Property and precarisation: reading Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood and Fly’s CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM!

In early 2024, news coverage of squatter occupations in the borough of Queens led to amending the legal definition of ‘tenant’ in New York. Those media reports suggest that the practice of squatting is a growing menace and that those most threatened are the housed. I argue that the coverage documents and contributes to what political theorist Isabell Lorey terms ‘precarization’, a neoliberal process that produces insecurity as ‘a central preoccupation of the subject’, and that the materiality and affective centrality of the house amplify that preoccupation with insecurity. The alleged threat is credible in part because squatting has a history of disrupting housing as a market phenomenon in New York City. This essay examines two graphic narratives from an earlier era of cultural panic about squatters. Both Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood (2000) and Fly’s CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM! (1998) represent the practice of ‘staying put’ as a rejection of the security promised by finance capital, thus depicting squatting as a compelling form of unhousing. Both texts call out the false promises of security and locate potential in and for what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘bad debt’. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.