Price became a housing activist on New York’s West Side with loose connections to the Metropolitan Council on Housing (hereafter Met Council), one of the city’s most important tenants’ rights organisations. As Rompiendo puertas, however, shows, this was ultimately a squatters’ rights movement that was largely organised and executed by working-class Puerto Rican women. It was their voices and actions that are the main subject of the film.
The film documents the challenges that its predominantly Latino protagonists faced in securing a home in a city where many residents lived in inadequate or unsafe housing while others faced ‘removal’ to the outer boroughs as part of the city’s urban redevelopment plans. As one activist in the film noted, ‘wherever the city sets up urban renewal programs, it removes working people and poor people and removes them from their homes and replaces them with rich people and big business’. In one scene, we watch a group of families moving their possessions out of an apartment in sacks and papers bags while a voice-over proclaims that ‘hundreds of working people like us are being evicted and forced into the streets’. ‘Housing,’ another activist concludes, ‘is a necessity. Why should we pay for a necessity?’6
As Rompiendo puertas shows, it was the death of a neighbourhood teen that served as the catalyst for the emergence of Operation Move-In and the seizure of empty vacant buildings across the Upper West Side. The teen had died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a first-floor apartment on West 106th Street. The film follows the funeral march held for the teen as well as the occupation that took place in its immediate aftermath. A day later, another nine buildings around Columbus Avenue and the West 80s were squatted by dozens of families who moved in during the night.7
The film places particular emphasis on the actions undertaken by the squatters while foregrounding the role played by middle-aged and elderly Puerto Rican women as leaders of the ‘movement’. It depicts the collective formed to organise and undertake building repairs. The squatters created a system to pool their money and labour as part of the effort to renovate apartments. The film also draws attention to the wider infrastructure and network of co-operative services they created within the local neighbourhood (day cares, communal kitchens, apartment registries). In the words of one recent commentator, ‘by defining the city as a space built by and thus in a fundamental sense for poor people, by asserting that the seizure of abandoned apartments is a morally justifiable and politically legitimate form of activism … Rompiendo puertas depicts a radical politics of place that challenges the economic and political forces shaping the postwar urban city’.8
The squatters were able to secure some modest concessions from the city while salvaging some of the city’s low-rent housing stock. These victories were, however, partial and short-lived, and the activism they ultimately depended on was unable to halt the gradual and wholesale gentrification of New York’s West Side in the decades that followed. At the same time, the film remains an important document within a rich and expansive history of squatting and tenant-based activism in New York. This is, moreover, a history that challenged traditional social fault lines around class, race and gender. The actions instigated by the squatters of Operation Move-In drew, after all, on a long and varied tradition of resistance rooted in a struggle for a more just and equal urbanism and in opposition to an equally protracted history of destruction, displacement and destitution.
In the end, as David Madden and Peter Marcuse remind us, movements for housing have always assumed a number of different forms. They exhibit ‘enormous variety in terms of tactics, strategies, goals, alliances, political calculations, compromises, and ideologies’.9 New York is no different in this respect, and it is hardly surprising that the city encompassed a vast living archive of alternative knowledges, materials and resources that, in the eyes of squatters, tenants and other housing activists, served as a basis for developing a different vision of the city.
This is admittedly a history with a much longer narrative arc, whose origins can be traced back to the seventeenth-century Dutch resettlement of what is now the state of New York. It is also a history that highlights the exemplary significance of New York’s housing politics and their relationship to national patterns and trends. For historians and radical urbanists alike, New York’s lessons derive less from their typicality than their ability to illuminate and speak to developments in other American cities. ‘In its tenant history, New York is,’ according to the historian Roberta Gold, ‘both representative and atypical at different times.’ On the one hand, it was largely of a piece with developments in a number of other industrial centres in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, on the other hand, it departed from the suburban homeownership model that prevailed nationally. While this led to the destruction of mass movements for affordable housing in most major American cities, activists in New York were able to forge and sustain a tenant infrastructure that supported – sometimes successfully, sometimes less so – many of the city’s poorest residents.10
If squatting came to occupy an important position within the post-war struggle for decent housing in New York, its relatively recent revival as a radical social movement ultimately belies its place within a more expansive history of occupation, settlement and resistance. Illegal occupations of land and struggles over property were central to what has been described as the ‘unjust usurpation of the continent by white settlers’.11 In the United States, squatting was closely intertwined with the predations of settler colonialism and, on a shifting frontier, it often represented a form of violent displacement through which indigenous communities were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods.
At the same time, frontier settlers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, in most cases, compelled to become squatters as the distribution of land was largely controlled by speculators and land-grabbers (also known as ‘land-jobbers’), and many settlers were simply too poor to enter into credit-debt arrangements. Illegal settlements were vigorously proscribed by Congress, however, though squatters were quick to organise and form ‘settler’ or ‘squatter’ associations that lobbied politicians while adopting a range of direct-action tactics. The squatters were, in this way, successful in pushing legislative change through state-level adverse possession statutes as well as a series of pre-emption acts from 1815 to 1841. In 1862, the federal Homestead Act was passed which allowed settlers to acquire federal land after living on it for five years and demonstrating that they had ‘improved’ it.12
In the state of New York, the history of land tenure was closely connected to its resettlement by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and the formation of a patroon system that bestowed feudal manorial rights rooted in Dutch property law to large landowners. It was English common law, however, which formed the basis for property law in the United States, and while the Quia Emptores statute had long-since abolished subinfeudation in England, it was never fully incorporated in the United States, though the 1787 Act Concerning Tenures banned feudal properties and established all real estate as allodial – that is, owned absolutely and independently of a lord. Such legal quiddities helped shape the development of New York in the wake of independence and were responsible for the emergence of an Anti-Rent movement in the Hudson Valley in the 1840s that challenged the legalities of manorial tenure. Most landlords chose to sell their interests to the rent-striking tenants, though it was left to returning soldiers from the American Civil War to quash the remnants of the movement and, in so doing, uphold forms of servitude that they had only recently fought against.13
In and around New York City, large property-owners had, unlike their upstate counterparts, adopted a system of lease holding in which land was subdivided into small lots that were rented out to workers and artisans. By 1811, a new land-use plan had transformed Manhattan into a rectilinear grid of twelve avenues which ran the length of the island and dozens of streets spanning its width. Property lines were narrowly drawn within city blocks to carve out small parcels of land, twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep. Alleyways, courtyards and rear access streets were left out of the plan. As the city expanded during the first half of the nineteenth century, lease holding allowed landowners
