Los Angeles I do mind dying: recent reflections with Jacques Rancière on urban revolution in Skid Row, 1965-2010

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LOS ANGELES I DO MIND DYING:
RECENT REFLECTIONS WITH JACQUES RANCIÈRE
ON URBAN REVOLUTION IN SKID ROW 1965-2010 ,

by

Nicholas M. Dahmann

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(GEOGRAPHY)

May 2017

1

Table of Contents

Chapter 1.
Introduction and Research Questions ........................................................................... 4
Engagement + Intervention / Theoretical and Conceptual Disposition .................... 10
Theorizing ‘neoliberalism”: the state’s governmentalities, policies and practices .. 11
Socio-spatial practices of democratic politics resisting the urban ‘police power’ ... 21
Rancière as Foucault’s Supplement ................................................................................ 24
Chapter 2.
The Place: Los Angeles as research object, subject, and history ............................ 35
Existing Scholarship on Los Angeles ............................................................................. 35
The Purloined Center: Downtown Los Angeles ........................................................... 37
Scholarship on Socio-spatial Justice in Los Angeles .................................................... 42
The Urban Historical Context: the shifting spatial urban governmentalities of
Downtown Los Angeles, 1940 to Present ...................................................................... 45
1940 – 1953 ................................................................................................................. 49
1953 – 1965 ................................................................................................................. 53
1965 – 1978 ................................................................................................................. 56
1978 – 1992 ................................................................................................................. 60
1992 – 1999 ................................................................................................................. 64
Chapter 3.
In/Equality and the Politics of Method ....................................................................... 75
Rancière on Skid Row: “Lessons” for Spatial Politics .................................................. 77
Method 1: Rancière's sensibility in reading and writing ............................................. 82
Method 2: Mastery, Incapacitation and the Critical Academic Love of Inequality . 85
Chapter 4.
Skid Row Contextualized: Engaging the Real & Imagined Place .......................... 90
The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) ......................................... 90

2

Demographics and Skid Row .......................................................................................... 93
Homeless Counts in Skid Row................................................................................ 96
Housing Residential Hotels ................................................................................... 102
Concluding Notes ................................................................................................... 104
Community reflections on a community organized .................................................. 105
Chapter 5.
The LAPD: Uniformed Police with Police Power Writ Large ............................... 109
The Stakes ........................................................................................................................ 109
Perspective from the Community ................................................................................ 116
Policing the Police: community contestation of the “Safer Cities Initiative” ......... 126
Community Watch, Public Accountability (or lack) with Board of 2006-Present 130
Allocation of Officers Not Supported by Data ........................................................... 130
Personal and Financial Costs of SCI ............................................................................. 131
Community Perspective based on Participatory Survey .......................................... 135
Demographic Impacts ............................................................................................ 138
Citations ................................................................................................................... 139
Arrests ...................................................................................................................... 141
Stops/Detainments without Citation or Arrest ................................................... 142
Impact of Homelessness on Police Treatment .................................................... 143
Attitudes toward Skid Row Policing ................................................................... 144
Police, Law, and Space: Contested elimination of public space by law .................. 146
Legal Action ............................................................................................................. 146
The Prevailing Situation ........................................................................................ 147
Summary of Patterns and Practices that Foster Misconduct ............................ 149
Chapter 6.
The Housing Question ................................................................................................. 174
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 174
2002 CRA Redevelopment Plan and the Residential Hotel Preservation Ordinance
[2002-2006-2008] .............................................................................................................. 180

3

After the Storm: Holding onto and Expanding controls over rental housing in
general [2006-2008-Present] ........................................................................................... 184
Negative Human Rights Impact of Public Housing Divestment ............................. 189
Urban academics scholars in opposition to the proposed Transforming Rental
Assistance Initiative and the Preservation, Enhancement, and Transforming Rental
Assistance Act of 2010 .................................................................................................... 192
TRA is a re-branding of Bush's FY03/04 plan to mortgage and project-base public
housing ............................................................................................................................. 196
Processes of privatizing public housing: mainstream housing market .................. 198
Mortgaging public housing, its lack of regulation and PETRA's foreclosure
protections........................................................................................................................ 200
Failure to address the backlog of capital needs improvements ............................... 202
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 205
References ....................................................................................................................... 213
Appendices ..................................................................................................................... 230
Los Angeles People’s Declaration on the Human Right to Housing ....................... 230
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS OVERVIEW ........................................................................ 233
An External View Exhibit A: UN Report Based Policy Recommendations for Los
Angeles City Council Implementation ........................................................................ 237

