a new culture, as when beginning any new group, it is wise to present a starting structure, as opposed to offering the opportunity to structure alone; grist for the mill.”
—Anonymous entry in the 537 E. 13th Street homesteading journal, January 1985[1]
“I’ve lived on this street for nearly fifteen years,
Lived here with my hopes, lived here with my fears.
Paid my taxes, paid my bills,
Watched my money vanished in the council tills.
Along come these scruffs with their education,
Their grand ideas, talk of corruption.
My rent keeps rising, my job gets boring.
If things gets worse then I’m gonna have to join them.”
—“Dirty Squatters” by Zounds
By making a whimsical decision in 2003 to buy a video camera (to tape my drunk friends at parties), I unwittingly determined my focus for the following decade: squatting.
In 2004, having long since quit school in San Francisco and moved to Oakland, I fell in with people like Steve DeCaprio who was living in an abandoned house on the border of Berkeley. Steve had been having some negative encounters with police, and since I was one of the few people he knew at the time with a video camera,[a] he asked if I would film his interactions with the police for use in court. I did, firstly as a favor and secondly as a way to annoy the cops. But later Steve planted an idea in my mind: “Why don’t you use the footage to make a documentary?” Being entirely unreasonable in my youth (and aware that my film experience was limited to video yearbook club in high school), I accepted the challenge. I became Steve’s regular camera guy. At any moment when there could predictably be police on the scene, I was there, obnoxiously documenting everything.
This went on for months, until the following spring when I was inspired to break into an abandoned boat-motor and turbine warehouse in Emeryville (a small town bordering Oakland) called the Power Machine, where I had decided I would live. I shimmied up a drainpipe with a heavy power drill in my backpack, climbed onto the balcony, and, after teetering on the sill for a moment, entered through a broken window. I unsecured the plywood door on the first floor, through which friends and I then carried in blankets and pillows and bags of avocados and cookies to make ourselves comfortable. It was hereby irreversible: I had fallen in with the squatters!
Squatting has never had a particularly good reputation in the United States. This is nothing if not ironic, since, as indigenous advocates frequently point out, we are a nation founded by squatters. But the history of U.S. property is bursting with doublethink: Squatters are the greatest patriots but the sleaziest freeloaders; they are self-made men but unscrupulous carpetbaggers. Indeed, squatters are a group that has, throughout history, consistently been pulled in multiple directions at once. Who identifies with squatters? Is it the backcountry, right-wing militia types, who want the government off their backs? Is it the urban housing justice advocates, with their banners pronouncing housing as a human right? Is it the anarcho-punks, seeking an equitable lifestyle through do-it-yourself means? Is it homeless individuals and families with no other choice, having been preyed upon by predatory lenders and a rampaging capitalist system?
Incredibly, squatting embraces an eclectic mix of people, who embrace back for a wide range of reasons. But no matter what the reason, squatters hold the same reputation in the mainstream discourse—a reputation that is integrally tied to the general understanding of what property means in the United States, an understanding that reaches back to colonialism. Imposing new and bizarre ideas about property onto the indigenous people of North America, settlers set the stage for the next several hundred years of ownership mechanisms and expectations. Even when the government was giving away Western tracts of land in the nineteenth century, the general idea persisted that the parcels were to become private property, which in turn would come to represent a citizen’s individual worth (despite having never paid for property, as was the frequent case during Westward Expansion). The venerated notion of property carried forth, creating a myth that still impacts us today: Through hard work, American citizens are able to attain American ideals. We don’t like to think that it might actually be through sneakiness or opportunism or, conversely, mutual aid that American citizens have been able to attain American ideals, since that sounds silly. Yet these are common methods of squatters, and the country was, after all, founded by squatters.
Today, in the United States, squatters can be found in derelict urban tenements, in hand-built shacks on rural grasslands, and in foreclosed suburban mini-mansions. They can be found in just about any abandoned structure, but today, regardless of where they squat or why, they are all confined to the rules and assumptions of the property system.
We are all accustomed to talking about the “housing market” as if it is actually a thing, and we are able to do this because we have universally accepted that property is a commodity that, as such, can be bought and sold on a market. It is this common agreement that gives the arrangement power. Liken this to money markets, in which the users of currency universally agree that it has value. Money is able to grow or shrink in a market based on the universal contract that money is real and that it is guaranteed. But when you take away that guarantee, people lose faith that money has value, and—as we saw, for example, in Russia in the 1990s, or in Argentina in 2002, or in many European countries more recently—the whole system collapses. “In this sense,” as David Graeber articulates in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”[2] The same can be said for the housing market, similarly invented as a factitious system of measurement: Property stands in for money in an elaborate game of appreciation and depreciation based on arbitrary criteria—that is, based on the level of faith that the general public has in a neighborhood or region, or in the market as a whole. When a house is assessed, rarely is its worth based on use value, but is instead based on the expectation that the market worth may grow. This is why the housing market, as any market, is unstable and perpetually poised to fail: Investments are gambles, and there is not always enough money to back artificial claims of value. In the foreclosure crisis, which began at the end of 2007, many homeowners saw the amount they owed on their mortgages swell exponentially, while the appraised value of their homes (based on dwindling public faith in the market itself) plummeted.
Interestingly, however,
it seemed that most Americans were open to radical solutions. Surveys showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt that the banks should not be rescued, whatever the economic consequences, but that ordinary citizens stuck with bad mortgages should be bailed out. In the United States this is quite extraordinary. Since colonial days, Americans have been the population least sympathetic to debtors. In a way this is odd, since America was settled largely by absconding debtors.[3]
The historically contradictory reaction of Americans to the foreclosure crisis is reassuring. With the general public questioning the social contract about what property is and how it should be treated, squatting begins to appear as a plausible alternative to a flawed system. By challenging the assumptions of the contract, Americans are blazing a new trail of property resistance. And with squatting once again in the mainstream discourse, the potential to overhaul the way we do housing and the way we view resources creeps closer to a new reality.
Many places in the world have property systems similar to the United States’, but other, older countries have had more time to tug back and forth on the social contract and to settle on different conclusions.
My strongest understanding of squatting, in fact, came from the outrageously well-organized squatter diehards in Europe. On a poorly planned
