Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Let's All Move Into Daryl Hannah's House!”

« Rove Walks; Dean Balks | Main | We Didn't Start the Fryer »

June 13, 2006

Let's All Move Into Daryl Hannah's House!

Hatched by Dafydd

So we start with these grafs, showing poor farmers being evicted by the evil government from the land they had farmed for many years:

Sheriff's deputies evicted people from an urban community garden to make room for a warehouse Tuesday, touching off a furious protest in which actress Daryl Hannah and others climbed into a walnut tree or chained themselves to concrete-filled barrels. More than 40 people were arrested.

Authorities cut away branches and used a fire truck to bring down the "Splash" actress and another tree-sitter, who raised their fists as they were removed. Hannah was arrested.

"I'm very confident this is the morally right thing to do, to take a principled stand in solidarity with the farmers," she said by cell phone before the fire truck raised officers into the tree.

So right away, we're all reaching for our Solidarność t-shirts and singing Pete Seeger songs. And then we discover just exactly what "principle" Hannah is standing in solidarity with, along with (we learn) Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, and professional tree-sitting protester Julia Butterfly Hill.

They are bravely protecting the right of Mexican immigrants to steal other people's land:

About 350 people grow produce and flowers on the 14 acres of privately owned land, in an inner-city area surrounded by warehouses and railroad tracks. The garden has been there for more than a decade, but the landowner, Ralph Horowitz, now wants to replace it with a warehouse....

Dozens of protesters chanted, "We're here and we're not going to leave!" in Spanish, blew whistles and blocked traffic in the surrounding streets. Protesters linked arms and sat on the tracks. Officers dragged some protesters away.

It seems that the owner, Ralph Horowitz -- probably a liberal -- foolishly allowed the poor, immigrant farmers (Reuters makes clear they are immigrants) to grow food and other crops on his land for a number of years; but at $25,000 per month, it has become too expensive to maintain the mortgage without any income. So Horowitz asked them to leave.

They told him No: now that he had graciously allowed them to farm it for so long, it was now their land, and he could jolly well shove off, or Spanish words to that effect. He tried to evict them, and they fought back in the courts, suing Horowitz. (What on earth was the cause of action? AP doesn't say.) They picketed his office, they picketed his home.

And lefty celebrities by the bushel, possibly having flashbacks to the grand old days of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, rushed forward to support the theft of land worth millions of dollars -- from a man whose only crime was to allow poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants the opportunity to grow crops while he decides how best to use the land that he bought with his own money.

That's the American spirit! That's the way to persuade voters to support normalization of illegal immigrants already here -- though of course we have no way of knowing whether these particular immigrants are legal or illegal. (I should ask Patterico whether there is any state or local law that forbids the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies to inquire about the immigration status of people they arrest.) But even if they're legal... shouldn't attempted grand theft be sufficient to deport them?

Horowitz noted that the farmers were squatting on land zoned for warehouses and factories. The landowner said in a telephone interview that he was paying $25,000 to $30,000 a month in mortgage and other land costs.

"We've made, in the last three years, enough of a donation to those farmers," he said. "I just want my land back."

Oh, but how could the city of Los Angeles be so cruel and inhuman as to force people out to starve, wives and children huddled together in the snowdrifts? But of course, we don't learn until the very end that L.A. has actually provided other spaces for the farmers:

Horowitz also said the city had provided other locations for the gardeners, and most had left. In a statement, City Councilwoman Jan Perry also said many gardeners had moved to new garden sites.

So it's not even that they want some land; they demand this specific 14-acre plot. I wonder how long the warehouse will stand before somebody -- out of revenge for having "his" land stolen -- will burn it down.

So with what is Daryl Hannah standing in "solidarity?" With the proposition that if someone moves onto your land and squats there, and if you don't immediately summon the cops and have him evicted, but rather make the mistake of letting him stay for a few years while you get the land ready for sale -- then the squatter now owns that land, even if you told him all along that he had only temporary permission to stay.

In other words, if I want some piece of property -- let's say one of multi-millionaire Daryl Hannah's houses, or some piece of property owned by Joan Baez or Willie Nelson, or whatever tree Julia Butterfly Hill currently calls home... then all I need do is plant myself on it and declare it mine.

So let's all go move into Daryl Hannah's house. I'm sure, in the spirit of consistency and solidarity with the land-snatching Sandinistas, she will be delighted to let us stay... and equally delighted when we evict her -- from our new property.

Whaddya say, Daryl? You good with that?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 13, 2006, at the time of 3:13 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/842

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Robert Schwartz

If I were thirty years younger and single again.

The above hissed in response by: Robert Schwartz at June 13, 2006 4:05 PM

The following hissed in response by: cdquarles

Dafydd,

One can only shake his head and say "Only in America." After years of left wingnuts and assorted governments abridging property rights, now we get this farce. Lord, help us in our hour of need.

The above hissed in response by: cdquarles at June 13, 2006 5:41 PM

The following hissed in response by: Captain Ned

After reading the linked article I've had a bit of an epiphany. This quote is the clincher:

"I feel that the gardeners have been on the land for 14 years, almost 15 years for free. After 15 years, you say thank you,"

Fifteen is the important number here, and it relates to an arcane bit of real property (land) law known as adverse possession. Simply put, if someone encroaches on your real property and you are aware of it and do nothing about it for 15 years (in most jurisdictions), the legal presumption is that you have ceded that land to the encroacher. This is nothing new invented by liberal justices, this is a bedrock principle of the English common law. Even here in my little state of Vermont adverse possession claims are not infrequent (though they usually relate to things like shared driveways or paths to lake beaches).

