Urban Homesteading

Early Federal Homesteading

Homesteading began in the United States in 1842, when it was adopted as a government policy to help settlers become landowners in Florida under the Armed Occupation Act of that year; this act included provisions that could be considered precursors to homesteading on a national scale. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the first homesteading legislation—the Home-stead Act. This legislation, and the support for home-steading generally, were based on the belief that everyone is entitled to a piece of land as a basic investment on which he or she can then build equity. Under the 1862 Homestead Act, applicants received land grants of 80 to 160 acres depending on the location. The homesteaders were required to improve the homestead and make it their permanent residence for five years. Homesteaders and critics complained, however, that federal government land grants for railroads and other improvements removed public access to the best land.

Over time, the program was amended to increase the maximum acreage to 640 acres and to reduce the residence requirement from five to three years. Both changes were made to improve the economic vitality of homesteading and to encourage settlement of the western frontier. Eventually, homesteading became less attractive economically and practically ended in the 1930s when most of the remaining public land was withdrawn from homesteading eligibility. The U.S. government ended the homesteading program in 1976 for all states except Alaska; the Homestead Act expired in Alaska in 1986.

The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was another major federal attempt at homesteading. This legislation was part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal response to the Great Depression. The newly created Division of Subsistence Households in the Department of the Interior operated the program, which incorporated a subsistence-homestead concept intended to correct the population concentration in industrial centers by creating cooperative communities. Cost overruns, the lack of a sound economic base in most communities, and other problems arose, and all efforts at resolving these problems were abandoned in 1937.

Modern Urban Homesteading

Urban homesteading was proposed in the late 1960s to address the troublesome phenomenon of housing abandonment that occurred primarily in large central cities of [Page 1422]the midwestern and northeastern United States. The population of some major urban centers began to decline dramatically after 1950, when the number of people leaving the city exceeded those moving in. Central-city neighborhoods became less appealing to middle-and upper-income households, which increasingly moved to suburban communities.

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