Elderly Uncle Squatting In Rv On Property And Refusing To Leave Despite Being Asked For Years

Location: Southern California

I inherited and moved into a house near Los Angeles from my mother after she passed away in 2015. At the time her brother, my uncle, had been living in a 40 foot Airstream trailer parked in her back driveway, an arrangement she had agreed to "temporarily" to help him get back on his feet after a messy divorce. He had been "temporarily" living there for a decade before she died. He always had a verbal month to month unofficial lease, with nothing in writing.

The uncle is an alcoholic and a hoarder, but my mother managed to keep his worst tendencies in check while she was still alive. I was in a bad way with grief and depression after she died and didn't stay on top of him, and over the course of several years he turned the entire back yard, driveway and garage into a hoarder's junk heap, and met any request to clean up his garbage and stop bringing new garbage onto the property with aggression, "forgetting" that I asked him, or claiming he didn't think I was serious the hundred times I talked to him about it.

I have since gotten into a long-term relationship and engaged, with the uncle and my fiance not getting along at all, regularly getting into shouting matches with each other as the uncle thinks she's some kind of evil woman trying to steal my mother's house out from under me (she comes from a very well-off family, so this scenario is a bit far-fetched), and the fiance understandably not wanting to live with a drunken hoarder in the driveway five feet from our bedroom window, who she says leers at her and makes her feel uncomfortable even going out the front door.

After my mother passed, the uncle and I had a verbal agreement that he would be moving out as soon as his pension and social security started coming in, and with a very good paying job as a longshoreman for 20 years making low six figures and barely paying any rent (my mother was charging him $300 a month, I raised it to $500 which he protested was a king's ransom and stopped paying entirely during covid), he should have had a very comfortable nest egg. Instead, when push came to shove and I asked him to start packing once he was fully retired in 2022, he played the poverty card and claimed he was broke and couldn't afford another place because he had given all of his money to his daughter, who lives several states away and wants nothing to do with him.

The rest of the family is happy to keep the uncle my problem, and are well aware of his tendencies to the point they refuse to allow him to stay at any of their houses for even a single night. And yet when I raised the prospect of having the uncle legally evicted they paint me as the villain and tell me I should just be more patient and give him more time.

I was unable to take any legal action against him for years due to the extremely generous covid eviction moratorium in LA County, and when it was finally lifted the two attorneys I spoke to said that if we got the wrong judge the uncle presenting himself as a feeble old man with nowhere else to go (as no one else will have him) would bite us in the ass, and that I should get proof in writing that I had attempted to find him alternate living arrangements which he had refused to accept before trying to get him into court.

So I spent six months waiting for the LA County Department of Elder Care Services to send a social worker out to see him, they offered him a nearly free assisted living apartment in a brand new building with medical and counseling services on site specifically for elderly or disabled homeless or near homeless individuals. He refused because they told him he would not be able to bring his junk hoard with him.

Just as we had gotten this refusal in writing and were getting ready to proceed with a legal eviction, the uncle was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and spent six months undergoing aggressive radiation and chemotherapy, during which time I understandably backed off the pressure, and even the attorney advised me to just let nature take its course as there was no point in evicting a dying man.

Evidently his treatments went well, as he's gone from appearing to be at death's door and losing 100lbs in a month last December, to being back to his former portly self drinking a 12 pack of beer a day and dragging garbage onto my property every day again by April. My fiance is irate, feels like he's thumbing his nose at us and demanding that the eviction should be back on.

When I brought this back up to the attorney, he said the average judge in our jurisdiction would just say that being "with family" is the best place for an elderly dying man, be aghast we would even consider putting him out with nowhere else to go, and in the worst case give the uncle unlimited grace until he died of natural causes with nothing we could do about it, despite the fact that he is living surrounded by junk to the point the fire department would not be able to get a gurney through if he was having a heart attack, the interior of his trailer is a hoarder fire hazard that barely has a path wide enough for him to squeeze through to get from the front to the back, and absolutely no hospice nurse would ever dare set foot inside of it when his condition worsens again.

While there is no cure for his particularly type of cancer and the five year survival rate if they catch it as early as possible, which they did not in his case, is in the low single digits, the fiance is insisting she can no longer deal with the situation and has even suggested I just sell the property, uncle and all, to some all-cash buyer with the knowledge a hoarder squatter is there.

Any advice on options to remedy this situation would be greatly appreciated. I feel like I've tried to do things with patience through the proper legal channels, other family members, and progressively more stern treatment of the uncle himself, and just keep going around in circles with no real end in sight to actually get him off the property and reclaim my back yard and garage from the rats and possums.