News & Events: Lunch Lecture: March Lunch Lecture: The Use of Property (19 March 2025)

By Responsible City Team on Thu, Feb 27, 2025

The taking over of unoccupied and abandoned property has long served as a critical tactic of homeless activists to both meet immediate shelter needs, and to draw attention to the exclusionary nature of liberal property regimes. Some activists have specifically made claims to government property, intervening in normative conceptualizations of public use and public benefit. In this paper, I consider the reverberations of one such intervention, where activists took over an abandoned federal building in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, which contributed to the introduction of legislation that requires ʼsurplusʼ and ‘underutilized’ U.S. federal property be made available for homeless services before they can be sold or transferred for any other purpose. Since 1987, Title V of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act has allowed for around 900 acres of federal land across 30 states and the District of Columbia to be utilized for housing assistance. Examining both state and activist mobilizations of Title V, I critically attend to the ways that the governance of ‘surplus’ space intersects with the governance of ‘surplus’ life in the (dis)use of public property and consider the role of surplus in the maintenance of and resistance to liberal property regimes.

The event will take place online on 19 March from 12:30 to 13:30 and can be attended via this Zoom link. More information on the Lunch Lecture series can be obtained from the flyer below.