Blues Geographies and the Security Turn: Interpreting the Housing Crisis in Los Angeles

Abstract

This article examines the political and cultural struggles over housing and human rights in Los Angeles. It analyzes the racial and spatial dynamics of the housing crisis and subsequent global economic crash, and underscores the significance of the politics of scale. It argues that struggles for the human right to housing in Skid Row, in Los Angeles, represent a continuity of campaigns to contest racial capitalism’s organization of space. As grassroots activists and artists have shown, the resolution of crisis by racialization, neoliberalization, and securitization is not inevitable. They have produced alternative definitions of events, which could produce alternative outcomes.

The fire this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation of empire

“…Consider, for example, how urban regeneration projects often come to be seen as just and necessary through a colonial mentality that conceives of some spaces as ‘wastelands’, as places of crime, drugs, disease, teenage pregnancy and broken families, prostitution, and pimps — that is, as raced spaces that are ‘empty’ and lacking in civilised inhabitants, and that therefore need to be ‘regenerated, cleansed, and reinfused with [white] middle-class sensibility’ (Smith, 2014: 316). 14 In the context of contemporary Britain, it is the high-rise tower block that best captures this image of ‘blighted’ urban space in need of regeneration and development by urban elites — in Los Angeles, it is the ghetto; in São Paulo, the favela; in Mumbai, the slum; in Paris, the banlieue; in Jakarta, the kampung; and in Cape Town, the township (Alves, 2018; Camp, 2012; Davis, 2007; Samara, 2011; Tilley et al, 2019). As Sarah Keenan (2017) explains, raced spaces such as these come to mean:poor, over-crowded, migrant, socially immobile, working class, racialised, ghetto; and its consequences are government and corporate containment and malicious neglect, particularly as these spaces of poverty become blights on a rapidly gentrifying landscape, bringing down property prices and getting in the way of ‘regeneration.’ [To belong to such abandoned spaces] means having a materially lower than average standard of living and an identity that will not be listened to or taken seriously by those in power, even when — as the Grenfell Action Group blog shows us — it is a matter of life and death.…”

“…Racialised policing also helps to justify revitalisation programmes and plans to displace actually existing inhabitants as it directly casts them as deviant, criminal and violent. The broken windows metaphor is thus particularly revealing because, as Jordan Camp (2012: 667) explains, ‘broken windows are not repaired — they are replaced’, in the same way that black, brown, Muslim and poor people are literally removed from gentrifying neighbourhoods. Like the deaths of so many other black and brown people at the hands of the police around the world, the extra-legal killing of Eric Garner in 2014 is symptomatic of this development.…”

“…This article argues that this is problematic because although gentrification and neoliberal urbanism operate in different ways in different cities, a broader pattern of racialised dispossession and displacement can be discerned. From London to New York, Mumbai to Cairo, Johannesburg to São Paulo, ethnographic studies tell largely reminiscent stories of racialised evictions, expropriations and police violence (Alves, 2018; Camp, 2012; Cowen and Lewis, 2016; Ghertner, 2014; Johnson, 2014; Samara, 2011; Tilley et al, 2019). Like Grenfell, they highlight how the ‘making’ of global cities often goes hand in hand with racialised policies and practices designed to ‘clean up the streets’ through revitalisation programmes and plans to displace actually existing inhabitants, which are cast as deviant, criminal, violent and out of place.…”

Contested Development: Homeless Property, Police Reform, and Resistance in Skid Row, LA

“…Stuart () describes how homeless and poor residents are ‘copwise’: they employ everyday acts of circumnavigating police interaction and generate collective resistance by documenting policing, or policing the police. Jordan Camp () describes how contemporary regional and global politics of housing as a human right are part of Los Angeles' history of resistance. These studies have aided our understanding of urban contestation by examining counter policing strategies and the role of the homeless and the poor in making housing gains.…”

“…The manifestations also brought about the sharing of strategies to combat neoliberal urban governance practices with the Western Cape anti‐eviction campaign (Camp and Heatherton, ). In addition, LA CAN's 2012 ‘Operation Skid Row’—an outdoor music and activist festival—gathered thousands of people together to see Public Enemy perform ‘Fight the Power’, voicing the infamous protest anthems against policing, incarceration, urban neglect and the wage‐gap that foreshadow contemporary neoliberal urban strategies (Camp, ; Dahmann, ; Hardy, ). As a global anthem of the African diaspora (Redmond, ), Public Enemy's music and LA CAN together reject the racial enclosure and dispossession that make up the experiences of the mostly Black homeless denizens of Skid Row.…”