Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City by Amy Starecheski (review)

What can an oral history project on the experiences of squatters in a rundown section of New York City tell us about the real and the possible relationships between identity, labor, class, homeownership, citizenship, and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century? In Ours to Lose, anthropologist and oral historian Amy Starecheski chronicles and analyzes the rise of squatting in New York City's Lower East Side, focusing on the experiences of a few squatting communities in the area as they formed, grew, and eventually went through the complex, painful, and transformative process of legalization into low-income housing or co-ops in the early 2000s. Her study invites the reader in to what is likely an unfamiliar slice of the urban American experience, one that Starecheski herself glimpsed first hand as a brief inhabitant of the Lower East Side squat known as Casa del Sol in 2000. Though, as she points out, they "never called it a squat. We called it a homestead, and we were homesteaders" (19). This pointed distinction resurfaces throughout the book as a thematic tension in her narrative, as she weaves a complex analysis around fifty-five oral history interviews, archival sources, and participant-based observation. As she navigates the tangled history of late-twentieth century housing policy in New York City, Starecheski also seeks to contextualize this story within broader narratives in American ideologies, laws, and policies of homeownership.

Starecheski roots squatting in the tradition of homesteading, a key policy in nineteenth century America's westward expansionism. This helps her point to what is ultimately one of the central questions driving her work: can squatting be radical and transformative? Or does it only, and ultimately, lead to the privatization of housing and the reification of neoliberalism? Starecheski draws heavily upon her oral history interviews with squatters themselves to help "move beyond a dichotomy between structure and agency" in order to "understand how structures can be both permeating and dynamic, how people are both creative and constrained, how things change" (264). The story she tells is reminiscent of many radical movements of the twentieth century that sought to carve out new ways of living but which ultimately found themselves re-enlisted in mainstream processes and identities. For Starecheski, oral history serves as both a methodological and theoretical tool for finding a way out of this simplistic perspective. Through her interviews, she highlights the ways that these movements both shaped the people who made them and how they, in turn, helped carve small but lasting impacts into the state and into their urban landscape.

Starecheski's oral history work is well informed and sophisticated, offering an ambitious model for integrating oral history into the broader practices of history and anthropology. She notes that archiving these interviews is a "key practice that distinguishes oral history from anthropological life history interviews," because while they may "focus on a particular period in a person's life," they must "explore that focus within a broader biographical context" (35). (Transcriptions of the interviews are archived in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University as part of the Squatters' Rights Collection.) Her familiarity with the squatters' community in New York City no doubt helped her identify and gain access not only to the movement's most public and active leaders but also to those who had historically been silent and marginalized members—undocumented immigrants, those who were mentally ill, and those who struggled with addictions and lived lives marked by violence and deep poverty. By doing so she is able to provide a compelling cross-section of these squatter communities, capturing perspectives and experiences from across these diverse groups. She approaches her practice with the utmost attention to reciprocity, allowing her interviewees not...