Author: jtw361

Change in the use of public space change who the space is intended for and how the space can be used. The Lower East Side is defined by a long history of different types of “public” space for different uses and ultimately different people. During the mid-twentieth century, real estate disinvested from New York City. Former tenement buildings became unused and, when the city went through a recession in 1977, many publicly used buildings went vacant. Community groups, such as Loisaida, laid claim to these unused properties. These were intended to create community spaces for those who remained in the neighborhood— the Puerto Rican working class, artists, the homeless, and activists. The unused spaces became community centers and the location for these marginalized groups to organize to preserve their community. Using these properties in itself was a political statement. It decommodified the land, taking it from the real estate or city interests into the marginalized community squatters. The land went from liberal ownership to collective use through community action (149). This was particularly beneficial to the residents of the Lower East Side, who would not be able to own property under liberal property ownership schemes, who had space to their own communities and futures.

Reclaimed parks and garden space in the Lower East Side were one way to form these communities that consider them for a variety of marginalized people, as well as beyond purely human schema and instead as part of larger ecological communities. As Weinberg writes “parks are supposed to be neighborhood meeting places, public communities and, when necessary, forums for free speech and protest, available to anyone, regardless of income or social status” (Weinberg 46). Reclaiming this public space means letting the people, who are usually excluded by government action, to use it for their own needs: allowing homeless people to live there, protestors to organize, and food to be grown. Community gardens exemplify this. Built in the remnants of burned down tenements, they were claimed by the residents of the Lower East Side that stayed through disinvestment. They are both places to build community and ecological resilience. The community gardening system became one way to more sustainably handle waste. Weinberg proposes to expanding the gardens from former tenement sites to rooftops and other locations in the area. Efforts to compost and build community-run food systems bring ecosystems into the narratives, as well as protecting marginalized human communities. In combining the two, these systems create collective autonomy for the communities.

By in large the collective ideal is under threat today. The suburbs were a way for the white middle class to create a space for themselves in the 1950s—a space defined by exclusion. Reclaimed spaces reacted in the cities in contrast to this. However, starting in the 70s and 80s the return to the city by the new urban middle-class determined what the city should look like (Weinberg 50). This change, gentrification, was both the installation of new and unequal wealth, but also new values and aesthetics. These two factors—economic and cultural—are highly interconnected and work cooperatively. Public space is not always the space intended for everyone. It is monitored and controlled, according to whose identities are preferred. Private property (particularly with exception high rents) and rules and regulation of public spaces show the conflict between individual property rights for the rich and collective space for the people. Still, while the ideal of a fully autonomous, collective Lower East Side was not met, community gardens and other forms of reclaimed space persist today.

The housing crisis is the defining characteristic of many metropolitan areas. In the Lower East Side, market-based housing costs doubled in just one decade in New York’s Lower East Side (Angotti 12). Everyone is impacted by the high cost of housing. One-third of the nation are unable to pay for basic necessities because the cost of housing is too high (Gray 66). Low-income people are particularly negatively impacted, as speculation increases the costs of the land itself. They marketplace preferences the interests of high-income people over lower-income individuals. Simultaneously, because of the large amount of equity held in the land through this process, homeownership has been prefered over rentership. To encourage these equity holdings, for the past four decades, federal housing policy has favored promoting homeownership over rentership. Yet, because of the rising land values, homeownership is largely inaccessible in expensive housing markets. Even in the most expensive American neighborhood, the Upper East Side, 70 percent of people rent (Angotti 2).

Community land trusts present an interesting way to change how land is owned and make it more accessible for low- and moderate-income people. Community land trusts combine individual and collective land ownership. The community land trust purchases own the land, individuals then lease the land from the community land trust. Most community land trusts are based on providing stable and affordable for people who are not served by the marketplace. Thus, they create leases at low rents (Gray 69). This makes homeownership more accessible for people, who would not afford or qualify for loans, even with government assistance. Because the land is leased from the community land trust, instead of truly owned by the individual, the costs remain low over time. This process removes the housing from the marketplace. Instead of renting or buying as an individual, you are part of a compact. The residents are responsible as stewards for the land. Lease-holders make up the majority of the land trusts board. This makes the people living in the housing the proprietors of their own housing costs and quality (Gray 71). In doing so, it takes away the competitive and antagonistic relationship between tenants and landowners. This encourages the collective interest of the community over any one individual’s interests.

