This article uses “urban homesteading” to argue that working-class activists played an important role in the transformation of American housing policy from the 1970s through the 1990s. Designed to tackle abandonment and promote gentrification, homesteading programs in the 1970s offered houses to individuals who would rehabilitate and reside in them. Through protest, negotiation, and squatting campaigns, working-class urban activists demanded that policymakers reorient homesteading programs to enable low-income homeownership. Activists’ alternative vision of homeownership demanded access to a regulated system of federally subsidized homeownership and often adopted limited equity ownership; at the same time, their celebration of homeownership as a strategy for self-reliance offered a useful tool for Republicans seeking to privatize public housing and bipartisan efforts to deregulate mortgage lending, both of which increased housing insecurity. The article thus argues that working-class urban residents, often seen as merely victims of neoliberal policymaking, played an important role in that process.