How are climate change and debt – whether sovereign, municipal or household – related under racial capitalism? When faced with a warming planet caused by centuries of racial capitalism, how are people organizing the necessary ideas and social movements to fight back? What are the alternatives and solutions to racial capitalism-driven climate change proposed both by movements on the ground, and by those in (or near) halls of power around the world, from multilateral institutions to national governments to research universities? This paper offers an accessible introduction to many of the large-scale transformative ideas out there, from green central banking to degrowth, from climate reparations to de-dollarization. In addition, based on interviews with Argentina’s Debt for Climate, Britain’s Don’t Pay UK, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Chile’s Ni Una Menos, and the South Africa Green Revolutionary Council, this paper shares tactics and strategies used by social movements around the world to resist debt and climate change in the same frame.
The City of Los Angeles states that the “primary mission” of the Comprehensive Cleaning and Rapid Engagement (CARE+) program is to “deliver services to the individuals experiencing homelessness within their service areas.” While CARE+ costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year, not even including law enforcement, what does this budget translate into on the ground? Conducted by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights and Venice Justice Committee, Very Large Expenditure, Very Little Care: Los Angeles’ “CARE+” Homeless Services Program in Council District 11 reports findings from repeat observation of CARE+ operations in Venice, a related survey of unhoused persons about displacement and outreach, and a review of Councilmember Traci Park’s communications about CARE+ and homeless encampments. The report finds that CARE+ employs a large number of City staff and equipment to displace and dispossess unhoused people, with little to no outreach for shelter or housing. While the local councilmember celebrates removing encampments and vehicle dwellings with little to no mention of the people living there, it is worth re-considering how well CARE+ matches the City’s priorities for homeless services. As such, the report provides policy recommendations to accomplish neighborhood cleaning while still supporting unhoused people.
“Keep Moving”: The West LA Vehicle Residents Survey reports findings from a face-to-face survey of 99 vehicle residents residing in West Los Angeles. Conducted by Venice Justice Committee organizers over a one year period beginning in early 2024, the survey asked questions about pathways to vehicle residency and resident demographics, experiences with governing authorities and social services, vehicle condition and mobility, and shelter/housing program experiences and preferences, among other related topics. The report finds that the policies employed by city and county authorities to resolve visible instances of vehicular homelessness often harm vehicle residents and don’t deliver on their promises. The vehicle dwelling is a personal safety net in the absence of a sufficient social safety net. But vehicle residents are forced into adopting mobility due to various forms of criminalization, with social services outreach both inadequate and inconsistent. While governments across California and beyond expand policies of displacement and dispossession of vehicle residents, parking stability paired with supportive services that enable access to affordable housing offers an alternative vision. Methodologically, the West LA Vehicle Residents Survey is a testament to the power of community-engaged scholarship to challenge dominant narratives and policy paradigms.
This endeavor of collective scholarship emerges from a Freedom School held at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in Summer 2024. Organized as part of the project, Housing the Third Reconstruction, the convening brought together movement and university-based scholars actively engaged in insurgent research and critical theorization as a part of, or as accompaniment to, freedom movements. Intended as inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory land and housing, Freedom School 2024 took up the following issues and questions: 1) What is the present historical conjuncture of global racial capitalism and the attendant political economy and ideology of land and real-estate?; 2) How are movements undertaking land struggle, dismantling police-property relations, and enacting housing and spatial justice?; 3) How do we learn from “beautiful experiments” (Hartman 2019) of reconstruction, rematriation, reparation, and decolonization that are or have been underway? In the wake of mass protest movements that reveal possible futures while failing to materialize their aspirations, how can collective liberatory work learn from its recent and distant pasts in order to realize the world we imagine?; and 4) What are the ontologies of radical relationality, including kinship, presence, solidarity, and community, that are being created to counter social death and state-organized abandonment?
The Echo Park Lake encampment was an uprising. A settlement of tents in an iconic public park in the gentrified heart of Los Angeles, it offered a poor people’s radical solution to the housing crisis. From challenging sweeps to constructing an infrastructure of life, the Echo Park Lake encampment built an alternative world. In doing so, it became a threat to the policed-propertied order of Los Angeles, eventually facing eviction through a police invasion. Even so, the dreams and practices of the Echo Park Lake encampment could not be easily squashed, and they live on in the struggles of housed and unhoused tenants today. TENTS AND TENANTS charts the eras of organizing that unfolded at Echo Park Lake, uncovering not only the machinations of state power but also how poor people made the city their home. A public exhibition organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and displayed at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, it is intended to be the practice of a collective future.
