What I Learned Shadowing California's Katana-Wielding Anti-Squatter Enforcers
California's failure to eject squatters from the properties they've seized undermines the state's new housing laws.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
In this week's newsletter, I wanted to share a recent feature story I wrote for Reason about the strange world of California's professional squatter removal services.
For some time in February this year, I was camped out in an Airbnb in Oakland, California, shadowing James Jacobs, founder of ASAP Squatter Removal, as he went about his work of reclaiming properties from squatters with his trusty katana.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
It was a fascinating story to report out, and one that involved being in slightly dicier situations than this housing and zoning reporter is typically used to. The experience taught me a lot about the extreme edges of California's housing crisis and the limits of what Reason will allow me to expense for a story. (Body armor, yes. A sword, no.)
Truly, we are living in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash.
The reporting process yielded a few observations that didn't make it into the final draft, one of which I'll share here.
A major setting of the story is an apartment building off Oakland's International Boulevard that had been overrun by squatters. Jacobs had been hired by the owner to attempt to remove them.
Running down the middle of International Boulevard is a dedicated lane for the new Tempo bus rapid transit line. The lane was completed in 2020 for a total cost of $232 million.
That's a significant investment in new public transit infrastructure. Its presence means that properties along International Boulevard now qualify for new transit-oriented height and density allowances created by last year's Senate Bill 79.
Thanks to S.B. 79, one can now build a six-story apartment building, at a density of 100 dwelling units per acre, within a quarter mile of the Tempo line.
The apartment building that features heavily in my story should be a prime candidate for redevelopment into more, better housing under S.B. 79. The two-story building that currently occupies the land is badly deteriorated, thanks in small part to the presence of squatters there.
Unfortunately, no one is in a position to do anything productive with the property so long as squatters continue to occupy it. It'll continue to be what it is today, a badly run-down apartment building that the owner and neighboring business owners say has been overrun by criminal activity.
As I detail in my story, California's law enforcement agencies typically refuse to remove squatters. Property owners who report squatters are invariably told they need to file for eviction in civil court to remove them.
That's inherently unreasonable. But California's civil court process is long. In that process, squatters can claim a host of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that stretches out the process for months, and in extreme cases, years.
The upshot is that the state does very little to protect the basic property rights of owners who see their units fall prey to squatters.
That's an injustice all on its own. It leads to a law-and-order problem when desperate property owners turn to gray-market squatter removal services to solve a problem the courts and the cops won't.
This lack of orderly property rights protections also undermines the efforts California's policymakers have put into making its urban areas more affordable and transit-served.
All the upzoning laws and transit investments in the world won't induce the development of badly needed housing on a property that cannot be reclaimed from squatters who are occupying it illegally.
Even the best-conceived urban planning can't make up for the nonenforcement of basic property rights.
My feature is a little too long to fully include in this newsletter. Below is a short excerpt. If it piques your interest, I'd encourage everyone to read the whole thing at Reason.
Samurai vs. Squatters
"We're probably not going to use grenades on this one, right? Because I got 'em."
James Jacobs had hired a motley crew of toughs online to help him clear squatters out of an Oakland, California, apartment building. None of the hired muscle accept the offer of smoke grenades. They intend to complete this job with the baseball bats and firearms they brought from home.
"All right, let's do this," says Jacobs. He grabs his katana and sets off in his long black leather jacket toward the apartment. His improvised militia follows single-file behind him. Half a minute later, they confidently walk through the front door of a two-story building off of Oakland's busy International Boulevard.
From across the street, I watch them enter and wait anxiously for the sound of gunshots.
It was another battle in California's low-burning turf war between the squatters who invade homes and the enforcers hired to reclaim them.
Across the Golden State, uninvited occupants have taken over countless residential properties and then refused to vacate. Homes undergoing renovations, vacant rental units, and even whole apartment buildings have fallen prey to squatters. Once they move in squatters are very difficult to dislodge. The legal process to remove them is expensive and can take months or years.
In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.
Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that's more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters.
"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.
It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.
According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters.
If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.
Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.
The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.
But with reforms stalled in the state Legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.
On the streets, it's samurai vs. squatters.
(Read the whole thing here.)
Quick Links
- The latest House version of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act removes an effective ban on build-to-rent housing that the Senate had included it's version of the bill. The bill retains restrictions on large institutional investors purchasing homes. A vote on the House's bill is expected this week.
- Tokyo's housing is cheap, even if its land is incredibly expensive, writes Alex Armlovich in a new essay.
- In Illinois, a state upzoning bill supported by Gov. J.D. Pritzker is encountering predictable opposition from the state's cities and towns.
- The Trump administration is using eminent domain to seize a Catholic pilgrimage site on the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a border wall project.
- The City Council of Providence, Rhode Island, failed to overcome Mayor Brett Smiley's veto of a rent control ordinance it had passed. On X, the mayor had some wise words about the failure of rent control in other cities.
The rent in Providence is too high and we need real solutions to bring down costs for families. And I understand why rent control sounds compelling, but the reality is that it has consistently been shown to hurt those it is meant to help. In Cambridge, in Berkeley, in Portland,… pic.twitter.com/vEagSDrXca
— Mayor Brett Smiley (@PVDMayor) May 15, 2026
