Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, squatting has functioned as a self-help housing solution in urban communities across the United States. Historically, squatter movements have sprung up when public policies have failed to address housing insecurity, and a supply of vacant foreclosed or warehoused properties has propelled self-starting civilians to rehabilitate them to expand the housing stock. Invariably, renovating and inhabiting properties without ownership is illegal. However, housing activists who have spearheaded such efforts have not always been met with hostility by policymakers. In New York in the 1970s and ‘80s, several housing programs were formed in response to squatters, providing tenants a pathway to homeownership. These programs did not, however, legalize all pre-existing squats, leaving many vulnerable to eviction under City administrations friendly to real estate interests.
On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where around two dozen squats formed in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, squatters experiencedremarkable wins and terrible losses. About half the neighborhood’s squats were evicted during the Giuliani Administration in the 1990s, but eleven were legalized and converted into limited-equity cooperatives, a form of permanent affordable housing. As squatter movements continue to form throughout the United States, the Lower East Side’s movement offers an instructive model.
The Emergence of New York’s Squatter Movement
The squatter movement in New York formed in the wake of the City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. A confluence of factors precipitated the recession. Postwar federal subsidies to primarily white homeownership, federal investment in highway construction, and racist fears among the City’s white middle class paved the way for suburbanization. In addition, federal and state policies facilitated an exodus of industry as manufacturers moved their operations out of New York to southern states and then abroad, where labor was cheaper. A significant decline in tax revenue led City budgeters to borrow capital to fund public services. By 1975, New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy and was denied federal assistance as austerity became the ruling philosophy in Washington.
As the City descended into crisis, many landlords could no longer charge enough rent to properly maintain their buildings, pay property taxes, or make mortgage payments. They began to abandon them or set them on fire to collect insurance payouts. Defaulted private properties came under City ownership and were stewarded by a new agency called the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. During the 1980s, the City came to own about fifty percent of residential real estate on the Lower East Side and sixty percent of Harlem’s. With housing abandonment rampant in low-wealth neighborhoods, the Beame Administration instituted a policy of planned shrinkage – condemning buildings and cutting municipal services such as fire protection, garbage collection, police patrol, and library services to hasten the area’s population decline. This disinvestment policy, also controversly referred to as “benign neglect,” left impoverished areas deprived of basic services, susceptible to frequent fires, and strewn with vacant lots and dilapidated buildings. Abandoned properties became prime sites for drug trading, further diminishing property values and quality of life in these afflicted areas.
In response to these retrenchment measures, squatters across New York began to restore the abundant supply of defaulted, City-owned properties and create habitable spaces for New Yorkers needing housing and community space. One of the earliest campaigns took place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where over two hundred families moved into vacant apartments in nine buildings. Organizers on the Lower East Side – the only neighborhood where squatting would become large-scale and long-term – soon followed their example. Over about a decade, Lower East Side squatters built a movement. They took over approximately two dozen buildings, turned vacant lots into community gardens, formed community centers, recruited unhoused park dwellers to their squats, and published pamphlets educating others on how to enter and restore condemned buildings safely.
Government Response
As early as the mid-1970s, Municipal and federal programs developed under a progressive agenda to provide legal channels for doing exactly what squatters had innovated. Following the lead of resident-led initiatives, the short-lived Sweat Equity Program (1976-1980) offered low-income New Yorkers one percent interest rates on 30-year mortgages for gut renovating abandoned City-owned buildings. The program was followed by the New York City Urban Homestead Program (1980-1989), which granted up to $10,000 per unit to tenants willing to rehabilitate vacant City-owned buildings. After a building was fully renovated, the title was transferred to tenants upon payment of $250 per apartment. The buildings were required to operate as limited-equity cooperatives, meaning the profits an owner could make on selling their unit were restricted, and buyers were required to meet an income cap. A federal urban homesteading program was established in 1974 but was designed to support moderate-income homeownership rather than provide a rare pathway to low-income homeownership; funding was cut during the Reagan Administration.
