Opposing and Policing Racial Integration

Abstract

Over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, how have mechanisms of residential segregation changed? Using a case study of a Los Angeles suburb’s reaction to Black movement through the federal Housing Choice Voucher program, I argue that policing should be considered among the contemporary forces of residential segregation. Through interviews with forty-three local residents, I show how one community’s reaction to voucher movement spans from attitudes to actions. First, I document widespread hostility towards Black voucher holders on the basis of their race, gender, and participation in the voucher program. Second, I trace how the city’s municipal code changes have responded to public sentiment and created an incentive to participate in policing. By attaching fines and incentives for landlords to evict tenants to broadly written and subjective nuisance codes, the city has created a pathway by which local residents can pressure unwanted neighbors out of the community. Third, I illustrate how some residents engage in participatory policing by surveilling neighbors they believe are using vouchers and dispatching city and police agencies to inspect, fine, and possibly evict these targets. These findings illustrate how communities can use policing to racially segregate space, how eviction might be communally produced, and how local opposition to Black movement breaks the pathway between residential mobility and socio-economic gains that underlies the voucher program.

A Legal Geography of Prison and Other Carceral Spaces

“…In the public nuisance context, the community's right to security and protection must be reconciled with the individual's right to expressive and associative freedom” (ibid.). Who counts and has a say as “the community” and “the public” lies at the heart of how nuisance laws and other forms of what Kurwa (2020) calls “participatory policing” are implemented (Staeheli and Mitchell 2007), just as the subjective notion of “security” often resembles a desire for clarity, coherence, and cleanliness from the perspective of entrenched and ascendant “community members” (Bloch 2022a). Such subjective perspectives belonging to dominant groups and residents initiate a form of policing that is in reality based on “violations of societal norms, and behaviours considered to be socially undesirable and threatening to the normative order of public space” (Cook and Whowell 2011:611).…”

Caring Housing Futures: A Radical Care Framework for Understanding Rent Control Politics in Seattle, USA

“…The relationship between radical care and housing is developed further through an engagement with conceptualisations of housing justice. Housing justice is an analytical lens that emphasises the profound structural injustices and inequalities that are embedded within access to safe, secure, stable, and affordable housing (House and Okafor 2020; Kurwa 2020; Losier 2019; Roy 2019). Housing inequalities, including evictions, are expressions of projects of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that result in dispossession, displacement, and erasure from urban spaces and access to housing for people of colour, Black, and Indigenous communities, as part of a larger racial banishment project (Roy 2017).…”

Property, Personhood, and Police: The Making of Race and Space through Nuisance Law

“…slum‐dwellers. Kurwa’s (2020:363) important scholarship on “participatory policing” in Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley reveals how nuisance codes provide encouragement to residents to “pressure unwanted neighbours out of the community” thereby consolidating the policed protection of private property regimes.…”