Horowitz had to evict these people before the 15 years ran (I'm assuming that's the adverse possession period in California) and they thus obtained title to the property.

I'm not in any way defending the squatters, but Horowitz should have taken periodic affirmative actions to declare the squatters as trespassers and thus break the adverse possession chain. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some lawyer behind the squatters letting them know exactly when to file their action for possession of the land under an adverse possession claim.

The above hissed in response by: Captain Ned at June 13, 2006 7:04 PM

The following hissed in response by: Captain Ned

After reading the linked article I've had a bit of an epiphany. This quote is the clincher:

"I feel that the gardeners have been on the land for 14 years, almost 15 years for free. After 15 years, you say thank you,"

Horowitz had to evict these people before the 15 years ran (I'm assuming that's the adverse possession period in California) and they thus obtained title to the property.

The above hissed in response by: Captain Ned at June 13, 2006 7:04 PM

The following hissed in response by: dasbow

How terribly disappointing. When you wrote that fire trucks were used to get the 'Splash' actress out of the tree, I had visions of fire hoses and flying, falling nutjobs. Alas, they just used the trucks to gently carry them to the ground. Drat.

The above hissed in response by: dasbow at June 13, 2006 7:58 PM

The following hissed in response by: BigMediaBlog

I've heard a couple people say that many of the "immigrants" are actually illegal aliens, but I couldn't find a news report mentioning anything about that.

In any case, LA mayor TonyV is broken up about this, and - since he's a former meber of a racialseparatist group - the fact that he's the same race as most of the farmers probably has a great deal to do with it. It'll give him something to talk about when local Spanish language TV does its regular fawning coverage of him.

Of course, if those who support massive legal or illegal immigration get their way, expect many similar situations in the future, and expect demagogues like TonyV to get even more power:

biglizards.net/blog/archives/2006/05/what_samuelson.html

The above hissed in response by: BigMediaBlog at June 13, 2006 9:01 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dick E

cdquarles-

"One can only shake his head and say 'Only in America.'"

It's really "Only in Mexico."

My understanding is that, what the squatters are trying to do may very well be perfectly legal in Mexico -- maybe in other countries too.

I once worked for a company that set up an operation in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. One of the things our Mexican legal advisors told us was to beware of squatters. They said that, under Mexican law, if someone takes up residence (I'm not sure about gardening) on someone else's property for a given amount of time, without being evicted by the land owner, they are legally entitled to stay there as long as they like. Once they pass the legal threshhold for length of residence, the landowner cannot force them to leave.

I'm sure those poor souls are just confused. Either they think they're still in Mexico, or they assume the US has the same asinine law as their motherland. Right. ;-)

The above hissed in response by: Dick E at June 13, 2006 11:41 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Dick E:

Either they think they're still in Mexico, or they assume the US has the same asinine law as their motherland. Right. ;-)

Well, er, actually we do!

If you allow people to do something to your property that is considered against your interest, and you don't move to stop them for a certain length of time, you may wake up and find you've created an "easement."

The classic example is when you let people cut across your property to and from the beach, and you don't try to stop them: after a while, you discover they now have the right to continue doing so.

However, in this case, clearly Horowitz proved that it wasn't against his interest, because he actually gave them limited permission to grow crops for some limited period of time. Thus, they didn't have an easement, even after fifteen years.

But I think a lawyer would be helpful here; I'm not a lawyer, though I sometimes play a "Philadelphia lawyer" on the blog...!

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at June 14, 2006 12:29 AM

The following hissed in response by: BloggerAtHeart

Actually, there's more to this than the excite.com news story relates. Check out the AP story by John Rogers at Wired News at http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1533756 and at Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060608/ap_on_re_us/urban_garden.

Key grafs:
"The property was owned by developer Ralph Horowitz when the city seized it through eminent domain in the 1980s with plans to build a trash-to-energy incinerator. That project was eventually abandoned amid objections from what was then a poor, largely black residential community.

The city handed control of the property over to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which allowed people to set up small garden plots to aid residents who complained that food was scarce, particularly after grocery stores were burned and looted in the riots.

Horowitz eventually sued the city to get the property back. The city settled in 2003 by selling it to him for $5 million, a little more than the $4.8 million it paid when it took it away."

So Horowitz has only owned it *this time* since 2003. What a mess.

The above hissed in response by: BloggerAtHeart at June 14, 2006 11:59 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dick E

Dafydd-

You are right, of course. Your “beach path” example is a classic. So is the case where a neighbor who builds a fence on your property effectively gains permanent access to the space if you take no action against him. I’m no lawyer either, but I think the name for such cases is either “easement by estoppel” or “adverse possession” (as mentioned by Captain Ned above).

My post omitted one very important detail we were told by our legal counsel: The length of time a squatter needs to stay on your land in Mexico before he gains a legal right to remain is VERY short. As I recall, it was a matter of only a few days -- maybe a couple of weeks. (This doesn’t argue against your point, of course. It’s just an interesting -- frightening, I think -- detail.)

I don’t recall from my limited exposure to business law whether someone in the U.S. can legally take up permanent residence on land they have usurped. I doubt that they can, but I‘m not really sure. I wouldn’t be surprised though, if the LA gardeners might have a legal right to stay.

The way out of this dilemma might be for the city to exercise eminent domain over the gardens and sell the land to Mr. Horowitz. I think the recent New London, CT, decision by the Supreme Court would allow this. But of course we were all up in arms over that decision, so lots of states have passed, or are working on, laws to restrict eminent domain to things like roads and government buildings. If California has such a law, one of its (I assume) unintended consequences may be that those gardeners will be there growing nopales and tomatillos for a good long time.

The above hissed in response by: Dick E at June 15, 2006 11:05 AM