Gabriel C. Pérez / KUT News
A man removes items from a home in Southwest Austin in 2018. Several residents of the home were forced to leave after a judge ruled against them in eviction court.
A raft of new state laws will take effect Thursday, Jan. 1. One of the most significant is Senate Bill 38, a measure that supporters say will make it easier to remove squatters from homes and apartments.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, author of SB 38, says the new law will reduce the time frame from months to days to remove squatters from homes and apartments.
“What SB 38 does is set up a quicker procedure to get people that are clearly squatting out of the home,” Bettencourt said, “by changing time frames and setting up, effectively, what would be called a rocket docket, compared to how long it could take before the bill passed to try to get people removed from their homes because squatters don’t own the home.”
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Bettencourt recounted several of what he referred to as horror stories from public testimony on the issue of squatting before and during the state’s 2025 regular legislative session.
“After Lt. Gov. [Dan] Patrick asked us to do a couple interim hearings, we found out that this wasn’t just one or two cases, but in some jurisdictions, it was hundreds, and that meant it was thousands across the state,” Bettencourt said. “And it was just, I think … a real disconcerted view that the whole committee, bipartisan, had that, if that could happen in Texas, it needed to be stopped.”
SB 38 works through civil courts. Another law that speeds criminal prosecution of squatters, SB 1333, took effect in September.
“These are commonsense reforms to keep bad things [from] happening to people’s homes, and more importantly, to keep people out of property they don’t own and they don’t have any legitimate right to through a lease,” Bettencourt said.
But housing advocates counter that the legislation has far less to do with combatting squatting than it does with undermining already-weak tenants’ rights vis-à-vis their landlords.
“With the passage of SB 38,” said Ben Martin, deputy director of Texas Housers, “instead of addressing the real housing stability challenges that renters in Texas are facing, legislators made the decision to pass a law that makes the eviction process in Texas just a little bit less friendly to renters and a little bit more confusing.”
Martin argued that SB 38 weakened and made vaguer the requirements for a landlord to provide a tenant with a notice to vacate. It also allows off-duty police officers to execute evictions, where previously they could only be executed by constables.
“What that process is going to do now is, if you are a trespasser in a home that you have no right to be in, you are not a renter with a lease violation, you are ‘a squatter,'” Martin said. “You can have an eviction hearing from filing to judgment in only five days, and you don’t even need to have a trial.”