4

Chapter 1.
Introduction and Research Questions

Downtown Los Angeles is the site of a protracted racialized class struggle
over land and resources. This dissertation examines the production of a ‘new
downtown’ in Los Angeles during the period since the mid-1990s, focusing
specifically on the radical democratic practices contesting the displacement,
criminalization, and incarceration of existing residents. Home to the largest extant
Skid Row in the U.S., Los Angeles’s downtown is also the last major American city to
experience widespread gentrification of its core. Skid Row intersects the nascent
“Historic Core” along Main Street, constituting a contested area of approximately 50
square blocks between 3
rd
and 7
th
to the north and south with Spring and Alameda
Streets constituting the east-west boundaries. Skid Row itself is home to
approximately 13,000 people, about 75% of whom are Black, 95% extremely low
income. Of that population, up to 1/3rd currently homeless, making the majority of
Skid Row housed contrary common popular perception. This research substantively
examines on the socio-spatial strategies and practices undertaken by local
community members, groups and organizations to contest this latest round of urban
relocation taking place under the twin processes of housing and policing as they
articulate in and through urban policy.

5

In downtown Los Angeles, Main Street and Wall Street are two blocks apart.
Running parallel north and south, they bisect the approximately 50 square blocks of
Skid Row. Between them, at the epicenter of the Skid Row community is the Los
Angeles Police Department’s Central Division. Occupying an entire block, the station
is metaphorically and physically a bunker. Rising several stories high, two of the
building’s four block length walls are undifferentiated solid brick. Across the street
on two sides are mostly renovated Single Room Occupancy Residential Hotels or in
some social scientist’s coarse vernacular, “housing of last resort”. To the north is one
of Downtown’s three massive “Missions”, whose collective assets total over half a
billion dollars and CEO’s pulling in $200,000 each according to their required public
reporting as non-profits. Their promotional literature proudly announces they have
been serving the homeless since 1893. Over the past year, all three Missions have
begun charging between 5 and 7 dollars a night for at best a cot in a packed room, a
fee that all but depletes the basic “welfare” of General Relief’s $221 a month.
Returning to the LAPD compound’s entrance, we find a mosaic evoking a
rather dystopic notion of multiculturalism with the most prominent feature, an
unironically, “to serve and to protect” (in quotation marks). The remaining block face
resembles what appears to be an unremarkable garage, one however where standard
black and white police cars and unmarked American-make sedans enter and exit to

6

and fro. A brief glimpse inside reveals a set of heavily armed “tactical vehicles”.
Central Division is one of the few implemented infrastructural improvements from
the City’s 1975 redevelopment plan, commonly known as the “policy of
containment”. While plans initially called for the demolition of much of Skid Row,
activists from the Catholic Workers successfully brokered a compromise that
effectively created what community residents refer to as “our Soweto”.
Holding cells are limited at Central Division and Los Angeles is home to the
world’s largest known jail less than a mile away. Named “Twin Towers” for its
architectural design, the warehouse of caged humans announces that is possesses a
panoptic design. Twin Towers is also by official recognition as well as basic
arithmetic, the world’s largest mental hospital.
A final irony of the containment compromise is directly linked to the
production of LA’s gleaming financial skyscrapers that loom to Skid Row’s east.
Themselves built upon the home of demolished communities, 5% of all public funds
for financing and constructing the high-rise towers of mammon were diverted to
stabilizing the aging low income housing of Skid Row.
When the city of Los Angeles passed an Adaptive Reuse Ordinance to
facilitate residential conversions in 1999, it enabled the elite repatriation of the
downtown historic core for the first time since the early twentieth century. Of the

7

approximately 50-100,000 homeless persons citywide, an estimated 5,000 were found
in Skid Row alongside the over 9,000 permanent residents in housing of last resort
for the elderly, the disabled and lower income households. In addition to
establishing incentives for housing conversion, the Mayor’s Office and the Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initiated the “Safer Cities Initiative” (SCI) in 2006
with the goal of order maintenance through targeting the “criminal element” in Skid
Row. This policy has had the effect of criminalizing the neighborhood itself, through
an admixture of “community policing” and “broken windows” theory, resulting in
24,000 minor citations and 19,000 arrests during its first two years of operation (Blasi
and Stuart 2008). Together the dual strategies of housing and policing brought Skid
Row’s historically forgotten place of structural abandonment (Gilmore 2008) within
the ambit of urban elite ambitions to remake downtown space. Thus, after a history
of putative malign neglect (Wolch and Dear 1993) the contemporary constellation of
urban policy places Skid Row in a position of malign attention as a highly contested
space.
The contemporary urban policies of housing and policing the ‘new
downtown’ can be understood as partial spatial solutions to political economic crises
of legitimacy, organized by the state (Hall et al. 1978, Gilmore 2007). Far from

