America needs a new Homestead Act to make housing a human right and to end homelessness.

It is quite popular nowadays to demean my French, Scots-Irish, and English settler ancestors as genocidal racist maniacs, but they did come up with a concept which can be employed to end homelessness forever and take back the ability to simply move on in hopes of finding a better place to live, more commonly known as settling on the frontier.

There is an internal housing frontier in the United States, consisting of millions of serviceable houses which currently stand vacant, just waiting to be occupied, maintained, and improved. Now, they sit empty, owned by banks and Wall Street investment firms, slowly deteriorating in entropy, paying no property taxes, useless except to the ruling kleptocracy.

In the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, granting any adult male American citizen at the time title to so many acres of land, provided he or his family actually lived on that land and worked it. Its goal was to encourage American settlement of the entire continental United States while providing an outlet for those dissatisfied for whatever reason with living east of the Mississippi, and it succeeded.

Now the situation is very different, and this time any “victims” of such a policy would be absentee landlords, banks, hedge funds like Black Rock, and other nasty corporate gorgons that should have never been allowed to exist in the first place. Native Americans could participate as well, turning the tables and being the settlers themselves at the expense of some of their former exploiters.

Rebecca Parson, a DSA member and housing activist, is running in the Democratic primary for Congress in Washington’s 6th District. She proposes a movement for homeless people to simply occupy, or squat in, vacant housing stock across the country. She envisions a million Americans simply moving into empty houses owned by distant corporations and claiming them as their own, demanding housing as a human right. The New York Post just published an article critical of her.

And Fox News gave her a mildly hostile interview this past week.

DSA member or not, LGBTQ or not, and(puke-inducing for me) Democrat or not, at least Parson is advocating direct action, which I like very much. Direct, revolutionary action. She is challenging nothing less than the existence of the criminally rigged, kleptocratic capitalist real estate market we have now. I propose to take her idea a couple of steps farther.

A very broad-based populist front could demand a Second Homestead Act. Any houses which have stood vacant for more than six months would be subject to the jurisdiction of whatever Homestead Authority is established to administer the law. Anyone who filed a claim and moved into any such a vacant house would be required to occupy the property and make it completely habitable within five years, and live in it for at least ten.

For free. No property taxes for the first five years. No rent. No mortgage payments. Five years to completely fix the place up. After that, they and their heirs own the property outright until they sell it or leave it vacant. The whole idea is to encourage not only the settlement of vacant houses but the establishment of communities of people who want to make the area they are living in a better place for their families, and maybe descendants, to live.

This would be open to everyone. No means-testing. A chance for a fresh start on the new American frontier and to renew American culture and civilization.

As for the banks and hedge funds, well, we’ve bailed them out too much already and they don’t deserve what they have so long as a single American citizen is homeless. If they want to make a profit, then they better sell that empty house in six months or else risk losing it to anyone who decides to live there.

Mortgage companies would think twice about foreclosing on those who are struggling to make their payments. They would certainly have incentive to keep those people paying them, instead of risking making no money at all off of the property in the future.

As for the absentee landlords, well, my French ancestors were originally indentured servants to some be damned aristocrat, so I just don’t have any sympathy for them.

If Rebecca Parson was correct in saying that there is are 28 vacant houses in America for every homeless person, then a new Homestead Act would eliminate homelessness swiftly and for a long time to come.

This is something that Americans across a wide swathe of the political spectrum could get behind. The American Dream isn’t dead. It was stolen from all of us. It is time for us to take back our right to housing of our own to call home.