Staten Island’s North Shore has seen an influx of squatting in empty houses and apartments in recent years, a byproduct of the city’s overarching housing and migrant crisis, which has prompted local officials to introduce new legislation that strips squatters of tenants’ rights in the city.
The North Shore is the “most populous” portion of the island, housing about 38% of all residents, according to the latest economic report from the state comptroller’s office. From 2010 to 2020, its population grew by 7.9%—more than all of Staten Island. That number, however, doesn’t include the waves of migrants and asylum seekers that hit the city in April 2022 and started to occupy shelters and other spaces on the island over the last two years, because the data is based on the census count and the American Community Survey (ACS), according to the state comptroller’s office.
Like many neighborhoods in the city, Staten Island’s North Shore is struggling to house people, which has led to a flood of squatters in empty homes and apartments. Some homeowners have simply gone on vacation, are doing renovations, have put a property up for sale, or have died, leaving their place unoccupied.
“The scourge of squatters wreaking havoc on our buildings and neighborhoods cannot be ignored,” said Councilmember Kamillah Hanks, who represents the North Shore and is the island’s sole Black councilperson. About 37% of North Shore residents identify as white, 25% Black, and 11% Asian, said the state comptroller’s report.
More than two-fifths of North Shore residents are renters, and of these, more than half are rent-burdened, said the report. Port Richmond, Tompkinsville, Stapleton, Clifton, and Fox Hills share the highest amount of rent-burdened tenants. Although there are a significant number of residents of color in most of the neighborhoods on the North Shore, the areas with the highest rent burdens are also where the highest numbers of Black and Brown people reside, said the state comptroller’s office. The proportion of total unoccupied household units is 10% of the estimated 70,090 units (not buildings) on the North Shore, according to the state comptroller’s data.
New York City in the 1970s, and the following two decades, was once home to the largest squatting movement in the nation because of a gargantuan housing crisis, among other issues. Manhattan’s Lower East Side (LES) was riddled with derelict and abandoned city-owned buildings at that time, dramatized by Johnathan Larson’s bohemian musical “Rent.” Scores of white political punk rock activists, LGBTQ progressives, musicians, and people struggling with substance abuse squatted in burnt-out and boarded-up buildings alongside Black, Brown, and immigrant residents who had made their homes in the tenements in the LES going back centuries.
Squatting was characterized as a political statement, a cause, a resistance, even a subculture of glamorized city grit. People learned to build barricades, rig booby traps, and incite riots whenever faced with the possibility of eviction. This led to escalated and hostile police tactics throughout the ’80s, culminating in the cops resorting to tanks and helicopters by the ’90s.
Squatting was also seen as a way to push back against gentrification, displacement of residents by private developers, and racist eviction tactics, such as when Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) members took over 25 buildings in East New York in Brooklyn in 1985.
Author Amy Starecheski, in her account of the squatting movement in her book “Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City,” wrote that by 2002, the city had conducted secret negotiations, agreeing to sell the LES squatted buildings for a dollar each to the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB). The nonprofit took out loans on the squatters’ behalf to renovate the buildings, bring them up to code, and then convert them to low-income co-operatives (co-ops). About five of the 11 buildings in LES were converted by 2013 in a long, messy process, Starecheski wrote.
This time period in the state’s history essentially cemented squatter’s rights, meaning that a person who can move into someone else’s property and live there without the owner knowing for at least 30 days is technically considered a tenant and cannot be evicted by the homeowner or police without a judicial process, even if that person broke in illegally to begin with.
Earlier in April of this year, four people were arrested who were squatting in a partially evacuated house with dilapidated conditions on Livermore Avenue on Staten Island. This June, Hanks combined forces with Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton at a press conference in front of 108 Tysen Street in New Brighton where another instance of squatting was found. James Clinton of District Attorney Michael McMahon’s office explained that the Tysen Street house was up for sale when the Realtor discovered a person living there. The police were able to use camera footage from the owner’s security system to secure a conviction since the squatter didn’t meet the 30-day threshold, Clinton said.
Antoinnette Donegan, a Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP) Engagement Coordinator (MEC) for Stapleton and West Brighton NYCHA Houses, confirmed that the issue of squatting was not just about homeowners in the North Shore district.
As of February 2023, 2,964 of 4,500 NYCHA apartments on the island were on the North Shore, accommodating 6,370 residents, said the state comptroller’s report. “This issue affects these residents as well. There are issues with folks living in vacant apartments, on the roof, and in the lobbies,” Donegan said.
She said the perpetrators are a combination of migrants desperate for housing and the fact that security doors in the two NYCHA developments she oversees don’t work, which lets anyone enter even if they don’t live there.
The squatting instances this year prompted Scarcella-Spanton to get the rules around squatter’s rights changed in the recently passed state budget. The term “squatter” was excluded from the definition of tenant, allowing for the DA’s office to charge people more easily with burglary and criminal trespassing in criminal court if they are discovered living in someone else’s home, said Clinton. At the moment, the DA relies on direct calls from the community to report instances of squatting since there’s no required city or state reporting about it—according to the NYPD, the police don’t track that information on “that level of specificity.”
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Hanks introduced Int. 0872, a bill that creates an interagency taskforce to remove squatters, help them find legitimate housing, communicate with the owners of abandoned buildings, and better identify squatted properties.
“The creation of a permanent task force will not only save time and resources, but also ensure a more coordinated and efficient response to squatting incidents,” Hanks said.
Dealing with a similar issue in her district in south Brooklyn, Councilmember Susan Zhuang also introduced Int. 0907 this May, which calls for an amendment to the city’s administrative code to report on squatting locations. Her office said that in the last five months, homeowners in Dyker Heights had their homes burned down because of squatters and the hardest part is identifying which buildings squatters are in.
“It’s something that’s become more prevalent in recent years as we’ve seen the unhoused population in our city increase. We don’t have the proper solutions needed,” Zhuang’s office said.
Her district is composed of a diverse immigrant community, with people from Asian, Russian, and Muslim backgrounds. Zhuang’s office said that many of the afflicted homeowners in her district who are dealing with squatters struggle with a language barrier, and therefore don’t always get the help they need in housing court.
“Most of them didn’t know who to reach out to or ask for help, and so these things have been stuck in housing court or dealing with squatters in their homes for years,” her office said. “We talked to someone a month ago who was in housing court for 10 years with an interpreter because they don’t know how to speak English and couldn’t navigate [the system] themselves. It’s an incredible financial burden put on predominantly immigrant families. The bill is needed to understand who this is happening to and how this is happening…this is still really dramatically hurting immigrant families more than families that have the means and understanding of the legal system to fight this.”