While groundbreaking, these government programs were limited in scope and required individuals to navigate immense bureaucracy. Participation was mostly unattainable for New Yorkers who were already unhoused or on the verge of homelessness. The squatters – those still working illegally – continued to provide mutual aid to unhoused people, especially individuals living in the nearby Tompkins Square Park. The squatters’ reach and resources were greatly limited, but they maintained a local focus, providing services to community members facing food and housing insecurity. In addition to their squat recruitment work, a number of squatters founded or joined direct action groups such as Picture the Homeless, Housing Works, and Food Not Bombs. Like the squats themselves, these organizations were established to serve and empower the City’s most vulnerable residents, including those who were HIV-positive and unhoused.
Evictions and Radical Resistance
By the early 1990s, the City was recovering from the financial crisis, and the Lower East Side began gentrifying. The Giuliani Administration, accommodating real estate developers eager to capitalize on the rising property values, evicted approximately half of the squats. The remaining buildings were saved, however, as a direct result of the squatters’ highly coordinated and disruptive resistance tactics, including the establishment of an “eviction watch network.” The “network” was a phone tree that could quickly mobilize squatters and allies to defend a building threatened by demolition or eviction. By some accounts, the phone tree enabled the squatters to gather as many as one hundred protestors at a site in under an hour. Drawing inspiration from the Yippies’ tactics of the 1960s, some protestors chained themselves to trees to stop bulldozers.
The squatters who were most active in anti-eviction efforts explicitly aimed to make each eviction as financially and optically costly for the City as possible. They constructed elaborate barricades that could take hours for police to deconstruct. Furniture would be placed in entranceways and, on occasion, filled with cement. Bicycle frames would be welded to fire escapes to prevent police from entering through the windows on ladders. Fearing booby traps, the police department sometimes deployed the Emergency Service Unit, who arrived in riot gear and were armed with advanced equipment. This spectacle on the city streets attracted local media attention. The squatters’ actions were not simply disorderly, as was often suggested by the press; they were highly strategic and eventually led housing authorities to pursue a deal with the squatters rather than continue their eviction campaign.
In 2002, residents of the Lower East Side’s eleven remaining squats came to an agreement with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The deal authorized a third-party housing nonprofit to buy the squatted buildings from the City for $1 each. The nonprofit took out loans on behalf of the squatters so that they could bring them up to building code. Once the requisite renovations were made, the building titles were transferred to the squatters, making them legal homeowners. Like the City’s 1980s homesteading program, the deal required the buildings to be converted into permanently affordable housing as limited-equity cooperatives. Located at the heart of a neighborhood that has become, as one squatter put it, “a fortress for the wealthy,” apartments in the former squats continue to be affordable for low- and moderate-income buyers as regulated by City-imposed income requirements.
Present-Day Relevance
In the past five years, several squatter movements have been spearheaded by working mothers. Dominique Walker founded the nonprofit Moms 4 Housing in 2019 after becoming homeless while working full-time in Oakland, California. According to her organization, Oakland has four times as many empty homes as unhoused people. As a collective of homeless and marginally housed mothers, Moms 4 Housing organizes to reclaim vacant property warehoused by investors. In 2020, another group of mothers began squatting in vacant foreclosed properties owned by Philadelphia’s Housing Authority (PHA). The occupation expanded to include 50 people in over 12 vacant PHA homes. Their takeover was remarkably successful; within five months, the PHA ceded at least nine of the squatted properties, and the Philadelphia Land Trust was formed to maintain them as long-term affordable housing.
When ideally executed, squatting has not only served as a method for securing emergency housing in cities where shelters are overcrowded and subsidized housing waitlists are years, if not decades, long; housing activists have also used squatting as a strategy for transforming vacant property into permanent affordable housing on a small scale and creating opportunities for low-income individuals to achieve homeownership. Government investment in affordable and public housing development, voucher programs, rent stabilization, and inclusionary zoning is essential to reducing homelessness. In the absence of such investment, squatting has emerged as a self-help measure to modestly expand urban housing stock.
Katie Heiserman is a public historian and filmmaker whose work focuses on New York City housing, activism, and public memory. She received her Master’s in Archives & Public History from New York University.
