Where these laws allow squatters to occupy houses without the owner's consent, they qualify as takings of private property that require payment of compensation under the Fifth Amendment:
In recent weeks, there has been a lot of media coverage of squatters' rights laws that sometimes have the effect of blocking property owners from removing trespassers who occupy their houses without the owners' permission. ...
As often happens when an issue attracts media attention, it is hard to tell from early reports how widespread the issue actually is. But even a few cases of successful squatting may be problematic, because they could incentivize imitation. Media attention could accelerate that process.
Ideally, state and local governments should make it easy for property owners to swiftly remove squatters, and should subject the trespassers to civil and criminal sanctions. But where they instead facilitate this violation of property rights, the laws that do so violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires payment of "just compensation" whenever the government takes "private property."
