A Bronx nonprofit that’s gotten $240,000 from taxpayers teaches followers how to squat in city buildings. “It’s breaking and entering for dummies.” [NYPost]
Posts Tagged ‘real estate’
Canada: lender’s inspection may create liability to third parties
A British Columbia court has allowed a suit to proceed arguing that a government lending program which included inspection of the property to be renovated could incur a duty to third persons who might later fall on a staircase whose faults allegedly would have been detected had inspection not been negligent. [Erik Magraken; Benoit v. Banfield]
Urban development, the NYC way
“A 2-story Whole Foods on an empty lot in the heart of brownstone Brooklyn should not take 8 yrs to (maybe) get permits” [@MarketUrbanism on NYT coverage]
“Lawyer Pleads Guilty in Scheme to Elect Condo Board Members Favoring Construction Lawsuits”
“A Las Vegas lawyer who once ran a courthouse restaurant has pleaded guilty in a scheme to take $3,000 in kickbacks to rig two condo board elections in Nevada.” The takeover of the condo boards, advanced by methods that included stuffing ballot boxes with fake ballots, made it possible to bring in a favored law firm to file construction-defect suits. “Federal prosecutors claim conspirators used straw buyers to buy properties in about a dozen condo communities from 2003 to 2009 and helped them win control of condo boards, AP says.” A wider investigation continues whose targets allegedly include judges. [ABA Journal]
“The main force letting protesters stay in the park is old-fashioned crony capitalism”
Gordon Crovitz at the WSJ tells how muddled property rights, combined with the dependence of real estate developers on the good will of New York’s City Council, have resulted in the continuing occupation of Zuccotti Park.
Cuba flirts with property ownership
Eduardo Penalver explains at PrawfsBlawg:
Cuban law has long permitted private homeownership…The most significant difference is that Cubans are not permitted to buy or sell their homes. Cuba’s blanket prohibition on sales leads to enormous problems. …The outcome of the 1980s experiment illustrates why Raul Castro’s housing reforms are likely to fail this time around as well. … What the Cuban government refuses to acknowledge is that Cuba’s housing problem is not really a housing problem. It’s a socialism problem.
Great moments in legal aid
From the United Kingdom: “Foreign squatters given legal aid to fight eviction from £1 million house… as its British owner has to represent himself in court” [Daily Mail, back in February]
Ban on smoking by renters
The Bay Area town of Larkspur plans to forbid most apartment and condominium tenants from smoking in their own units. [Marin Independent Journal; related]
April 6 roundup
- Lack of defect poses problem for plaintiff: Toyota prevails in first acceleration case [NLJ]
- Australia: writer Andrew Bolt on trial for alleged racially disparaging columns [Herald Sun, Crikey, The Age]
- “Attorneys Put Themselves Before Consumers in Class Action over Faulty Computer Chip” [CJAC, Frank/CCAF on NVidia case]
- Ruling by Federal Circuit is thinning out rush of patent marking cases [Qualters, NLJ, earlier]
- Podcast: Lester Brickman and “Lawyer Barons” [PoL, earlier here and here]
- “Are class actions unconstitutional?” [Lahav, Mass Tort Lit, on Martin Redish book]
- “Free speech belongs on campuses too” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato, on Widener case, with kind mention of Schools for Misrule]
- King Canute turns attention to dry land: states mull bills to forbid use of distressed properties as appraisal comps [Funnell]
U.K. authorities might seek remedy for squatting
Britain is rethinking its curiously limp penalties for illegal property occupation [Legal Blog Watch]:
As a result, for example, when hotelier Connan Gupta moved out of his house in Camberwell for a week while it was being renovated, he returned to find 10 unwelcome Italian students who had moved in and changed the locks. Gupta learned that the police were powerless to help him because under existing U.K. law, squatters may legally enter an empty property if they do not cause damage when gaining access. To his dismay, Gupta was required to hire lawyers and begin a lengthy process of trying to evict the squatters. “It’s as if the squatters have more rights than I do,” he said at the time.