8

unchallenged, however, Skid Row community members and supporters contested
dispossession and eviction through a series of collective and individualized practices.
Through an urban ethnography and observant participation (Vargas 2008)
with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), these socio-spatial
practices are of particular focus to this project and are understood broadly as
democratic contestations of the prevailing governing rationality that privileges
market exchange and property over social use values. As such, three distinct but
related sets of questions underpin my theoretical and empirical investigations:
1). What are the implications of how ‘neoliberalism’ is theorized for the relationship
between space and politics, particularly when considered through a generalized concept of
police power? How might Michel Foucault’s recently translated work on the police, the state
and neoliberal governmentalities provide insights into the empirical and theoretical questions
for the related politics of space and the space of politics? Finally, how might Jacques
Rancière’s work productively supplement Foucault as a means to conceptualize emancipatory
socio-spatial politics?
2). Taking urban policy an articulating point for multiple state governmentalities as
constitutive of the general police order, what are the continuities and shifts in the political
rationalities governing downtown Los Angeles’s urban policy and space since 1940? In what
ways does Los Angeles’s particular historical geographies reflect or diverge from concurrent

9

shifts at distinct yet overlapping scales of the nation, state and globe. Particularly, how has
Skid Row been discursively and materially constructed as well as contested through such
socio-spatial governmentalities over time?
3). What are the potentials for radical democratic practices to disrupt and alter the
contemporary urban policies of housing and policing? What are the multiple spatialities upon
which democratic practices intervene? In what ways can the radical democratic practices
extend across space to form chains of equivalence that avoid a localized territorial trap?
Ultimately, how can individual and collective radical democratic practices not only capture
urban policy but alter the coordinates or terrain of urban governmental practice itself?

This introductory section proceeds in four distinct but related sections. First I
examine the central conceptual role of “neoliberalism” within recent critical
geographical scholarship and the conspicuous absence of “the state” from analyses.
An alternative perspective is proposed through the work of Michel Foucault and his
recently published work on the historical emergence of government, the state and
crucially the historically broader concept of “the police” than is typically understood
in contemporary usage. The subsequent section highlights a corollary absence
relating to the practice of politics and its always already contested nature. Here,
questions of what it means to be productively “critical” are engaged that seek to

10

move beyond what has been described as ‘left melancholy’. I then delineate a
perspective on what constitutes politics as well as the central importance of such an
outlook building on the work of Jacques Rancière. In closing, I provide a brief
account of the outlined theoretical approaches as they directly apply to my dual
focus on housing and policing.

Engagement + Intervention / Theoretical and Conceptual Disposition

Through an examination of the socio-spatial dimensions of radical democratic
practices contesting the production of a ‘new downtown’ in Los Angeles’s Skid Row,
this dissertation engages, intervenes and extends upon interdisciplinary scholarship
in three assemblages. The first two areas broadly involve research and
methodologies therein concerning on ‘police power’ and ‘neoliberalism’ while the
third looks at empirical scholarship on Los Angeles. The first engagement focuses on
neoliberalism’s theoretical conceptualization and the general failure of scholarship to
adequately account for the continued and altered salience of the state under
neoliberalism. Working with recently translated works of Michel Foucault, this
approach opens analyses of neoliberalism beyond economic policy to governmental
practice itself, implicating processes of subject and citizen formation. In related

11

fashion, the second takes issue with the overly pessimistic “critical” scholarship that
fails to consider already existing practices of contestation. Conjoining existing
literatures on the politics of place, Jacques Rancière’s contentious notion of
democratic politics supplements Foucault’s state governmentalities to ground
emancipatory political practices. This foregrounds the and critical analysis in
subsequent chapters reviewing the scholarship on gentrification and policing that
highlights the general lack of substantive research on processes of resistance and
contestation.
Ultimately, this dissertation focuses on downtown Los Angeles, a remarkably
neglected site of urban geographical research. Further, despite two decades of
clamorous “Los Angeles School” scholarship, it is only within the last decade that a
body of scholarship concentrating on the politics of socio-spatial justice has emerged.