This report summarizes the first eighteen months of the Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), an online legal mutual aid tool that helps any California tenant facing a legal eviction to file a legal answer with the court. Through this intervention, the TPT seeks first to keep tenants housed, but as a threshold onto de-individualizing tenancy through research-supported organizing. The TPT’s backend database provides unprecedented tenant-reported, real-time eviction information by zip code, landlord, tenant race/ethnicity and more. In an otherwise opaque data landscape of evictions, this research-organizing partnership aims to enable tenants to fight their evictions, use the data produced in that process to support ongoing and new local tenant organizing, while also building translocal tenant power at the scale that can contend with the consolidation of rental housing ownership. This report leverages the toolkit’s unique data to provide insights into the racialized eviction and rent debt landscape in post-pandemic California, revealing the activity of the firms and lawyers driving it.
Authored by the After Echo Park Lake research collective, this monograph analyzes processes of state-led displacement in Los Angeles. With a focus on the violent eviction of the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake, a public park in a gentrifying neighborhood of the city close to downtown, it draws attention to how political claims of housing placements legitimize such displacement but rarely result in housing outcomes. Through ethnographic research as well as analysis of homeless management data, it exposes this ruse of housing and draws attention to a condition of permanent displaceability for the city’s poor. A key finding of the monograph is that at a time of expanded housing resources underwritten by federal and state emergency and economic relief funds, there is a perverse investment of public funds in the criminalization of poverty and in the carceral containment of the unhoused. In sharp contrast to such carcerality are the infrastructures of community envisioned by unhoused organizers, including that which was built and sustained at Echo Park Lake.
Elaborado por el Colectivo de Investigación Después de Echo Park Lake, esta monografía analiza desplazamiento encabezado por el estado. Con un enfoque centrado en el desalojo violenta de la comunidad sin vivienda en Echo Park Lake, un parque publico en un barrio gentrificando de la ciudad cerca del centro, eso llama la atencion sobre cómo reclamos políticos de ubicaciónes de viviendas legitiman desubicación pero rara vez resulta en soluciones de la vivienda. A través de investigación etnográfica además de análisis de datos de la gestión de personas sin viviendas, eso expone la artimaña de la vivienda y llama la atención sobre un condición de dezplazabilidad definitiva por los pobres de la ciudad. Un hallazgo clave de la monografía es que en un tiempo de recursos de vivienda ampliados suscrito por fondos federales de emergencia y ayuda económica, tiene un inversión perversa de fondos públicos para la criminalización de pobreza y contención carcelaria de los personas sin viviendas. En marcado contraste con eso carceralidad están infraestructuras comunitarias imaginadas por los organizadores sin viviendas, incluye eso construyó y sostuvo en Echo Park Lake.
This report, undertaken by the After Echo Park Lake research collective, was homework assigned by unhoused comrades, especially those who are part of UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing. While the stark reality of unhoused deaths has long been a matter of concern, the COVID-19 pandemic brought surprising new challenges. As the report shows, in addition to deaths on the street, there were also deaths in hotels and motels, including in the emergency housing program, Project Roomkey. A large proportion of hotel/motel deaths are attributed by the coroner to drug and alcohol overdoses, a finding in keeping with general trends in unhoused deaths. As the report argues, it is crucially important to understand such deaths as evidence of the dislocation and trauma caused by housing insecurity and displacement as well as by carceral isolation in shelter and emergency housing programs. Drawing on the organizing by UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, the report amplifies the demand for unconditional and humane permanent housing.
In Los Angeles, and across the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has expanded and exposed social and economic inequalities. It has also become starkly apparent that such inequalities are structured through racialized risk, the disproportionate and systematic exposure of working-class communities of color to unemployment, unsafe jobs, eviction, homelessness, displacement, and wealth loss. In this research brief, we draw attention to how crisis serves as the opportunity for housing grabs, by which we mean the unregulated acquisition of residential property by powerful corporate actors. With a focus on Los Angeles, we show how the Great Recession set the stage for a significant expansion of the corporate control of residential property in working-class communities of color and argue that there will be a similar capitalization of distress in such communities over the next few years. Dispensing of the myth of “mom and pop landlords,” we provide the first robust analysis of the different types of corporate landlords active in Los Angeles and the varied strategies of profit-making that they deploy in wealth accumulation.
