Chapter 2 of Amy Starecheski’s Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, “Who Deserves Housing?: The Battle for East Thirteenth Street,” the author tells the story of the practice of squatting as homesteading on East 13th St from 1984-1994 and the subsequent desire to make a claim to the property through adverse possession following the implementation of the 50/50 Cross Subsidy Plan. The author identifies the challenges squatters experienced when making adverse possession claims and uses archival records that documented the squatters’ process of creating their legal case and oral histories in order to examine how they crafted a narrative of continuous possession, how they used oral histories to compare articulation of property claims in court with stories of its practice in everyday life, and how the kinds of relatedness portrayed in the narrative exacerbated and created social conflicts in the squatter communities living on East 13th St (99). Prior to this reading, I only had a vague understanding of what squatting and homesteading were, and I think the author did a good job of not only defining the terms but also contextualizing them in the terrain of New York City. I like how Starecheski referred to homesteading using frameworks, implying their subjectivity and flexibility. I also thought the different configurations of squatting she identified were interesting, which are political squatting (squats as a base from which to foment conflict with the government), entrepreneurial squatting (depends for legitimacy on the value of the establishment to the community), conservational squatting (protest against gentrification rather than a defense against abandonment), deprivation-based squatting (targets low-income housing that is left empty without reason, legitimacy is achieved relatively easily) and squatting as an alternative housing strategy (legitimacy is more difficult, must add to the overall pool of affordable housing stock rather than taking a portion of it for use by individuals from middle-class backgrounds and alternative cultural or political tastes who aren’t considered to have a right to low-income housing).
Something that bothered me a little at the beginning of the chapter was the brusque way that Boyle and DeDominicis spoke about residents in the community, like how Boyle mentions ejecting a security guard from the coalition because he wasn’t provided heat and refused to pay his dues and how DeDominicis said that Angel Delgado represented “the Puerto Rican community that [they] wanted” (75). Starecheski writes later in the chapter about how “in the context of a neoliberalizing regime of urban governance, where the cultivation of valuable and valued subjectivities is a core part of the project of marketizing in inner-city spaces, the divide between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor can become heavily policed,” (83) which eloquently encapsulates my thoughts after reading the quotes at the beginning. As the chapter goes on and discusses the different rifts and tensions between the squatters’ movement, first with other mainstream housing activists and later between the squatters themselves, it wasn’t particularly surprising to me. There’s a moment earlier on page 86 that describes the squatters’ inability to utilize community networks to recruit and vet new members, and other actions that demonstrate how squatters “[denied] agency to some people of color living in the squats by failing to portray them as full active partners in the project of homesteading” (86). I think this in combination with the majority of organizers’ identities being white and working or middle-class made conflict inevitable. However, even if the movement wasn’t able to accomplish its goal of claiming adverse possession of the buildings on East 13th St, I agree with Starecheski that by “pushing the city to negotiate to transfer the remaining illegal squats on the Lower East Side to their residents” and “destabilizing the city’s property claims” (117), the legacy of the case is significant.
Thank you for the close reading of the chapter! Some of Starecheski’s research on the squatters’ movement on the Lower East Side might give you some insight into similar practices in the South Bronx. You might want to look into organizations like Banana Kelly to get a sense of how different communities in the South Bronx responded to mass abandonment of buildings in the 1970s and 1980s, for example. The main thing I wanted you to consider (which I think you did peripherally) is the way in which oral history was used to tell this story. How did oral history and community archiving allow Starecheski to produce her analysis in a way that, perhaps, another set of research methods might not? Or do you think another method might be able to elicit the narrative that Boyle and DeDominicis shared?