When do you consider something abandoned and open to homesteading? There doesn’t seem to be any clear consensuses on this subject so I’d like to see how everyone feels about it.
In New York City in the 1970’s many buildings in the Lower East Side and Alphabet City were abandoned by landlords since they were no longer profitable to keep. What this abandonment meant was that the landlords used their influence to get the city to buy the buildings and then the city did nothing with them.
Later groups of homesteaders or “squatters” as they called themselves moved into those buildings, kicked out the drug addicts from the neighborhood, planted gardens, hooked up and started paying for electicity and water and generally made things much better than they were for themselves and their neighbors. The best known person was a guy named Adam Purple who took an abandoned lot and turned it into an amazing garden http://www.earthcelebrations.com/gardens/eden.html .
But later in the 80’s and then again in the mid 1990s when real estate prices in New York went up and especially because people like the squatters cleaned up areas previously known to be dangerous, the landlords who got the city to buy their land suddenly wanted the city to sell it back to them and that included forcible eviction of the squatters. One place on C and 13th street got evicted in 1996 at 4am. I got a call late one night when I lived in the Bronx to come down and help defend it from the cops (I was friends with many of the people who lived there and still am) but since I was way up in the Bronx I did not make it in time and in fact hardly anyone did (yep…pre-dawn raids of “compounds” really do work). And the cops and firemen declared the building unsafe as soon as everyone was driven out of there and then they cut multiple big holes in the floors and cielings of all four floors of the building to prove their point…it was unsafe to occupy and was made unsafe by them…not by the squatters.
As far as the criteria goes for what is abandoned and what is not..I would say that a number of criteria have to be met. The first one would be if the place was occupied by an owner or a renter. That is obvious. A squatter or homesteader who would move in then would be more of a permanent burgler than anything. The next would be if it is unoccupied and a private party owns the land and is actively trying to sell it (one can do due dilligence on these things like the squatters in NYC did) then maybe negotiation with the owner is in order or one might look for another place. The final criteria is that if you move in , stay for a few years and no one objects on grounds that you unfairly took it and your labor made it more valuable. Then as far as I am concerned the place is then the squatter’s.
The tricky question is that many squatters in New York used the presence of drug addicts living in the building as a marker as to whether or not they could take it. Technically the squatters siezed many buildings from crackheads and thus commited agression against people who could claim residency and ownership of the place. It could be said that the crackheads were commiting an agression against the property of others simply by using the drugs, stealing and panhandling (plus they used someplace as a toilet when there was no plumbing.) but perhaps they were just minding their own business and using drugs.
I agree with Rothbard’s assessment:
“Abandonment” occurs when an owner deliberately renounces his title without passing it on to another person, or when a property goes unused for such a long time that no discernable evidence of its prior transformation (from raw resource to property) can be found. An untended house will disappear, foundation and all, within a couple of centuries. But it is also unlikely that a property so neglected will produce any challengers (bearing valid title) to homesteaders, even long before it becomes completely “un-transformed” so to speak.
However, abandonment by the latter means doesn’t seem likely to occur. Naturally there will be exceptions, but a person with no further use for a property will probably sell it to someone to whom it would be useful, rather than just let it sit and deteriorate. Or to put it in economic terms, the opportunity cost of holding on to something out of nostalgia or a holdout mentality versus sellilng it for a profit would tend to be persuasively high.
That seems kind of subjective to me. I’m sure it would work well in obvious situations (such as a house collapsing after years of neglect) but what about situations such as fire damage to the property and the owner doesn’t have the immediate funds to repair the home? What about people that own a plot of land in Florida and a plot of land in New York, then travel between the two during the off seasons in a mobile home (RV)?
In those cases the owner is fairly readily identifiable. In the case of the buildings described in the previous post, the city bought them - therefore there is no legitimate owner, prior to homesteading, so there’s no need to wait for them to fall down and disappear…
I actually have a graphic novel titled “War in the Neighborhood” by Luc Sante that’s about this very story. One of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.
I’ve got to think about the rest of your post so I’ll get back to you with more a little later.
It’s still their home; they would still have the title to it. Part of homesteading is the idea of the just claim: you can lay claim to a resource if you have the intention of making it productive and the means to do so within a reasonable period of time.
Additionally, the definition of “home” doesn’t have to include the presence of a house. If the owner doesn’t have the immediate funds to repair the home, it would be enough to clear out the debris and turn it to a different, temporary use. Off the top of my head, I would suggest that the owner sell an option on the reconstruction of the home, and make it a “lot in predevelopment” until they have the ability to pay for the service itself.
A fence and a notorized title are that would be necessary to maintain the ground as valid property so long as it is valid in the first place. If they are parking their RV on 300 acres with no other use than privacy, that could not be considered valid. 10 acres; maybe. I don’t know. That’s what Walter Block would call a “continuum problem”: something that would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis because there’s no clear-cut answer in theory.
Luc Sante is kind of the historian of the Lower East Side area so it is not suprising that he would write about it. He wrote a pretty decent book on that area called “Lowlife” about it as well. Some of the squats have won their court cases where they were declared the legal owners of the buildings since they settled there. Then the City would present them with a tax bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for back taxes and then claim the building anyway.
One time on Rivington street I was wandering around and came accross what looked like a typical protest. There were cameras, food set out (I assumed by Food Not Bombs as they would often feed protesters) so I hung around eating really good food and chatting with people. Sudenly I realised the cameras were not news cameras…then I saw Jerry Orbach…and realised I had just crashed the set of a Law and Order episode. The people who I thought were squatters were actors playing squatters and they thought I was an actor playing a squatter.
Law and Order hired caterers that basicaly served the same food as the scavenging Food Not Bombs did but they did not put out a donation coffee can which should have tipped me off.