Squatting in the Recession
I’ve got a piece up over at Slate on squatting in the current economic downturn. Here’s a taste:
To survive, everyone needs to have a place to be and to sleep, eat, and, let’s face it, go to the bathroom. For most of us, that place is the home. As rising unemployment pushes more people out of their houses and apartments, however, and growing numbers of Americans cannot find a place to perform these essential functions legally, they will have little choice but to break the law. And so some of them are turning to a strategy that has cropped up repeatedly in American history—squatting. Governments are sometimes tempted to respond to a spike in this form of outlaw residency by simply forcing squatters out. The better strategy, however is to treat squatting as a symptom of a simultaneous failure of both the market and the government. Viewed in this light, an outbreak of squatting is a sign that governments should change their housing policies to make it easier for poor people to find the housing they need—as law-abiders instead of renegades.
UPDATE: The NY Times has just put up a piece on the spread of shanties in U.S. cities.
A very timely and sobering article, and I think the solutions you propose to reduce squatting are both sensible and workable. I’m glad you mentioned the Sacramento tent city, which was profiled recently on NPR. If the government and individuals aren’t motivated out of kindness to help those among us who are living on the edge, then perhaps this comment about the tent city in the LA Times article you linked to will do the trick: “Then this tattered encampment along the American River began showing up on Oprah Winfrey, Al Jazeera and other news outlets around the world.”
Very interesting article, Eduardo.
In the suburban area where I live, there a number of homeless people who live in their cars. They sleep at night in PADS shelters (not sure if PADS is just a local program or if it’s more widespread – it’s a network of local faith communities that provide a sleeping mat and a place to shower). During the warmer months many of them sleep in the public woods (“forest preserves” around here).
One of my brother deacons who ministers in PADS had an interesting idea – letting the homeless use vacant hotel rooms. They are secure, heated, and have bathroom and shower facilities. How to get hotel owners to agree to the idea, we’re not sure.
It is interesting that when we have a surplus of housing, on the one hand, and homeless people, on the other, that it would be difficult to come up with a solution.
The pre-economic-crisis problem of homelessness — often involving the mentally ill, substance abusers, and so on — was intractable. But when the people are homeless because they have lost their jobs and can’t pay their mortgages or their rent, it seems to me quite another story.
I’m in Sacramento. What seems kind os sad is that there have always been people living under the brudge here, and I suppose almost everywhere else, but only now when the recession is starting to hurt middle and upper classes do people seem to have noticed.
Great article, Eduardo.