Theorizing ‘neoliberalism”: the state’s governmentalities, policies and
practices

Over the past decade, discourses around ‘neoliberalism’ have in many ways
defined the theoretical and imaginative horizons of possibility for scholarly visions of
alternative urban futures. In this sense, research on neoliberal urbanism serves as one
point of articulation for theoretical and material concerns for radical politics within

12

the academy. As such, it is important to recognize that defining ‘neoliberalism’ is a
theoretically and politically fraught task with empirical consequences. The fact that
neoliberalism did not enter academic parlance until well after its purported origins
circa 1973, suggests a theoretical reinscription onto existing discourses such as the
restructuring of capital without the renovation necessary to capture the specificity of
the new. In this vein, overly structural and/or economic framings for neoliberalism
fail to appropriately consider a wider gamut of processes apace, particularly the
continued salience of the state, within and beyond the “state apparatus” through the
role of government over and among the everyday practices of individual subjects.
This predominant account of neoliberalism can be found in the recent work of
David Harvey (2005) and others who argue that neoliberalism has arisen as the
dominant accumulation strategy for the crises of Fordist modes of production and
breakdown of Keynesian fiscal policies. As a theory of political economic practices,
neoliberal ideology appropriates a mixed set of classical liberal positions that purport
to maximize human well-being through free market rationalities and mechanisms.
The breakdown in North Atlantic Fordism and the Keynesian Welfare State has led
to the restructuring of governance and the rise of new state spatialities (Brenner
2005). In a shift from “government to governance”, alternatively understood as
“devolution”, certain authority and responsibility shift from the federal government

13

to the sub-national or urban scale (MacLeod and Goodwin 1999). In turn, Brenner
and Theodore (2002) outline the role of cities in the path-dependent character of
neoliberal reform programs. In contrast to ‘ideal-type’, neoliberalism is never
instantiated as such but is always filtered as path-dependent and contingent
“actually existing neoliberalism”. Significantly, however, the lived socio-spatial
experiences and acceptance by individuals of these actually existing neoliberalisms
are not considered. Further, within these analyses, emphasis is placed firmly on “roll-
back” phase or “retreat of the state” (Peck and Tickell 2002) without adequately
consideration of the multiplicity of forms “roll-out” neoliberalisms take, particularly
those outside of economic policy. While scholars have addressed the “roll-outs” of
welfare to workfare or the increasingly revanchist and carceral urban policing
programs, how these shifts are legitimized through state practice and understood
and accepted by individuals is not well established. One example is Jamie Peck’s
recent turn to the ‘penal state’, where he declares that “the state is back” (2004).
While it is certainly appropriate for Peck to consider prisons as new forms of state
function, this perspective fails to capture how the state never vanished nor considers
how such practices become rationalized by individuals.
Put simply, the state did not disappear but rather “what withered was the
state’s legitimacy to act as the Keynesian state” (Gilmore 2007, 84). The above

14

analyses provide an overly coherent “top down” framework with which to view the
world that elides any of the messiness of everyday practices, the altered and
expanded functions of state practices, as well as the implications for individual and
collective subjectivities. Recently translated work by Michel Foucault provides one
productive means to conceptualize both neoliberalism and the state
1
, cutting through
the false binary distinction between “top down” or “bottom up” perspectives. While
Foucault’s work might appear an unlikely candidate to elucidate such questions, his
two lecture courses from the College de France between 1977 and 1979 directly
address these concerns.
2
Security, Territory, Population (2007, henceforth Security)
explores a genealogy of the modern state through a history of governmental
rationalities or governmentalities while The Birth of Biopolitics (2008, henceforth
Biopolitics) examines the rise and transition from liberal to neoliberal state
governmentalities. At its core, Foucault’s ‘state governmentalities’ enable an analysis
that works through accounts of the ‘retreat of the state’ or the simple ‘domination of

1
This is to suggest that following Gramsci, Weber, Lefebvre or Poulanzas among
others might not also provide productive paths.
2
The delayed publication of Foucault’s lectures in French and their eventual
translation into English is complicated. Both of the lecture courses under consideration here were
prefigured as projected volumes in the History of Sexuality. Their transition into published books
was ended abruptly and tragically by Foucault’s death. Further, interpretations of the
stipulations of Foucault’s will kept the lectures from being published in French until 2004, with
subsequent English translation in 2007/8.

