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.