Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

Grounds for Eviction: Race, Mobility, and Policing in the Antelope Valley

This dissertation links research on residential mobility with research on policing and the criminalization of poverty. It does so through a case study of Black movement to Los Angeles’ Antelope Valley through the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, a federal housing assistance program that is increasingly replacing public housing and one designed to promote residential mobility and racial integration.Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act banning discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, and the publication of the Kerner Commission report urging integration- oriented housing policy, social policy has turned towards residential mobility as a mechanism of combatting segregation and, by extension, racial inequality. Though the effects of mobility programs like vouchers are known to be smaller than expected, less is known about why this might be the case.I look to the Antelope Valley to examine what voucher experiences there might reveal about this process. Tracing the region’s decades-long history of racial segregation and inequality, I show how racial hierarchy has adapted to changes in laws, racial composition, and economic circumstances. I then illustrate how the Great Recession drove Black voucher movement to the valley over the past decade.Turning to qualitative findings, I show how Black voucher renters moving to the Antelope Valley are met with racism, economic resentment, and gendered stereotypes in their new communities. This social context of reception is key to understanding the mobility process. I then trace how one local government reflected and encouraged these sentiments by developing policies designed to reverse voucher movement by criminalizing, policing and evicting Black voucher renters in the area. While some of these schemes were abandoned, changes to the municipal code structure that encourage individual policing remain a highly effective mechanism of intimidating, impoverishing, and evicting Black voucher renters. This participatory policing regime, wherein local residents surveil their neighbors and file complaints with municipal code enforcement and other local authorities, illustrates an understudied contemporary mechanism of maintaining segregation. Finally, I show how Black voucher renters interpret, experience, and navigate these conditions, focusing on how they maintain their housing and avoid eviction

Deconcentration without Integration: Examining the Social Outcomes of Housing Choice Voucher Movement in Los Angeles County

This article reports on the social experiences of tenants moving from low–income neighborhoods in the City of Los Angeles to a racially mixed, lower poverty suburb—the Antelope Valley—using Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers. Voucher tenants experience significant social exclusion and aggressive oversight. Local residents use racial shorthand to label their black neighbors as voucher holders and apply additional scrutiny to their activity. They aggressively report voucher tenants to the housing authority and police, instigating inspections that threaten tenants’ voucher status. Tenants react to these circumstances by withdrawing from their communities in order to avoid scrutiny and protect their status in the program. These findings illustrate that the social difficulties documented in mixed–income developments may also exist in voucher programs, highlight the ways in which neighborhood effects may be extended to include social experiences, and suggest the limits of the voucher program to translate geographic mobility into socioeconomic progress

Segregatory Consequences of the Carceral State

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Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor

The neighborhood is a historic and contemporary site of the assertion of white racial and economic domination, particularly over Black people. Although there is strong evidence that whites continue to prefer racially segregated neighborhoods, fifty years of fair housing jurisprudence has made it more difficult to openly bar non-white residents. Among the many strategies used to protect white domination of residential space is the coordinated surveillance and policing of non-white people. In this paper, I show how Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, has become an important platform for the surveillance and policing of race in residential space, enabling the creation of what I call digitally gated communities. First, I describe the history of the platform and the forms of segregation and surveillance it has supplemented or replaced. Second, I situate the platform in a broader analysis of carcerality as a mode and logic of regulating race in the United States. Third, using examples drawn from public reports about the site, I illustrate how race is surveilled and policed in the context of gentrification and integration. Finally, I discuss implications, questions, and future issues that might arise on the platform