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.

Squatters and Cotters

American exceptionalism leads us down some weird rabbit holes.

Consider this: There is a considerable body of American historical research that argues against widespread urban squatting because, America!

Some approach this conclusion through a theoretic position. Charles Abrams being the best known. His training in the old Chicago School perspective both encouraged his belief in exceptionalism and led him to expect that the reason for that exceptionalism would be found in the unique American frontier experience. So, as was noted in the last post, Abrams put forward a theory that the frontier siphoned off the land-hungry poor that would otherwise be seeking land in the wastes of the developing cities. After all, why would anyone settle for a pittance of crowded and infertile city property when the promise of tens or hundreds of acres of tillable farmland could be had for the asking?
Abrams leans rather heavily on the other leg of the old Chicago School here, where the American Population has a true aversion to cities as unnatural and undemocratic. The national temperament is fired with a Jeffersonian disdain for the clerks, the bankers, the savage capitalists that swarm the cityscape seeking to further their own gain. Instead they seek the forests and plains of the nation as naturally as a vine seeks light and water. Once planted on the frontier they develop a yeoman's pride in their own self-reliance and an unquenchable interest in the progress of the nation. That's an overstated version, but conveys the essential mood of this generation of scholars.
Like other examples of exceptionalism, Abrams' conclusion is ripe for revision. The simplest way to refute the exceptionalism premise is simply to demonstrate that there was widespread urban squatting throughout the frontier era, and this seems to be where the state of the literature is now. Since publishing my article establishing a case for widespread urban squatting four years ago I have become one of a diverse group of scholars on the same mission. What hasn't happened yet is a theoretical challenge or any other reframing of squatting that could direct future research.
Also, interestingly, there is some defense of America's no-urban-squatters exceptionalism that also uses local archival research. That is set to become part two of yesterday's post introducing this topic.

What I want to move to instead, and what I want to begin emphasizing more strongly in future, is the absurdity of the exceptionalism argument while building a new framework to observe historical urban squatting.
The absurdity argument is fairly straightforward and rests on several points.
1. That any urban property is inherently more valuable to their owners than the undeveloped farmlands of the far west. This most true for the very poorest in terms of their opportunities to earn a living or establish a business.
2. Farming isn't for everyone. In an age where a significant percentage of the population worked in agriculture, it couldn't have been very hard to get a sense of how well suited one was to the life. Also, if my reading of Horatio Alger and other Victorian popular authors is representative, the culture as a whole was not as deeply enchanted of the rustic life as scholars of the period remain today.
3.  The immigrants fueling urban growth throughout the 19th century came from nations with a strong squatting tradition, a tradition that encompassed cities.

This last point is best illustrated in the little-noticed volume Cotters and Squatters, which documents how the nearly universal "House Built In a Single Night" tradition remained current into the modern age. Particularly telling are the stories of the masses displaced during the endless rounds of enclosure bills passed in the 17th-19th centuries often took up residence in urban wastes and parish common lands. This pattern is replicated almost precisely in the United States by the displaced persons who had the ability to travel to the New World. Fascinatingly, the usual course was not to displace the squatters, but instead to fine them. This in time was regularized into a form of rental payment.

Mind mapping.

This is old, and needs work, but it is a useful guide anyway.

Confusing the Legal with the Social. Part 1

With two year's thought I have reconsidered. The problem with writing about squatters isn't so much about identifying the intentional versus the unintentional squatters; it is instead how squatting is defined and when.

Simply put, squatting in the 19th century just isn't the same as squatting in the 20th, or 21st. The significant difference is that squatting now has more legal presence than social. The opposite was more true in the 19th century, when squatting was general, unremarkable, and had a class weight behind it.

Surprisingly the idea of squatting, or at least that application of the word seems to have evolved through the 19th century. The fact of unauthorized occupation certainly predates that century, but the idea that there was something wrong about it, some social judgement, grows throughout the 19th century and squatting became a social state in addition to the legal.

If I had to speculate, and at this point I am because I am in mid-literature review, the cultural panic over squatting and the increased notice of squatting across the nation after the Civil War is part and parcel with the social unease over tramps and immigration.

This migration of meanings, this easy slide between the legal observation and the social accusation, creates an unstable middle ground. Most historians that approach this quaking bog hold their noses and dash across, merely noting in passing that squatters were at such-and-such location when the real settlers arrived. Civilization is assumed to have brushed them aside.
More enterprising scholars, those with some imagination (or an axe to grind), stop mid-mire and report. The most interesting are prone to exciting categorical statements. While Charles Abrams recognized the moral angle to modern urban squatting, he saw it as a phase of urbanization and development and the result of conditions that didn't exist inside the United States. Indeed, he viewed the example of the 19th century U.S. as a model for developing nations to avoid mushrooming squatter settlements. In his volume Squatter Settlements: The problem and opportunity. (1966), Abrams argued in classic Chicago School fashion that the frontier siphoned off the excess population with opportunities for fertile uncontested land, and so the United States never experienced widespread urban squatting. Overlooking any other motives the migrants may have for locating in the city slums of those cities, Abrams argues that the solution to the mega-settlements surrounding Nairobi, Lima, and Sao Paulo is for the governments of those nations to open their frontiers so people can farm.

The problem for Abrams is that there is no evidence for American exceptionalism, and plenty of evidence that urban squatting was both widespread and of general concern throughout the frontier era.