State Evicts Man From Land Nobody Owns

April 10, 2008

In a Seattle suburb, there was a man who lived in a tree on a vacant lot. He lived alone, bothered pretty much nobody, and nursed sick and injured squirrels back to health. All of that changed recently, when the State ordered him to tear down the hand-made shelter in which he had been living for the past two years.

[C]ity workers arrived unannounced and put pink-ribboned survey stakes around the cluster of trees that hold [David Csaky's] home. Then Friday, the city dispatched social workers to tell him about shelters a man with pets can’t use and treatment programs a light drinker doesn’t need.

They told him officials planned to evict him from his treehouse in the vacant lot under the interstate…

Workers with the city Transportation Department, acting on a citizen report dated March 12, decided Csaky (pronounced Shacky) must go. There are longstanding policies about encampments, about precedents, about liability on rights of way and Csaky is, without a doubt, in violation of each.

The State departments are primarily evicting him from the land because they claim to own it. Of course this is ridiculous, because as others have pointed out before, the State cannot legitimately own property! For a thorough primer on this concept, listen to Robert LeFevre’s take on “Collective Ownership.” To lend the appearance of propriety to this expropriation, the State of course cites rules and regulations which are created and enforced by the State!

Fortunately for Csaky, one local couple was willing to spend $500 to buy an old and weathered recreational vehicle, to replace the tree-house he’s no longer allowed to keep.

Brandon Ferrante, 28, and Maria Bolander, 27, neighbors who watched Csaky build his treehouse and befriended the self-taught carpenter, found the RV on Craigslist after they learned of Csaky’s situation…

“It broke our hearts,” Ferrante said of the eviction notice. “He’s taken care of the neighborhood. We couldn’t sleep at night. We decided to make it happen.”

When the Craigslister who sold the RV learned the story, he reduced the asking price to a penny! Most people are generally decent, and willing to lend a helping hand to others, when they need it.

Csaky said he’s not looking for pity or a handout. He compared himself to a homesteader who simply is using what wasn’t used. “I just need a place where I can live with my animals.”

I like how he brings up homesteading. There was vacant land that nobody owned and nobody was using. Anybody could have chosen to use it at any point prior to Csaky’s construction of his tree-house. But nobody did. Csaky should be the owner in-fact of the tree and ostensibly some surrounding property, by virtue of having mixed his labor with the previously unowned or abandoned resources. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the news pretty much ignored this angle.


Posted in: Anarchy!, Property Rights

Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. olly April 10, 2008 12:27 pm

    David — do some reading on Seattle’s mayor, and our general city council — you’ll get the picture of political correctness and “properness” taken to new extremes. After all, we’re the supposedly “liberal” city that banned lap dances.

    This makes me so freakin’ angry. With all the homelessness everywhere, we can’t even see fit to leave a guy alone who’s managed to make his own way in the world, without being a burden on anyone, and we’re going to turn him into a shelter victim?

    Criminal.

    -olly

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