The moral force of squatter words

Even though squatting had a moral dimension before Hernando de Soto's intervention, his efforts have served to codify the sense that informal settlements are a failing of the state to accommodate the individual need for property. This grants an overt moral position to the discussion comparing the developed to developing nations that was implicit before de Soto, but is now very much out in the open (O'Mahony and Cobb, 2008). The shift from implicit to explicit moralism has revealed a hole in how we describe squatting in the US and instabilities in how the descriptions coming to us from archival sources are read and interpreted.

Just as wastes are a useful idea missing from the American discussion of how space is seen and used, equally impoverished are the terms around squatting in American English. In fact, it's the two key terms that cause the most trouble.

Part of the confusion is created by local context. A "shanty", which suggests a small shed house when describing a western homestead, takes on a different flavor in the city; where it describes a low, mean house thrown up out of the cheapest materials and sited in the poorest parts of town. There is some order to the ways shanty is used to describe houses; for example, the closer to the large cities of the northeast United States, the more likely it is that the New York Times will use shanty to describe an Irish-occupied home no matter its quality. Similarly, a Black-occupied home is, almost by definition, a shanty and prior to the Civil War a shanty was the only structure from which to drag a fugitive slave. Although everyone agreed that shanties were substandard in one way or another, the urban east-coast usage is especially laden with the moral position that a shanty is a problem.

Another source of confusion is changing moral weight by place and time. "Squatter" experienced this migration of meanings several times, accreting and then shedding moral weight in New York City as disapproval of the Irish gained or waned in relation to other prejudices, but then waxed in moral disfavor again as the hygiene movement successfully identified squatters with intellectual poverty and depravity. Simultaneous with the ebb and flow of outrage over squatters in New York, squatters were largely ignored elsewhere until some event called them back to mind. By 1928, the Irish were acceptable enough, and the memories of the giant squatter colonies long enough in the past that a misty recollection of a shanty Irish childhood (albeit in the small town of St Marys Ohio) was published by a New York publishing house and sold well.

Only three decades earlier, at the 19th century’s end, shanty and squatter in greater New York had become near synonyms for pestilence and crime. The fervor that fueled the eradication campaigns makes for entertaining reading in the newspapers, and continually suggested that the end was near for the squatter colonies (beginning in 1867 no less), but seems to have had much less impact on the ground than in newsprint fantasies.

To  a great degree those words have lost their force in American English when describing historical squatter colonies, but retains that moral weight when describing the developing world.

-- O'Mahoney, LF, and Neil Cobb. "Taxonomies of Squatting: Unlawful Occupation in a New Legal Order", 2008, The Modern Law Review; 71(6), 878-911.

The perception and the shanty

So what does one do with a statement like this:

"Since land ownership came late to Turkey compared to western countries, state-owned unoccupied land was siezed by new comers. Squatter housing erupted"
2009 Yilmaz Guney "Chapter 10: Beautiful Losers; Idiom and performance in Turkish political film", p 48, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ed Deniz Bayrakdar.


when it is easy to find statements like this:

That's from the July 15, 1867 New York Times

The first posits that the west somehow did it right and had no squatters while the second states clearly that squatter housing erupted in 1850s New York. This perception of land ownership as a prophylactic against squatting is straight out of deSoto.

What the Developing World can teach the US.

I am now recovering from the flu, and so can begin blogging again without falling asleep in the middle of a post.

As part of my recovery I have been reviewing the recent literature on squatting, and I am kind of astonished at how little the dialogue has moved in the past decade.

With the attention of development and urban scholars drawn back to slums by the popular success of Hernando de Soto and Robert Neuwirth in the 2000s I expected a new wave of interest in informal settlements and the history of squatting in the United States. After all, both authors spend considerable space in their books and articles rooting their discussion in the American experience. De Soto even consistently puts the preemption principle adopted by the United States as a model for the developing world to follow as a model to end squatter sprawl and the attendant loss of capital.
Instead research interest appears to only be turned to more closely examine the lessons the US can impart to Lima/Nairobi/Bangalore/etc. The conclusions differ, but the idea is the same; that America has an important lesson to impart to the developing world.