15

the market’ without simply valorizing ‘agency’ irrespective of structural constraints.
Treated as a political rationality or governmentality, neoliberalism represents not just
a “manner of governing states or economies, but is intimately tied to the government
of the individual, to a particular manner of living” (Read 2009, 27).
Taking this broadly post-structural outlook does not entail abandoning the
questions and problems of political economy. On the contrary, a post-structural (as
well as any post-Marxist Marxian) position is only critical as it remains in contact and
relation to the structural and material world. This mode of analysis opens
neoliberalism to governmental practice that connects with regulating the regulations
of the economy and processes of subject and citizen formation. In this way, the
Security and Biopolitics lectures are significant for their elaboration and expansion of
the ‘governmentality’ concept, Foucault’s turn to the examination of the state
practices of neoliberalism as governmental rationality, and the elaboration of the
historic notion of “the police” to be considered below in conjunction with Rancière.
While there exists a vast literature and field of ‘governmentality studies’ based
upon the February 1, 1978 lecture (Barry et al. 1996, Burchell et al. 1991, Dean 1999),
essentially all references to “governmentality” prior to 2004/2007 do not consider the
context of the full lecture course. This lacunae has led to a generalized call to
‘rethink’ governmentality (Elden 2007a), particularly its relation to the state practices

16

(Lemke 2007), colonialism (Legg 2007), questions of territory and space (Crampton
and Elden 2007, Elden 2007b), and Marxism (Jessop 2007). Read within the context of
the entire course, Foucault’s usage of governmentality simultaneously gains both
plurality and specificity of form. Briefly, governmentality (or governmental
rationality) is introduced as emergent during the 16
th
century in contrast with the
‘earlier’ sovereignty and discipline in a genealogy of the modern state. Foucault
defines governmentality as the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and
reflects, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this…power that has the population
as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as
its essential technical instrument. (2007, 108)

From this, we can understand governmentality as a mode of power, an
analytic for understanding a plurality of state governmental practices, and in
reference to the transition from the medieval state to the liberalism and the modern
administrative state. As Elden puts it, the ‘governmentality lecture’ was “an overture
of where his researches were going, rather than a culmination of analyses already
undertaken” (2007a, 29). Beyond the schematic presentation found in the initial
lecture itself, Foucault empirically explores each these themes throughout the rest of
the lectures in direct consideration of changing social and political geographical

17

realities (Legg 2007, 10; Huxley 2008). In its more generalized form, governmentality
applies not just to the government of the self but is tied up in the practices of
sovereignty and discipline through an expanded perspective of the problematic of
‘government’. The problem of governing populations at the level of the economy
makes “the problem of sovereignty even more acute…and it makes the need to
develop the disciplines even more acute” (Foucault 2007, 107).
3
Thus, questions of
sovereignty and discipline become more, not less important, through the emergence
of governmentalities and the object of the population circulating in what Donald
Moore has termed a ‘triad-in-motion’ (2005, 7).
Extending the methodological and empirical concerns of the previous lecture,
Biopolitics explores the emergence and circulation of neoliberal state
governmentalities. With regard to the state, Foucault explains that he does without a
“theory of the state” as “one can and must forgo an indigestible meal” (2008, 76-77).
Working within the frame of an ‘analytics of government’, Foucault argues that “the
state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities”
(2008, 77). As such, Foucault proposes to approach the problematic of the state

3
Without going into further detail here, examples of Foucault’s expanded empirical
application of ‘governmentalities’ are found in the concrete spatialities of towns (January 11),
management of populations during an epidemic (January 25) and the practices of counter-
conduct (March 1).

18

through an analysis of the practices of governmentality whereby the state is both
instrument and effect, implicating power over both population and individual (2008,
78). Within this context, Foucault considers first the rise of liberalism as a political
rationality, a project roughly coeval to the rise of governmentality outlined above,
and then the more recent transition to neoliberalism. Therefore, while scholars have
worked to mobilize the notion of “neoliberal governmentality”, they have done so
without Foucault’s own explicit writing on the subject (e.g. Gupta and Ferguson
2002, Mitchell 2006, Larner 2000 among many others).
Foucault’s own approach to neoliberalism is informative, despite considering
the question nearly two decades before its circulation in geographic discourses.
4

Foucault’s consideration of neoliberalism builds from liberalism, which he takes to be
a form of “frugal government” or governing through freedom (c.f. Rose 1999). This
liberalism is itself highly intertwined with capitalism and the emergence of the
modern subject of rights, relying upon danger and risk (Foucault 2008; 61, 70). Thus,
the crises of capitalism and liberalism are necessarily related to the breakdown and
sustained assault on the assemblage of Keynesian welfare economy and New Deal
social policies (2008, 142). Foucault highlights three typical responses to

4
In contrast to his fastidious citation of historical texts, Foucault unhelpfully does not
cite the contemporary perspectives he critiques.