Community land trusts provide an alternative to the default laissez faire housing market. They can, therefore, help stabilize neighborhoods facing exponentially increasing rents due to speculative land development. Because of skyrocketing rents in cities across the country, it is not surprising that community land trusts are increasingly popular, with half starting this century and increasing most rapidly in the past decade (Gray 73). They provide the stability that is difficult for low-income renters. Yet they also remain within the marketplace, as a small-scale solution of collective within the greater sea of market-based housing. As a result, community land trusts are not a whole-scale solution, but part of a patchwork of different housing systems for different community groups. For most renters in expensive housing markets, rents will continue to rise, as the local economy grows and new highly paid people move into the community. Community land trusts have begun to create a more equitable system, but expanding quality affordable housing remains difficult for the vast majority. Moving forward, community land trusts beget the question would an equitable system have one form of land and property or use several interlocking systems?

 

In Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, Elizabeth Blackmar explains how New York City property was established, became profitable, and the political conflicts in the city’s property system. The concept of property was produced by the British and Dutch colonizers of the land. What is now Manhattan became the site for trade, but not a strong internal economy. European residents on the “new” land were able to establish and own their own households and artisans could buy small pieces of land (Blackmar 15). While this continued for some time, both the Dutch and English used to the land to form connections with businessmen, endowing land to the mercantile elite. In the 1640s, the West Indies Company established gave half-free slaves “negro lots” just outside the fort to protect the company’s trade interests (Blackmar 16). This shows the role land played, as a tool for the elites to utilize. 

The land was a crucial mean for profits, but because the city was based on trade and not the use of land itself, it did not hold the same “intrinsic” value it does today. Yet as the internal economy expanded, the land became used more (Blakmar 21). While this process was already underway, the economy turned a corner, shortly after the industrial revolution. From 1785 to 1800, the population increased from 23,000 to over 60,000 people. Because the economy was increasing, as well as the sheer number of people, the land became a means for profit itself. Between 1795 and 1815, the real land costs in New York City became eight times the price (Blakmar 38). The land was no longer a place for the economic outputs to occur, as the artisans used their land or how the West Indies Company used the fort for trade. Rather, the land itself was the cite for economic transaction and growth. The financial value was in the land itself.  

This can be seen in the regulations of land emerging at the time. Henry Rutgers, a large landowner in Lower East Side, set strict terms on his lease’s, such as not building backhouses, to maintain the value of the property, even though they were against the practical use of the occupants (Blakmar 41-42). Similarly, in the early twentieth-century real estate largely backed limitations to housing because it could be used to protect their own land values, which could fall if skyscrapers, like the Singer Tower, were built (Revell 29-30). The property-based economy because the lens for decision making, as profits became a goal within itself.

As the land became profitable, the issue of land ownership became not only a question of unequal distribution but also unequal power. As independent proprietorship fell, working-class people became trapped in wage labor and rent. According to Blakmar, by 1850, the working class had lost their claims to the city’s resources and their own labor and life value. Here Blakmar compares Marxist understandings of the worker-capitalist relationship to the tenant-landowner relationship, as landowners exploit their tenants for rent. They are able to do so because they own the land, the means of production This is particularly true for the increasing tenement population in the city. Dumb-bell apartments were first constructed in 1879 and became ubiquitous. They used almost the entire lot with a small gap in the back along each side. For residents, they were largely inhospitable, with little light and access to air. But, for the landowner, they were the most efficient means for exploitation (Revel 7-9). The use of land underwent a striking transformation into modern-day property. By looking at this history, we can learn that the current state of property has been produced and is not a natural state.  

In Whiteness as Property, Cheryl Harris claims that whiteness and property rights are historically linked to one another via legal claims. This claim on the surface is unsurprising, considering that on average blacks have one-tenth the assets that whites have, a largely structural and intergenerational phenomenon. Institutional access is certainly critical in this. Take Harris’ initial example of her grandmother, who, during the 1930s, took a job at a department store by passing as white, after separating from her husband. Whiteness (or in this case proximity for whiteness) became the tool for access to a standard of living, by in large inaccessible to blacks. Simultaneously, this is a story of intergenerational wealth and poverty, as her grandmother was from a family of sharecroppers, who had systematically been locked out of accumulating wealth (Harris 1710-1). This pushed her to leave the south and pretend to have a different identity. Because of the racialization of poverty, she unable to accumulate the wealth necessary to provide in times of hardship and because of her current identity, she was largely barred from passing it on to her children.

