During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
To me the situation you’re describing and the OP situation seem pretty similar; using threats to overrule the established system of property rights. But of course that system is how society decides what new people can move in, and something has to decide that.