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.