Source: https://homelesslaw.wordpress.com/category/shelter-sleeping/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 16:48:04+00:00

Document:
How can a squatter get the actual title to the property?
The earlier post about squatter’s rights identifies the behavior that can give a squatter rights to property. But the legal right to property is only complete when the title is transferred. Usually, a title is transferred when a seller conveys property to a buyer.
Searching for anyone who has a claim to all or part of the property, even if the claim is just a right to use the property for some purpose and not to own it. For example, there might be a neighbor who has an easement that allows him to drive his truck through the property every morning. This search is a big expensive investigation. Most state laws about quieting title will require claimants to prove that they have thoroughly hunted in public records (vital and property) and placed multiple ads in various newspapers as ways of searching for the current property owner.
Filing documents in the appropriate court. In this step, you have to write and submit assorted documents according to all of the rules required in your jurisdiction. You might be able to find a sample of someone else’s action to quiet title by contacting or going to the court clerk’s office and paying for copies of the documents in that case. If the clerk’s office will not provide you with a full case file, they might at least give or direct you to a list of things that you have to include in your court filing. You can also look for sample forms in Justia. Here is an example from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania section in Justia Forms: “Fraudulent Conveyance- Quiet Title Packet.” If you cannot find online forms for your county, you will need to go to a law library and find a book of standard real estate forms. Any form from a book must be re-designed to match the requirements in your county court’s document rules. Here are the quiet title instructions for Kansas. Here are the Colorado quiet title instructions. Here is North Dakota’s quiet title law. Here is an example of a Complaint to Quiet Title in Florida. Here is an example of a Complaint to Quiet Title in California.
Making your claim. When you write the court documents in an action to quiet title, you will have to tell about and show the proof that you satisfied all of your state’s requirements for adverse possession and that you also satisfied your state and county requirements for taking action to quiet title. This is a detailed descriptive writing project, not merely the simple work of completing a form. If your documents are accepted by the court, you will be assigned a date to appear in court. In court, you will have to answer questions that the judge asks you. If the current property owner does not come to court that day, you might have to do an additional procedure asking the judge to give you a “default judgment.” If the judge decides that you have satisfactorily proved your claim, he or she will give you a document to file with the deeds office.
The Nov. 3, 2011 New York Times has an obituary for Yvonne McCain. She was a homeless mother who, in 1983 sued the City of New York for failing to provide her small family with habitable emergency shelter. Here is one of the court decisions, the one that best summarizes a series of smaller parts in this very complex situation and which states definitively that families have to be provided with shelter. This decision was rendered in 1987, but the full case didn’t conlude until 2008. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3375906449026576910&q=mccain+koch&hl=en&as_sdt=2,39 Because Yvonne McCain had the courage to use the legal system, families in New York have been able to expect decent transitional housing for nearly a quarter of a century.
What are the legal requirements for getting an address? If trailers have addresses, can you get one for another parked vehicle?
In the United States, all land is presumed to belong to the government unless an individual or entity holds title to it. So, a person cannot simply settle comfortably on some land, or park a vehicle there, and try to get an address for it. Getting a home address begins with the government’s making the land available for private residence. Then a real estate developer, or whoever has bought the land from the government, gets the first title to it and records his title at the deeds office, usually a component of the county government. If you need to find out who owns a piece of land, you are allowed to search for the deed because it is a public record held at the deeds office.
Title is legal ownership of land. A deed is the document showing that someone has title to a piece of land. The deeds office identifies pieces of land by giving them block and lot numbers, known as the legal address. When the landowner applies for local permits to build structures on that land, a street address (the address used by the postal service) is assigned to it. If a landowner opts to make a trailer park on his land, then his building permit will establish street addresses for the separate spaces in the trailer park.
Look for more information about real estate law at Nolo.com and Justia.
Are shelters allowed to search through your possessions? Are shelters allowed to collect information about you?
There are ever-increasing community initiatives to reduce homelessness. These are typically coordinated by government agencies, such as the housing authority and the health department, acting under the authority of their federal counterparts. They bring about the construction of new shelters and the implementation of new social services.
A national directory of homeless shelters is available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development at http://www.hud.gov/homeless/hmlsagen.cfm.
If the police come looking for you, does a shelter have to turn you over to them?
A place of shelter is not a place of asylum from the law. On the other hand, it is also not a place where the homeless should feel at risk of being rounded-up by the police. Unless someone commits a crime in a shelter or the police come to the shelter looking for a particular person, shelter staff have no legal obligation to identify residents to police.
There is a whole spectrum of interactions that might occur between shelter staff and police who come looking for a resident. At one end of the spectrum are the police with a warrant to search or seize. They might be there to seize a person or evidence. If they come to seize a person, the warrant is an arrest warrant.
As explained elsewhere in this blog, judges issue search and seizure warrants when police and prosecutors have given them probable cause to believe that evidence of a particular crime is located in the place to be searched.[ii] When the shelter-police interaction is at this end of the spectrum, the shelter has no choice but to comply with the police. Staff who interfere with the officers’ carrying out the warrant are blatantly obstructing justice. They might be handcuffed and immediately arrested so they can’t continue to impede the police work.
At the other end of the spectrum is a scene in which police have heard a vague complaint about a minor offense and come to the shelter asking the staff to present all of the male residents ages twenty to forty who have blue jeans. Here the police have not conveyed that a crime has occurred or that they even know who they are looking for. They are putting the staff in the dubious position of disrupting multiple innocent residents who came into the shelter only seeking a safe indoor place to rest.
