Squatting, its Role in Communities and Outcomes for Individual Freedom

Squatting is the presence of individuals and groups in abandoned private buildings for the purpose of meeting, sleeping, commerce, and human activity generally. This type of activity is legally prohibited by local ordinances (i.e., trespassing, a violation or misdemeanor with a penalty of up to years in prison in New York City). Yet it is widely preacticed in Western culture, for as precisely as many different reasons as the number of activities alluded to above. Many of these squats have endured a long history of survival and use by residents year after year, in some places for hundreds of years.

Squatters rights laws in many states grant those who are able to demonstrate to landowners or the local authority that the property has been inhabited or otherwise disposed of by longtime squatters (non-owner inhabitants) for a certain period of time. The squatter's conduct, to warrant his or her takeover of the property title, must "dispossess" the property owner's interest or right to the property. But this provision is hard to apply literally when, as is often the case, the title-holder has long since abandoned the property and has, for whatever reason, vacated, razed, evacuated, or otherwise abandoned the property indefinitely, and ceased to maintain any effort or undertaking related to the land and its development, use as capital, exploitation, or maintenance. Property owners may have ceased paying any taxes related to the property, losing control to the local govrerments, some of which have limited means or inclination to dispose of it or sell it; or it is otherwise undesirable to the marketplace, like buildings in hazardous locations (see, for example, squats established in East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall)

When a squatter takes control of an abandoned property, he is putting to use a building or land that had laid farrow. The squatter's activity houses people and provides a venue for commerce and the arts; it provides a venue for assemblies of people with no better place to assemble, and thus promotes free speech and civil society. It exists as a counterweight to the powerful influence of mainstream marketing or popular/public "culture" by existing as a valuable capital source for the homeless, disenfranchised, penniless and yet creative, entrepreneurial, prolific, spiritual, artistic, talented in commerce and academia. These participants are freed from traditional roles that may compete with or stifle the private aspirations and inclinations of the individual.

The suggestion that such places are rife with crime and substance abuse is logically unsupported because illicit activities are no more likely to be exhibited in squats by squatters than by private owners or renters in buildings legally occupied but otherwise closed from public scrutiny. The observation that squatting is predominantly practised by lower income people and is thus more likely to be accompanied by unemployment in the formal economy, lack of formal education, drug-use, and petty crime, is poorly motivated because it unfairly discriminates against low-income people. to insist that squatting ought to be erradicated because of its statistical link with poverty and its symptoms (e.g., drugs and crime) is akin to insisting that politics and the formal economy be prohibited because of the statistical link between these activities and power and its symptoms (e.g., corruption and white collar crime). Surely squatting, like politics and commerce, can be practiced in many ways. Such activities practised with malicious or abusive tendencies is a deplorable but thankfully limited aspect of human nature. The presence in squatting of a minor association with behaviors considered antisocial in the public sphere is not enough to distract and observer or participant from the observation that squatting provides a powerful counterweight to the waste and disuse of valuable capital and resources, enables the growth by legitimate communities, and promotes individual freedom and enrichens the private lives of people of diverse persuasions.