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

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row has undergone private and state‐sanctioned policing practices within the fifty‐block neighborhood. These policing practices are fueled by increased commercial and real‐estate development to dispossess and contain the mostly Black homeless and housed residents. Grassroots organizations and residents have responded to gentrification‐induced policing by claiming a homeless right to property, transforming neighborhood politics. This article examines these neighborhood politics as a process of contested development. Contested development reveals the push‐and‐pull contradictions that occur when spatial difference is challenged and reproduced. Through the sphere of urban property, the contested development of property in Skid Row restores or resists the generation of spatial difference. In so doing, the claims of homeless residents and grassroots organizations to a right to property engender transformative police reforms while at the same time igniting revanchist policing methods.

The Ambiguities of Homelessness Governance: Disentangling Care and Revanchism in the Neoliberalising City

“…Alongside these overtly punitive practices, however, people experiencing homelessness are subject to a range of subtler interventions. They are frequently issued with move‐on orders and fines, and/or have their property seized, because they are deemed a nuisance, or a threat to their own or others health and safety (Dozier 2019; Herring et al 2020; Stuart 2016). As Herring et al (2020:146) argue, whilst lower impact than arrest or imprisonment, these subtler interventions contribute to a “pervasive penalty” that “exact[s] both material and psychological harm through the frequency and depth of orders and citations”.…”

“…Both revanchist politics and enforcement practices remain important features of homelessness governance, particularly in the US (Dozier 2019; Hennigan and Speer 2019; Herring et al 2020), but also in Australia (Clarke and Parsell 2019) and Europe (Schinkel and Van den Berg 2011). Recently, however, a nuanced picture has emerged, with studies highlighting the role played by care‐oriented practices.…”

“…In response to these arguments, recent North America studies have stressed the continued value of such theories for understanding contemporary homelessness governance. They describe how care‐oriented interventions are often implicated in revanchist processes of disciplining the homeless and excluding them from prime urban spaces (Dozier 2019; Mitchell 2011); and they attribute this to care‐oriented interventions remaining susceptible to the structural pressures of the neoliberalising city wherein the needs of marginalised groups are subordinated to the imperatives of increasing competitiveness and economic growth (Hennigan and Speer 2019).…”

Intersecting hazards, intersectional identities: A baseline Critical Environmental Justice analysis of US homelessness

“…It also occurs in “pristine” green spaces, in the name of environmental sustainability (Dooling, 2009; Goodling, 2019; Mokos, 2017), even as urban green spaces remain places of relative material and spiritual refuge for some houseless people (Speer and Goldfischer, 2019). Dozier (2019) and Stuart (2016) illustrate how even entire neighborhoods with dense houseless populations, such as LA’s Skid Row, become extensions of the carceral system. Nevertheless, despite the constant sweeps, many houseless people prefer the streets over shelters, given the destabilizing, often jail-like conditions of shelters (Herring, 2019; Speer, 2018).…”

“…Christensen (2017) articulates the experiences of First Nations houseless people in Northern Canada, with an emphasis on settler colonialism as root cause. In an ethnographic study, Dozier (2019) draws on Clyde Woods’ Blues development concept to articulate how the largely Black houseless population in LA’s Skid Row engages in a contradictory push-and-pull of grassroots planning, ultimately producing what Gorz (1967) refers to as “non-reformist reforms.” Medical scholars examine the relationship between homelessness and health, with a focus on the experiences of elders, one of the fastest growing houseless sub-populations (Brown et al., 2016, 2017). Nicholas (2006) and Plaster (2012) likewise parse the experiences of LGBTQ+ houseless youth.…”