Bring on the squatters! In the 19th century, much of the United States was settled in a similar manner. When the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War added immense tracts of public land in the West, the federal government initially sought planned development and public sale of the land. But settlers usually got there first and defied the government in Washington to remove them. Reacting to squatter pressures, Congress at first confirmed titles retroactively, then with the 1841 Preemption Act offered the land prospectively for sale to squatters, and finally with the 1862 Homestead Act granted the land free of charge prospectively. Homesteading was simply polite language for the now legally authorized squatting on public land. Squatting was also common in New York and other American cities in the 19th century, and many people occupied their unauthorized sites for decades. Eventually, however, the authorities tore down the squatter settlements in New York, responding to demands that the land be made available for intensive development. Unlike settlers in the American West, the New York squatters had never acquired a property right and thus could not profit from the growing value of their sites; eventually they were simply cast into the street. This treatment was both unfair and inefficient: It often took long court fights and many years to evict people, delaying a higher-valued use of the land even as the squatters were finally denied any appropriate compensation. It would have been better to enact an urban version of the Homestead Act, as the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has proposed that nations across the world do today. reason/archives/2005/08/01/illegal-cities/singlepage
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 11:01:40 +0000
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