Marietta Republican Rep. Devan Seabaugh, the House sponsor, said the legislation makes it quicker and easier for landlords and homeowners to take back control of their properties.

The lawmaker said eviction backlogs in the civil courts mean it can take months to resolve cases. The new law would make squatting a misdemeanor. Trespassers could face a $1,000 fine and up to one year in jail, or both. Seabaugh said if a magistrate judge determines squatters used a fake lease they could be charged with a felony of filing false documents.

“Right now, squatters are treated like tenants of a property and they’re not tenants — they’re criminals and they’re intruders,” he said before the bill was signed.

But Brandon M. Weiss, a housing expert and law professor at the American University Washington College of Law, called the bill and others like it a “distraction” from more pressing housing issues, including skyrocketing rents and soaring home prices.

Weiss suggested that squatting was rarer than recent reports suggest. He said he was concerned that “outlier cases will be used to affect legal changes that will then be used in a way that detrimentally impacts a much broader swath of tenants.”

“I think there’s been a few high-profile cases that have received disproportionate coverage,” Weiss said.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March, Betsy Bradfield of the Georgia Association of Realtors said the problem was not just confined to the Atlanta area but other Georgia communities.

“Squatters are currently illegally taking over our properties, destroying them, and causing havoc in our neighborhoods. A lot of times that also occurs with other criminal enterprises in the area. We’re seeing some stories of human trafficking, drug cartels … and they’re happening in squatter properties,” she said.

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(Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer Greg Bluestein contributed to this story.)

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