From Welfare Queens to Respectable Homeowners: Urban Homesteading and Squatting in the Late Twentieth Century United States

In the 1970s, more than 100 American cities adopted “urban homesteading” programs, which offered free or minimally priced government-owned houses to individuals and families who pledged to rehabilitate and occupy them. Policymakers and journalists drew explicitly on romantic images of nineteenth century pioneers and initially focused on convincing (white) middle-class suburbanites and young, upwardly mobile urbanites to “settle” in declining inner-city neighborhoods. By the late 1970s, low- and moderate-income minority urbanites were challenging this paradigm. Community activism, including squatting campaigns in a dozen cities in the late 1970s, won program reforms designed to target homesteads instead to low- and moderate-income urbanites. This paper analyzes the central role of African American women, often single mothers and household heads, as urban homesteaders and squatters. Amidst popular and political denunciations of the “underclass,” homesteading promoted an image of low-income urban residents as hard-working pioneers and respectable homeowners. In particular, in claiming a right to homeownership and a role in neighborhood stability and improvement, low-income women homesteaders challenged contemporary labeling of Black single mothers as both a cause and a sign of urban crisis. But activists’ and homesteaders’ assertion of homeownership as a right proved less compelling in an increasingly conservative political environment than a celebration of homeownership a mechanism to reform the poor. By the late 1980s, such arguments fueled a federal homesteading effort that explicitly denigrated public housing and celebrated privatization and the free market as the solution to both the need for affordable housing and the presumed pathology of the ghetto.