19

neoliberalism that fail to capture its specificity. First, the notion that neoliberalism is
nothing more than the reactivation of the “old, secondhand economic theories” or
“Adam Smith revived”. Second, the sociological perspective that neoliberalism is
“just a way of establishing strictly market relations in society”, put otherwise as the
‘commodification of everything’. The final perspective treats neoliberalism as a
“cover for a generalized administrative intervention by the state which is all the more
profound for being insidious and hidden.” While neoliberalism is certainly
implicates these things, Foucault defines the problem of neoliberalism as “how the
overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of market
economy.” Reoriented as governmental rationality, neoliberalism should not be
identified with “laissez-faire” but rather the permanent vigilance, activity and
intervention [of the state]” (2008, 132). Further, neoliberalism as ‘regime of truth’ or
governmental rationality entails a redefinition of the human subject, of homo
economicus. While liberalism interpellates its subject as a partner of exchange, homo
economicus under neoliberalism is “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself”
(2008, 226). In this manner, as a modality of governmentality, neoliberalism operates
at the level of individual interests and desires rather than through discourses of
liberal rights (Read 2009).

20

Ultimately, as with all of Foucault’s genealogies, new elements, in this case
neoliberalism, entail a shift in accent rather than displacement of previous concepts
(Foucault 2008 148). In what I would term a “mingling model” of power’s modalities,
neoliberalism does not wholly displace liberalism. Just as governmentality does not
supplant sovereignty or discipline, these multiple modalities of power circulate and
produce effects in differential yet associated fashion (McClure 1997). For the
purposes of this dissertation neoliberalism is conceptualized through polyvalent
modalities of state governmentalities, particularly urban policies. Urban policy
becomes a point of articulation for neoliberal governmentalities in their uneven but
directed application upon on the production and maintenance of urban territorial
space, and individual bodies.
Before turning to questions of contestation and specific scholarship on
housing and policing, one glaring shortcoming of Foucault’s work on neoliberal
governmentalities is his failure to connect his analyses to his own and other’s
scholarship on race. Foucault’s own 1975-1976 Society Must Be Defended (2003)
analyzes the emergence of state racism, though he never applies this in his writings
on governmentality. The works of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) and
David Theo Goldberg (2002) are instructive in linking Foucault’s governmentalities
to the emergence and functioning of the modern police and racial state. Scholarship

21

by Barnor Hesse (1997, 2004, 2007) and Donald Moore (2005) explicitly elaborate
upon a racialized analytics of government. Further, while much of the
‘governmentality’ scholarship is empirical, Moore importantly extends this
perspective to the ethnographic. Together, this scholarship makes connections where
Foucault himself did not. In the end, approaching neoliberalism through multiple
state practices concentrates on the mutual constitution of both the object of
governance and the rationalities which make them perceptible and comprehensible
for specific forms of political intervention (Dikec 2007). Taking seriously the State as
an object of study discursively reveals its power to both define problems and their
solutions (Hall et al. 1978, Gilmore and Gilmore 2007).

Socio-spatial practices of democratic politics resisting the urban ‘police power’

Building upon the first frame, the second intervention and engagement
concerns the broad failure of critical scholarship to address already existing processes
of resistance. In what can be characterized as overly dour and defeatist, so-called
critical scholarship does little to move beyond Margaret Thatcher’s invocation that
“there is no alternative” to our neoliberal present. Without going into an extensive

22

review, I would suggest that the bulk of ‘major’
5
disciplinary statements on
neoliberalism produce scholarship of “Critical critique” derided by Marx and Engels
of the New Hegelians (1954 [1844]). The body of ‘critical’ scholarship on
‘neoliberalism’ spends 95% of its work sketching the architectures of gloom and
doom leaving a salutary and short final chapter for brief remarks on how things
might be otherwise but how very difficult that might be. Primary instances include
Harvey (2005) and Hackworth (2007) but also extend to works that claims to study
the ‘contestation’ of neoliberalism such as Leitner et al. (2007). Another example is
Sparke (2005), where his “persistent critique” remains as “anemic” as the political
theorists he deconstructs, dwelling in the world of discursive representation will
little connection to material grounds.
6
Within this frame, little or no sustained
attention is placed to the actual practices of how actually existing neoliberalism is
already being contested.
Beyond this “left melancholy”, Wendy Brown argues that “the Left cannot
content on revealed deception, hypocrisies, interlocking directorates, featherbedding,
or corruption to stir opposition to the existing regime…inconsistency does not matter

5
Following Cindy Katz’s 1995 reading of Deleuze and Guatarri 1986 in her discussion
of Gregory 1994.
6
With the notable exception of his Chapter 1.

