatedly, the police and courts take a dim view of self help evictions. You can’t try to man handle them out, or change the locks, or toss their stuff while they’re gone, or chop down the tree the tree house is in. Whether the guy is there or not is immaterial to whether he’s tenant.
Yes, this is probably just criminal trespass, but the police don’t care because we would rather renters not be easily be kicked out by landlords claiming their former tenants are merely trespassing.
Does a treehouse qualify as a habitable structure that someone could be tenants in?
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For code enforcement, hell no. For cops to care about civil tenancy dispute? Probably enough to be allowed to say “not our problem”
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What the police will and won’t do is often very different from what the law requires.
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