Squat right here

Rather interesting story in Saturday’s Washington Post from their London Bureau Chief about squatters taking advantage of the hard times to take over properties in Britain.

In the US we tend to think of squatting in terms of westerns—a phenomenon of the frontier range lands, not so much an urban experience. You know—the cattlemen hire guns to toss out the squatters spoiling their grazing. Our contemporary homeless don’t seem to take over unoccupied houses, going instead to shelters, parks or doorways.

But in Britain, it’s quite the social statement, partly because appropriating property is a civil, not a criminal, offense, & the burden is on the owners to go through a process that can take months (or longer) to evict the squatters.

According to Wikipedia in 1979 there were an estimated 50,000 squatters throughout Britain, 30,000 in London. (Well, makes sense, doesn’t it: if rent money is no object, why would you choose to live in Luton or Glasgow when you can have Picadilly?)

Today’s squatters seem to be a mix of the genuinely homeless (although the reporter didn’t find anyone who said he had no legitimate place to live) & the usual cohort of “artists” & others who spend their time getting up the noses of the establishment instead of, you know, getting a job.

There are a couple of things I find interesting about this. I noticed in my years in Britain that there’s this innate horror at the idea of living anywhere to which you don’t own the deed. Paying rent “is just throwing your money away”, so people will mooch off their friends & families for months (or longer) until they can “get on the property ladder”.

I can sort of understand this, given the landlord-lessee laws that weigh heavily in the formers’ favor (& the fact that there’s nothing like what we would recognize here as apartment complexes & management companies: flats in a huge building will be individually owned & rented out, & you’re lucky if the landlord will fork out money for a management service to take care of things that go wrong). But the idea that the ’rents or your college buddies should subsidize you while you rack up a deposit instead of you actually living independently just strikes me as rather entitlement-infused.

The other thing I find odd is that the Brits are so wishy-washy about property rights. Not only is squatting viewed as a sort of stick-it-to-the-man cocked snook that does no real harm to anyone (although I wonder whether the average owner of a detached semi in Hampshire would be quite so blasé if he returned from a month in his vacation villa in Majorca to find twelve “artists” in residence), but there’s also a legal right for walkers to cross land belonging to private parties. If any property owner should dare to fence off his land, you’d hear the squawking in Uganda.

Now, this is just bizarre, given that the template for Thomas Jefferson’s inalienable rights of “life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness” came from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher of law & the social contract, declared that the function of legitimate government is to preserve, so far as possible, the rights to life, health, liberty & property of its citizens.

Somehow that idea got transferred to the Colonies & transmuted in the mother country.