system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5 - How the heck did squatters (people who refuse to leave a home) get "rights"?
gpt
People who just move in to a place they don't own and won't move out aren't "squatters" in the sense of legal "squatters' rights".

Historically, this was there so that land owners couldn't just ignore property and their tenants "forever"...like a decade. So there's one kind of squatters' rights called "adverse posession" where, if you can show that you lived there and paid taxes for a really long time, you can take posession. Basically, the actual owner abandoned it and literally did nothing to assert ownership for years.

There's another kind where the squatters \*were\* legal tenants but their lease/time ran out, "holdover tenants." They can't stay forever but you can't just forcibly kick them out the day their lease ends either...they get something like 3-7 days depending on jurisdiction.

Then there's "unknown persons"...people who just show up and start living there. This is \*not\* the same as trespassing...you can throw a tresspasser out right then and there. But if they show up and start living on your property and \*then\* you figure it out, you clearly weren't paying that much attention to your property in the first place. And then you have to actually evict them.