This is a very debatable point considering the extraordinary distances between the culture and locations under comparison.
The most cogent analysis that I have found compares the preemption policy histories of the frontier-era United States and modern Brazil. The comparison works largely because the analysis is kept within the shared problems of native people's rights, corporate speculative claims vs small holder settlements, and the government interest in getting fair value for the transferred lands. This narrative is complicated by the human rights and environmental concerns entailed in settling the Amazon Basin, but even more so the comparison is confused by the incoherent post-hoc solutions applied in the United States to catch up with an existing situation.

These comparisons are even messier when the authors try to derive lessons from the frontier-era policies of the US and apply them to the developing urban context of today around the world.

Aside from the differences in local legal, cultural, and spatial contexts, there remains the central unasked question about how successful America was at controlling squatting.

Not that I am prepared with a indicative answer to the question of American success in that regard, but I am ready to question strongly the effectiveness of a policy that constantly changes and takes more than a century to take hold and accomplish it's goal.

There is an old joke about a man who enters a diner and orders a plain doughnut with a cup of coffee. When he is done eating that one he decides he is still hungry, so he orders another. Done with that plain doughnut he is still hungry and so orders a jelly doughnut. When done he is no longer hungry, and thinks to himself, "I could have just ordered the jelly doughnut and saved myself the cost of the plain ones."
That's how policy discussions appear to me.

I need to explain why federal policies directed at a specific problem of distributing the sparsely populated public domain fairly and collecting the entailed fees is a terrible comparison to the current megaslums of the developing world.
But there are lessons in the American experience that can be brought to bear too.

The deadline.

I just got word that I have until May 1 to submit an abstract.

Wastes

The British have a useful word to describe marginal spaces; wastes.

I don't know that the American vocabulary has a synonym. We can describe vacant lots, abandoned houses, road margins, empty fields, levees, parks, and such, but not all of them with one word.

The utility of the word is that it neatly sums up both the perception and the  promise of underused spaces. In the eyes of a person having trouble finding affordable housing, the levees, abandoned lots,  and road medians of your typical urban environment are both wasted spaces and ripe with promise.

Confusing the Legal with the Social. Part 2

So now to the heart of the matter.

In recent decades the mounting evidence that squatters were present (in some degree) in American cities during the frontier era has led to some re-evaluation of Abrams' position that urban squatting simply didn't happen in the U.S.. The most cogent response restates Abrams' conclusion with the modification "to a significant degree".

On page 77 of their general history of Central Park, Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar critically examine what they believe is a myth of widespread squatting within the bounds of the park prior to construction. Upon examining contemporary tax lists, church registers, land records, and censuses, Rosenzweig and Blackmar drew a portrait of the park’s former occupants. What they found is exceedingly interesting:  many park inhabitants had permission to occupy those lots, or rented their homes. The paired footnote (on p548) extends their discussion greatly, concluding that “…it seems unlikely that the number of true squatters ever exceeded the number of property owners.” which they estimate to be 1/5th of the total.

Having established to their satisfaction that the pre-park inhabitants were not occupying the park illegally, Rosenzweig and Blackmar turn to answering the question of how the park residents were labeled squatters, and their conclusions rest upon two points. The first is that about 90 percent of the inhabitants were African Americans or recent European immigrants. The second is that more than two-thirds of the park population were low or no-skill workers; day laborers, gardeners, or servants. Of the remaining third, they were skilled tradesmen that still located them in the laboring classes, such as stone masons or carpenters.

To the the authors, this ethnic and occupational profile argues that the word “squatter” is incorrect when describing the Central Park evictions. To their minds, the evidence of permitted occupation alongside the generally high level of employment and the ethnic composition of the population suggests that, “[l]ike the word shanty, in mid-19th-century New York the term squatter was more a cultural category than a formal legal description, a convenient shorthand for the sort of poor people more affluent New Yorkers preferred to remove from their neighborhoods.”

I chose this example because this conclusion places the authors squarely in the center of that quaking bog I identified in part one of this topic; that undefined middle ground between the legal and the social meanings of squatting.

First, the authors present a needlessly narrow and quasi-legal definition of squatting to support their conclusions.
Second, their archival sources require that the occupants report their tenure accurately.
Third, they assume that the landlords of a rental property obtained clear title before renting.
Fourth, they frame squatting as a permanent category of ownership, one without a path to ownership.

Each of these is a critical topic for further discussion and will make up the next arc of entries.