August 1953: House Concurrent Resolution 108 passes, abolishing the federally recognized status of first nations, eliminating approximately 109 tribes, and affecting 1,262,155 acres of land.
1968: The anti-racist White Panther Party is founded as a white response to the Black Panther Party; the group opens neglected properties and secures them for the underhoused.
1974: HUD institutes an Urban Homesteading Program based on Section 810 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974.
1977: Milton Street opens the unsanctioned “Walk-In Urban Homesteading Program” in Philadelphia, a direct-action style of homesteading and friendly euphemism for squatting.
1982–83: Squatters Anonymous, mostly composed of middle-class youth, becomes known for its mass public squatting demonstrations in San Francisco.
1983: Congress passes the Housing and Urban-Rural Recovery Act of 1983 to address the complaints of ACORN regarding the fairness and accessibility of the Urban Homesteading Program.
1985: Between June and August of 1985, ACORN takes an impressive twenty-five buildings unlawfully.
1987: Charlie “Boo” Burrus is charged with misappropriating $128,000 in public funds from Philadelphia’s homesteading agency, ICON, for personal expenses, despite actually using it to fund an unsanctioned food distribution program.
1987: Congress passes the McKinney-Vento Act, requiring the federal government to track its surplus property and convert it to shelter, services, or storage for the benefit of homeless persons.
1988: In Tompkins Square Park, 450 riot police on horseback battle homeless people, squatters, and punks over the newly enforced park closing time.
May 1, 1990: Homeless and homeless advocates across the country coordinate a national day of takeover, publicly claiming vacant properties from New York to Los Angeles.
1991: Urban homesteading is outlawed in United States per U.S. Code TITLE 12 > CHAPTER 13 > SUBCHAPTER I > § 1706e.
January 1992: Charlie “Boo” Burrus suffers a cerebral bleed (a condition similar to a stroke) while serving a one- to five-year sentence in prison.
1992: Homes Not Jails is founded in San Francisco.
May 1995: Squatters are evicted from 541 and 545 E. 13th Street in the Lower East Side of New York City.
1995: Homes Not Jails occupies a building at the possible site for a new ballpark, holding it hostage until Mayor-elect Willie Brown concedes to support the group’s plans for a vacant, city-owned apartment building at 17th and Capp streets in the Mission District.
1999: Senator John McCain proposes reinstating the Urban Homesteading Program in S. 485 [106th]: Urban Homestead Act of 1999.
1999: Homes Not Jails pays $5,000 toward the back taxes of an abandoned Page Street property that homeless individuals (including Victor Willis, the “cop” in the Village People) had allegedly occupied for the previous five years since the owner died. Despite wanting to claim it in the name of homeless people, they can not substantiate claims.
1999: Albany police sweep through the Albany Bulb (“the Albany Landfill”) park outside of Berkeley in a mass eviction attempt of campers and homeless people.
2000: The Washington, DC, chapter of Homes Not Jails makes its first public demonstration for fair housing by openly occupying a vacant Columbia Heights home in the middle of the day, claiming that they would “fix it up” for a needy family. This action is poorly received.
2002: The City of New York offers to sell twelve squatted buildings in the Lower East Side to the squatters for $1 each, using UHAB as a conduit.
2002: San Francisco City Council passes the Surplus City Property ordinance, developed by Homes Not Jails, which requires city agencies to compile and maintain a list of unused city properties and relinquish them to non-profit housing developers who, in turn, make them available for homeless facilities or low-income housing.
2003: Jamie Loughner and Thomas Gomez win a court battle over the DC activists’ takeover of an abandoned school.
April 26, 2007: Umoja Village Shantytown—an autonomous homeless encampment in Miami—burns down, leaving many with no place to go.
2007–2008: The U.S. “foreclosure crisis” begins.
2009: McKinney-Vento Act is amended to better fit the needs of newly homeless foreclosure victims.
2009: Democratic representative from Ohio Marcy Kaptur declares publicly that foreclosure victims should become “squatters in their own homes.”
May 2009: Congress passes a temporary act to grant renters at least ninety days notice to move out of foreclosures, though few people are aware of the extended protection and continue to move from their homes when prompted.
2010: The New York State Senate passes the Smart Growth Public Infrastructure Policy Act, which implements a program to use existing infrastructure to reduce sprawl.
May 2010: The federal government sues Deutsche Bank for foreclosure fraud.
March 2011: So many Floridians begin attempting adverse possession claims that the state passes a bill adding roadblocks to the process.
May 2011: After the bank is branded the largest slumlord in Los Angeles, the city attorney’s office files a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and to force the rehabilitation of the foreclosed properties.
June 2011: A Detroit court rules that occupants of derelict buildings are not protected against warrantless police searches—even if the resident actually owns the condemned house.
December 6, 2011: Occupy Wall Street and Organizing for Occupation stage a demonstration in which they publicly and successfully claim a foreclosed house in East New York. Embarrassingly, the house later turns out to not be a foreclosure after all, and the remaining squatters are evicted in April 2012.
Introduction
“When starting a new culture, as when beginning any new group, it is wise to present a starting structure, as opposed to offering the opportunity to structure alone; grist for the mill.”
—Anonymous entry in the 537 E. 13th Street homesteading journal, January 1985[1]
“I’ve lived on this street for nearly fifteen years,
Lived here with my hopes, lived here with my fears.
Paid my taxes, paid my bills,
Watched my money vanished in the council tills.
Along come these scruffs with their education,
Their grand ideas, talk of corruption.
My rent keeps rising, my job gets boring.
If things gets worse then I’m gonna have to join them.”
—“Dirty Squatters” by Zounds
By making a whimsical decision in 2003 to buy a video camera (to tape my drunk friends at parties), I unwittingly determined my focus for the following decade: squatting.
In 2004, having long since quit school in San Francisco and moved to Oakland, I fell in with people like Steve DeCaprio who was living in an abandoned house on the border of Berkeley. Steve had been having some negative encounters with police, and since I was one of the few people he knew at the time with a video camera,[a] he asked if I would film his interactions with the police for use in court. I did, firstly as a favor and secondly as a way to annoy the cops. But later Steve planted an idea in my mind: “Why don’t you use the footage to make a documentary?” Being entirely unreasonable in my youth (and aware that my film experience was limited to video yearbook club in high school), I accepted the challenge. I became Steve’s regular camera guy.