They enter through a broken first-floor window each night to sleep on a moldy bed in the abandoned four-family house at 827 Main Street, part of a new generation of squatters emboldened by the U.S. housing foreclosure crisis.
"For squatters, foreclosed homes like this are like a campground with free camping," Marc Charney, a real estate broker, said as he entered the home in Brockton, Massachusetts, and shined a flashlight at a mattress where homeless people had been sleeping each night.
Squatting is on the rise across the United States as foreclosures surge, eviction notices mount and homes go unsold for months, complicating the worst U.S. housing slump in a quarter-century and prompting real estate brokers to enlist the help of law enforcement and courts to sell empty houses.
In some regions, squatting is taking on new twists to include real estate swindles in which thieves "rent out" abandoned homes they do not own. Others involve "professional squatters" who move from one abandoned home to another posing as tenants who seek cash from banks as a condition to leave the premises, a process known by real estate brokers as "cash for key
