Reflection & Data:
Over the past few days, I explored scholarly articles hoping to better contextualize squatting in New York City. Upon reviewing this literature, I found myself repeatedly astounded by the diversity of squatting projects both across and within various neighborhoods, ranging from institutionalized homesteading campaigns to more dispersed autonomous communities. Furthermore, prior to reading these studies, I never imagined the extent to which these movements articulate with municipal agencies, not only negatively when suffering from quasi-paramilitary repression but also in positively informing local policy decisions. Fortunately, much of the information collected corresponds to my theoretical framework of makeshift urbanism, which regards squatting as an ambiguous project of everchanging objectives, structures, and institutional relationships. Additionally, in observing how occupying movements fluctuate over time, as a partial result of the ever-changing legitimacy granted them by the general public, I have decided to retain the temporal scope of my project. Last week, I considered focusing solely on recent initiatives (post-2000s) given the lack of academic research. However, the extent to which this phenomenon remains embedded in neoliberal reforms of the Reagan era has urged me to begin my analysis with the 1970s. Next weekend, I plan to finish assessing interpersonal relationships and structures within New York’s squatting communities, as well as start examining ‘guerrilla-style’ occupations in Detroit.
Below, I briefly present a history of several squatting projects in New York City:
In the early 1970s, practices of urban renewal began displacing poor, often immigrant families across the city, as landlords forcibly evicted tenants from buildings slated for demolition or speculative investment (Ferguson 2007; Pruijt & Roggeband 2014). In Upper West Side Manhattan, a housing movement developed in response, mobilizing these families to squat thirty vacant apartments, thus stalling municipal development projects. From this initial action surged the organization Operation Move-In (OMI), which focused primarily on occupying city-owned buildings. Assuming an institutionalized approach, OMI employed squatting as a tactic to pressure urban planners to allocate a higher proportion of low-income housing to redevelopment sites, thereafter helping the city assign new leases to occupiers. On the other hand, in neighboring Morningside Heights, a small group of men began autonomously organizing squatting in private abandoned buildings, recruiting families from OMI’s waiting list. The activists eventually transferred leadership to the residents, who renovated and maintained these spaces as a loosely organized group, eventually winning titles to their homes in 1979 (Pruijt & Roggeband 2014).
Hans Pruijt and Conny Roggeband (2014) affirm that in the late 1970s, however, increased political legitimacy for squatting prompted increased institutionalization. For example, in 1985, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN, a national organization with over 75,000 members) organized squatting in 25 Brooklyn buildings. Originally planning to auction off these residences, the city ultimately relinquished over 50 buildings to ACORN, in partnership with the Mutual Housing Association of New York. This partnership essentially formalized urban homesteading in the city, whereby people rent rooms in occupied apartments via ‘sweat equity,’ substituting labor for money (Pruijt & Roggeband 2014). Inspired by experiments in several cities, President Jimmy Carter had authorized a National Urban Homesteading Demonstration Program in 1977, granted public agencies and community organizations funding as a homesteading agency, essentially as a means to renovate abandoned buildings. Nevertheless, many groups had eschewed government bureaucracy by taking over tenements themselves, encouraging the city to launch its own program in 1980 to minimize such unauthorized occupation (Ferguson 2007).
During the 1970s, homesteading also dominated the squatting scene on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. However, this form of occupation soon proved unsustainable and restrictive, as the volume of institutionalized opportunities failed to satisfy the massive demand for affordable housing. Furthermore, the city would not allow residents to move into their buildings until all repairs were finished, which often required years, thus excluding many people without alternative accommodations. Regardless, Reagan ultimately eliminated the federal homesteading program, with New York soon following suit as real estate values began to surge (Ferguson 2007; Pruijt & Roggeband 2014). Acknowledging that (now illegal) homesteading could not alone deter gentrification in the Lower East Side, neighborhood housing advocates thereafter mobilized for and received a cross-subsidy plan, whereby the city agreed to allow residents to renovate remaining in-rem buildings in exchange for permission to sell vacant lots for market-rate development (Ferguson 2007).
In this context, numerous projects developed, overlapping in philosophies between those who still pursued homesteading with the goal of attaining legal ownership and others who squatted in defiance of property laws (Ferguson 2007). In the first example, the city would not negotiate with squatters, forcing them to create non-profit organizations and seek representation on local councils to attain permission for residency. Such institutionalization, however, often provoked internal conflict regarding organizational structures and goals, causing projects to splinter into smaller efforts – contributing to an “eclectic, dissentious mix” of initiatives in the area (Ferguson 2007:152). At the height of the movement in 1988-89, squatters occupied two-dozen buildings on the Lower East Side. However, throughout the 1990s, the city employed what S. Ferguson (2007) terms “paramilitary” assaults to evict people (159). In 2002, the city began legalizing the majority of the remaining Lower East Side squats, many of which have now become low-income cooperatives. More recently, during the 2011 Occupy Movement, many neighborhood activists involved in previous projects organized people experiencing or at risk of homelessness to reclaim vacant foreclosed buildings (Pruijt & Roggeband 2014).
Bibliography:
Ferguson, S. 2007. “The struggle for space: Ten years of turf-battling on the lower east side,” In Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side. Eds. Patterson C, J Flood & A Moore. New York: Seven Stories Press, 141–165.
Pruijt, Hans & Conny Roggeband. 2014. “Autonomous and/or institutionalized social movements? Conceptual clarification and illustrative cases.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 55(2):144-65. Retrieved February 28, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715214537847).
Lopez’s Comments:
Brandon, you continue make excellent progress on your project. The material that you have found would make an excellent dissertation project. I like the depth that you found in your new your case. I agree with you that looking at this case study from the context of the 1970s on will help you get a better sense of the longue duree of leading movements in the United States. Just one quick question: within this entry you mentioned that you’d be looking at two locations. Mentioned New York and Detroit; are you still looking at Seattle?