Yet, Harris’ argument goes beyond the continued historical inaccess to property for blacks and Native Americans and the inequality between them and whites, although these are central to her claims. Harris adds that racialization takes liberalism’s individual property rights, as opposed to group or collective rights, as foundational (Harris 1761). For Locke property was rendered individual once one’s labor was mixed with nature. This is the case for land, which once cultivated became an individual right (Locke 15).

This is in particular conflict with Native Americans and other indigenous people, who did not have individual property rights and were colonized by liberalist Europeans. We can see how whiteness is privileged in the courts through these contrasting understandings of property in the Mashpee Tribe v. Town of Mashpee court case. In this case, the Mashpee tribe sued to recover land that had been transferred to whites not in accordance with and without approval from the federal government. Yet, they were denied group claims to this land because they could not racially prove to be a tribe since their lineages were now largely mixed (Harris 1764). In this obfuscation of group and individual rights, the white individual rights of the land now held won out over the group rights of the tribe. Beyond this, it was done by denying the racialized group rights of the tribe. Because they of a mixed racial lineage, they were denied group status. In this regard, “passing” into white society was the act of not having group legal protections. This does not mean that the group is barred from discrimination, just as the Mashpee land continued to be withheld and Harris’ grandmother was still denied the intergeneration wealth typically provided to whites. Passing, in this legal definition, becomes the act of being fully subsumed in the liberal understanding of property without group protections.

 

Hanks, Angela, et al. “Systematic Inequality.” Center for American Progress, 21 Feb. 2018, www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/.

John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government remains a foundational text today. His understanding of property rights has shaped our contemporary liberal societal framework. Personal property is the basis for Lock’s argument. Thus, by understanding the Lockean property rights, we can understand how they have shaped our current society.

Locke uses two principles to justify private property. Firstly, “God gave the world to men in common,” and—or perhaps rather but—secondly, “individual man has a property in his own person; […] the labour of his body [is] strictly his” (Locke 13, 11). These two principles drive his understanding of property, both as they stand alone and how they conflict with one another. Through the first principle, Locke rebukes the sole ownership of property by monarchs. While prior theorists had limited property rights to the king, Locke believes “God gave the world to Adam and his posterity in common” (Locke 10).

This is true for the expansive and “unworked” land in the Americas. Yet, because bodily labor has individual ownership, so does the products of that labor. For example, once a man gathers acorns, they become his. While Locke does not explain precisely why when personal labor and communal (natural) property are mixed together they become solely private, it appears to be a part of his rationale that spatial productivity must be maximized. He explains that “[God] gave it them for their benefit and for the greatest conveniences of life they could get from it” and because labor contributes so much to value, it is the determinant of (Locke 13, 15). This is seen in land. As it becomes cultivated, it becomes private property for the cultivator, who, in turn, becomes the owner of the land. In doing so, they add value to the land. Unworked land has little value, according to Locke—this does not necessarily hold true today—compared the value of cultivated land.  

In the natural state, one’s own land ownership does not affect other’s ability to own land. Again, looking towards the Americas, the land seemed limitlessly expansive. Thus, everyone has the ability to attain land. Property thus is a right for all people through both their bodily ownership and the land itself. Because God gave man land for their greatest conveniences vis a vis private ownership, land and bodily ownership become the basis of all forms of ownership. In industrial cases, like London, the government exists to maintain these property rights for the people and ensure that these “natural” property rights are maintained.

When considering the built environment today, Locke’s schemes are paramount with the vast majority of land held privately and the notion of private ownership appearing pre-political, as it is within the Lockean schema. Yet three questions I had of Locke’s rationalization pertaining to New York are, first, how does it rationalize one’s own labor as not a right but rather a commodity? From slavery to contemporary construction workers, the owners of New York City are not the builders, but rather the owners of labor. Second, land appears to have a value determined by neither the person who works the land nor in the land itself. An undeveloped parcel of land in New York City would have immense value compared to the same land in the 1970s or the early colonial era. How does Locke compensate for these external market forces? Finally, I was struck by Locke’s understanding of money corrupting property rights because now people could own more than they could consume. With land being the ultimate commodity in New York City, how would Locke understand this?