A New Frontier of Settlement: Urban Homesteading Programs, Federal Housing Policy, and Urban Redevelopment, 1974-1986

A New Frontier of Settlement: Urban Homesteading Programs, Federal Housing Policy, and Urban Redevelopment, 1974-1986

The concept of urban homesteading has lived many different lives. Today, it is primarily associated with urban farming and agricultural self-sufficiency. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, government officials saw urban homesteading as a way to tackle intersecting urban ‘crises’ in one fell swoop. Homesteading could provide homes for working and lower-middle class constituents for whom home ownership might otherwise be out of reach; increase a city’s tax base; save a city the cost of demolishing properties; and arrest the processes of neighborhood decay associated with vacant buildings.

First conceived by Joseph Coleman, a Black Philadelphia city councilman, in 1968, Philadelphia’s program launched in the fall of 1973, along with similar programs in Wilmington, Delaware and Baltimore, Maryland.[1] The following year, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 established an urban homesteading program at the federal level. That year, Detroit mayor Coleman Young proclaimed his desire to institute a homesteading program akin to Philadelphia’s, one “particularly [for] the poor and the black … [and] properly mortgaged so that the poor can take advantage.”[2] The idea of repurposing otherwise abandoned property makes an enormous amount of intuitive sense in a country where persistent and substantial racial disparities in rates of home ownership are responsible for a large part of the racial wealth gap. Even then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan sought to use the promise of homesteading to “reach out” to Black Americans in a 1980 campaign speech where he pledged to support programs in “city ghettos” where “abandoned government-owned housing … would be sold to a family for $1 on the condition that they rehabilitated and lived in it.”[3] In practice, however, the federal government, in partnership with local and/or state government, sought to use urban homesteading to ‘revitalize’ neighborhoods on the edge of decline but that had not yet tipped into wholesale decay. These neighborhoods might be “blighted,” to use the lingo of the day, but could still be salvaged.

The theory behind this version of urban homesteading shares much in common with the theory of broken windows policing that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. First put forth by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George L. Kelling in a 1982 Atlantic article and subsequently adopted by New York City police commissioner William Bratton, “the broken windows theory argues that “crime and disorder are usually inextricably linked … serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked.” A broken window in an empty house leads to a slippery slope of litter, street fights, and panhandling, which in turn causes residents to behave in anti-social ways that further open the door to more serious crimes like drug-dealing, prostitution, and mugging.

As a set of policies aimed at intercepting a process of neighborhood deterioration, federally supported urban homesteading projects followed a similar logic. The goal of these programs was not to provide the most affordable housing to the greatest number of people, or even to the most desperate among those in need of shelter, but rather to reverse the creep of “blight” associated with the physical characteristics of uninhabited properties: peeling paint, piles of trash, cracked pavement and overgrown grass and, of course, broken windows. As such, the homesteaders installed through the HUD-funded “Demonstration” programs fit a niche profile. In Chicago, “[f]amilies of four earning above $33,200 are not eligible, but neither are families earning below $13,800”—at a time when the poverty threshold for a non-farm family of four was $8,414. Candidates must not have experienced bankruptcy within the past three years (an automatic disqualification) but must also demonstrate a “real need” for housing—a five-member family, say, squeezed into two rooms.[4] In the early years of the Philadelphia program, one of the nation’s first, the average annual income of the homesteaders was $7,000 when the 1975 poverty threshold for a non-farm family of four was $5,500.[5] Due to the renovation and rehabilitation costs associated with homesteaded properties, “the very poor … cannot take advantage of homesteading.”[6]

Depending on one’s idea of who ought to be prioritized by local and federal housing policy, these urban homesteading programs could be considered either small but resounding successes or disappointingly limited in scope and execution. At no point, for example, was urban homesteading considered by government officials a way to provide homes and stability for the homeless. The provision of basic housing—a roof over one’s head—was in practice only a small piece of what homesteading programs sought to achieve. Radical as the potential of homesteading might seem, the urban homesteading programs realized by HUD and its partners ultimately provided housing only for a select few while articulating a relatively limited conception of what community revitalization and reinvestment could look like.

Researcher: Emma Herman