23

much, because political reason and reasoning that exceed or precede neoliberal
criteria have ceased to matter much” (2003, 58). Against these empty consolations
and framed by the understanding that the lineaments of change are always already at
hand in the present, this dissertation places already existing social movements and
the processes and practices of emancipation as its central impetus (Pile and Keith
1997), not just melancholy architectures of despair.
Following Foucault a bit further, I accept his suggestion that “critique is the
art of not being governed quite so much” (2001:193). One theme of research
positioned against neoliberalism that focuses on both theoretical and empirical
questions is that of radical democracy. While geographers have long demonstrated a
preference for social rather than political theory (Agnew 2002, 2003, Barnett and Low
2004), a growing body of scholarship within the discipline focuses on democratic
theory (Barnett 2003, Barnett and Low 2004, Brown 1997, Dikec 2005, Featherstone
2008, Massey 1994, Purcell 2008, Slater 2002)
7
. While there are great definitional
struggles over the term (Braun and Disch 2002), I follow Rancière in defining
democracy as a practice and a challenge rather than an administratively fixed form
that might be achieved. In this way, existing bodies of scholarship on the politics of

7
Kohn 2003 is a good example of scholarship from Political Theory outside the
discipline that has made a turn toward space.

24

place and community organizing can be understood as struggles that mobilize
democratic practices against and within the state (Agnew 1987, Featherstone 2008,
Gregory 1998, Miller 2000, Pile and Keith 1997, Routledge 1993, 1997). Working with
the frame of scholarship on democratic practices and community politics of place, I
expand beyond the above conceptualization of neoliberal governmentalities to find
Jacques Rancière’s work on radical democracy a productive means of understanding
the space for and place of resistant and contesting practices.

Rancière as Foucault’s Supplement

Jacques Rancière can be described as a post-Althusserian theorist of
Democracy (Zizek 2005), building upon an agonistic conception of the political that
emphasizes disagreement and conflict over resolution and consensus. This
distinguishes Rancière’s project from merely deliberative or participatory modes of
democracy but does not entail the adoption of Chantal Mouffe’s reformatted enmity
in Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. By contrast, the ‘wrong’ or ‘dissensus’
8

Rancière identifies is “not a conflict of interests, opinions, or values; it is a division

8
Rancière a numerous points has stressed his preference for the term mesentente or
‘disagreement’ rather than resistance or contestation. In what follows, I use the more common
vocabulary of resistance and contestation but aim to inflect them with the valences of Rancière’s
‘disagreement’.

25

put in the ‘‘common sense’’: a dispute about what is given, about the frame within
which we see something as given” (2004, 304). Put otherwise, the gap between the
oligarchic structures of social space of ‘the police’ and the egalitarian democratic
practices of ‘politics’ immanent within them. Ultimately, disagreement is thus a
positive claim for equality rather than a merely negative denunciation against
inequality.
Notably, Rancière’s work has received little reception within the field of
geography with the exception of Mustafa Dikec, particularly his “Space, politics and
the political” (2005). There, Dikec delineates the broad schematics of Rancière’s later
scholarship and its connection to spatiality. Building upon this frame, I outline the
Rancière’s thought as it applies to disruptive democratic politics and conceptually
link it to Foucault’s state governmentalities.
Rancière’s political thought pivots on the distinction between “the police” and
“politics”.

The two terms reactivate and radicalize the terms of ‘politics’ (la politique)
and ‘the political’ (le politique) used by contemporary theorists of “political ontology”.
Rancière’s thought maintains an ambivalent connection to other theorists of “political
ontology” (Deranty 2003) such as Laclau, Mouffe, Zizek, and Badiou. A central
distinction amongst such thinkers is the distinction between the ontic “politics” and
the ontological “political” (Wolin 2004 [1960]). While Rancière broadly maintains this

26

distinction with “the police” as ontic and “politics” as ontological, his reclassification
destabilizes the couplet. Typically, as found in the work of Mouffe (2005), “the
political” signals the ontological essence of the merely ontic “politics”. For Rancière,
by contrast, his “politics” simultaneously underpins and exceeds the “the police”.

