Nine-tenths of the Law. Hannah Dobbz

work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.”

      —Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

      The rough-and-tumble methodology of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural homesteading and land-grabbing may have shaped land distribution across the continent, but it does not explain the circumstances of inner-city housing. Though many westward-moving rural pioneers were poor, a bulk of the nation’s poverty-stricken also subsisted in squalid urban conditions. Faced with a choice between slummy tenements or ramshackle squats, many poor nineteenth-century city-dwellers made their homes in decaying, neglected properties—their choice facilitated by highly unregulated city infrastructure. In 1880, there were an estimated 20,000 squatters in Manhattan alone, a figure comparable to estimates of squatters in some Third World nations today. The lion’s share of these squatted dwellings were actually more comfortable than even the most pleasant tenements, and as a result of personal investment in space, squatted blocks maintained more sanitary conditions than did slum neighborhoods. New York City, in particular, is a historical benchmark for U.S. squatting movements, with a deep history in housing struggles that begins in the nineteenth century—likely because of its position as an immigration hub—and continues today.[1]

      The discourse of modern squatting tends to focus on individual circumstances, its foundation assuming a reductive “housing is a human right” slogan, without an analysis of the incubatory conditions that breed resistance. The events within housing movements cannot be isolated from the organism that is the city. Because the urban environment is subject to its design, neighborhoods within the organism are perpetually in a state of flux, with their intentions shifting through the decades. This mention of design and intentionality is more commonly heard in modern social-justice vernacular as gentrification or revitalization: the widespread circumstance of developers colluding with city planners to alter the representation of impoverished neighborhoods to suit middle-class tastes. Where the Western frontier was open to spatial interpretation and outward growth, the city is restricted to the space within its perimeters, forcing it to either grow upward or grow on top of existing neighborhoods, causing displacement.