At that point, the police might be causing the serious interference-interference with the fundamental purpose of the shelter. The shelter staff have to do their jobs and provide the residents with a place to rest. It would probably not be an obstruction of justice if they asked the police for more information so that fewer residents were interrupted or if they encouraged the police to come back and look for their suspect outside the building the next morning when the residents left for the day.
[i] Obstruction of justice or process is defined and examined in 67 C.J.S. Obstructing Justice § 24 (2002). In the federal system, the statute against obstruction of justice/process is published in 18 USC §§ 1501-20 (2007). If local or state police are obstructed in their efforts, the state’s version of an obstruction of justice charge would apply. Find these by using the following terms in the index to the state statutes: obstruction of justice, police, interference with arrest, interference with process, and crimes.
[ii] Robert M. Bloom, Searches, Seizures, and Warrants (Praeger 2003). This book tells about every aspect of law that applies to warrants for searches and seizures.
[iv] 39 Am. Jur. 2d Harboring Criminals § 3 (2006).
[v] A related but much more extreme legal obligation arises when a mental health professional knows that a client seeks to hurt someone. When that happens, the mental health professional is allowed to divulge confidential client information to police, but only to the extent necessary to protect the client’s intended victim. To read more about this and see a comparison of state laws, see John C. Williams, Liability of One Treating Mentally Afflicted Patient For Failure to Warn or Protect Third Persons Threatened by Patient, 83 A.L.R. 3d 1201.
[vi] Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th Ed. 17 (1990).
Are shelters legally obligated to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness?
Shelters, along with any other facilities that house groups of people, are subject to public health regulations regarding sanitation, rodent control, and safety just as they are subject to fire safety codes and zoning ordinances. But because so many different types of places offer various levels of sheltering and state and county health regulations vary, there is not an established standard guaranteeing that sheets are washed every day or that floors are always swept or that other measures of cleanliness are assured in every shelter.
A shelter resident who becomes sick or injured because of conditions in the shelter might be able to sue the shelter for negligence, depending on the situation. It could be the premises liability type of negligence if the sickness or injury was predictable. An example of predictable sickness might be when a shelter with heavy dust and mold causes an asthmatic resident to have a serious asthma attack.
If the sickness or injury has nothing to do with the condition of the building, but it happens in the shelter, failing to help a resident in need might count as negligence. Ordinarily, people in the U.S. have no duty to rescue somebody.[i] But innkeepers, businesses, and other places open to the public do have to help people who become sick or ill while there.[ii] Since the law imposes that duty, breaching it to the extent that harm comes to a resident would be negligence.
There are other reasons that the homeless might sue for healthier shelter conditions.
There was also a group of homeless people with HIV-related illness who sued the city seeking access to shelters better-suited to their health needs.[v] The city had a Comprehensive Care Program that equipped some shelters to particularly care for homeless AIDS patients. These plaintiffs with HIV-related illness had some health accommodations in the shelters, but were not entitled to shelter conditions comparable to those available to AIDS patients. A lower court had found that housing twelve to a room constituted a tuberculosis risk for people with HIV-related illness.[vi] The appeal concluded that plans for health and hygiene in shelters were within the authority of health and housing agencies not the courts.
Shelters tend not to have special accommodations for every specific health need. Diabetics cannot expect that a shelter will have meals that are suitable for their diets and ready supplies of insulin. Asthmatics cannot expect that a shelter will take extreme measures to reduce its dust and mold to assure that they can breathe.
The Centers for Disease Control maintains a list of state and local health departments.[vii] Reading a local health department’s rules and program descriptions is the most direct way to learn what public health services are available to the homeless. There may be drop-in clinics, day programs, special facilities for certain health and hygiene functions, etc… and these may be outside of shelters or on-site at shelters.
The National Health Care for the Homeless Council provides a free online manual titled “Shelter Health: Essentials of Care for People Living in Shelter.”[viii] This manual is not a legal document and does not legally obligate shelters to do anything. It is intended as a source of information for providers of group housing. It tells shelters how to keep the facility as hygienic as possible and provides clues about how to recognize health problems so that shelter staff can make helpful referrals for clients to get appropriate medical care. The manual is full of details like sample policies about laundry, hand washing, lice control, and cleaning body fluids from floors, furniture, and bathrooms. Homeless people or their advocates seeking to improve the local legal standards for shelters could use the manual to get examples of the improvements that should be made.
[i] Restatement (Third) of Torts § 37 (Proposed Final Draft No. 1 2005). 57A Am. Jur. 2d Negligence § 90 (2006). To find cases making this point, look in West Digests (indexes to cases) using the topic “negligence” and the key numbers 214 and 282.
[ii] Restatement (Second) of Torts § 314A (1965 & Supp. 2006). 57A Am. Jur. 2d Negligence §§ 90-91 (2006). The case of Baker v. Fenneman & Brown Properties, L.L.C., 793 N.E.2d 1203 (Ind. Ct. App. 2003) shows that business owners and innkeepers and others who have special relationships with sick and injured visitors to their establishments do have a duty to get those victims medical care.
[iii] McCain v. Dinkins, 639 N.E.2d 1132 (N.Y. 1994). This case culminated the series of cases about temporarily housing people in the Emergency Assistance Unit offices. It summarizes the cases leading up to it.
[v] Mixon v. Grinker, 669 N.E.2d 819 (N.Y. 1996).
[vii] List of state and local health departments http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/international/relres.html. If this Web address changes, go to http://www.cdc.gov/ and use its search box to find the most recent list.
[viii] The shelter health manual is at http://www.nhchc.org/resources/clinical/tools-and-support/shelter-health/.

References: § 24
 § 3
 § 37
 § 90
 § 314
 v. 
 v. 
 v.