In mobilizing the concept of “the police”, Rancière reactivates its initial 17
th

and 18
th
century meaning outlined by Foucault’s Security lectures. Historically, the
police signifies not just the petty uniformed police officer but rather a way of
directing or governing a community by prudent public authority that ensured
internal order (Foucault 2008, 311-340; Pasquino 1991). Thus, while Foucault treats
“the police” as a part of a genealogy of the modern state, finding its purest form in
the German Polizeiwissenschaft (2008, 318), Rancière generalizes its functions.
9

Rancière defines “the police” as “an ordering of bodies that defines the allocation of
ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of seeing”, as assigned by name to a
particular place (Rancière 1999, 28). Further, “the police” or “police order” is
described as an organizational system of coordinates that establishes a “distribution
of the sensible” or that divides the community into groups, social positions, and
functions (ibid, 57). Importantly, Rancière uses the term ‘police’ in a non-pejorative

9
The history of policing in the United States follows a theoretically related but
empirically distinct trajectory, see Ethington 1987 and Monkkonen 1992.

27

manner recognizing that there are clearly better and worse ‘police orders’ (ibid, 31).
Through the process of assigning each person to their place, the “distribution of the
sensible” produces the standard everyday socio-spatial order for the population that
defines what and who is legitimate to speak and when and where. The police order is
thus a proliferation of categories and distinctions such as the boundary between
public and private, citizen and non-citizen, political and social. Likewise, Dikec
productively connects the police with the symbolic constitution of social space
whereby its organization becomes the basis of and for governance (2005, 182).
By contrast, politics occurs as “an extremely determined activity antagonistic
to policing” whose place and emergence is never given (Rancière 1999, 27). Politics
happens when the police order is “interrupted by the institutions of a part of those
who have no part” (1999, 11). Importantly, the practices of politics may be
“spectacular or otherwise”, highlighting the role of individual micro practices (Scott
1985) as well as collective moments of organizing (Routledge 1993, 1997, Moore
1997). Thus, “politics acts on the police…it acts in the places and with the words that
are common to both, even if it means reshaping those places and changing the status
of those words” (1999, 33). This is not merely the inclusion of those who were
previously excluded, particularly as the basis for the existing order relies upon such

28

exclusions.
10
Rather, the sole principal of politics is equality, based not merely upon
the ‘arithmetical distribution of rights’ but the axiomatic presupposition that ‘we are
all equal’ as speaking beings. For Rancière, there can be no “we” before politics, no
political subject in advance of the political act. Thus, through the process of
‘subjectivization’, politics is the meeting of the egalitarian democratic logic with that
of the police, the outcome of which is the “configuring [of] a time and a space that
invalidated the old distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004a, 10). Here, then, is
the perpetual democratic challenge. For Rancière, democracy is not a system of
institutions but the immanent political confrontation of the democratic logic of
equality with the police order. Put otherwise, democracy is “the power of those who
have no qualification for exercising power” (Rancière 2004b, 304).Thus, the term
“democracy” is limited to the radical democratic practices that oppose the police
order by challenging and disrupting the ‘proper’ or ‘naturalized’ organization of
social space.

10
Just as the extension of citizenship to non-propertied individual does not abolish the
fact of property, the “‘political emancipation’ through citizenship is never an operation confined
to the negation of individual ‘private’ particulars” (Brown 1994, 109, following Marx 1978; Lowe
1996, 27).

29

In contrast to Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that he completes Foucault’s
project (Agamben 1999), I posit Jacques Rancière as a more effective supplement.
11

Against Edward Said’s representation of Foucault’s analysis of power as “a web
without a spider” (Said 1984:221), Foucault’s genealogy of state governmentalities
continually highlights their contingent and therefore reversible nature. Taking
Foucault’s assemblage of state governmentalities outlined above as broadly
equivalent to Rancière’s notion of the police, we can construct a problematic of socio-
spatial democratic practice that hinges upon Rancière’s conception of politics. From
this perspective, a Foucaultian analytics of state governmentalities effectively
delineates Rancière’s police order: a distribution of the sensible that organizes and
assigns bodies in space to their proper place and role. This extension of Foucault’s
governmentalities to Rancière’s police also signals the necessary co-presence of
sovereignty and discipline within the police order. Where Rancière leaves the
formation of the police order underspecified, Foucault does not adequately focus on
‘crises of governmentality’ or the role of ‘counter-conduct’. Thus, Rancière’s notion of
politics can be understood as an effective supplement to Foucault’s less than direct

11
My connection between Rancière and Foucault is not merely a discursive move,
substantively qualified in Rancière’s remark that “If, among the thinkers of my generation, there
was one I was quite close to at one point, it was Foucault” (Rancière 2003, 208). There is more to
say about their intellectual affinities that falls beyond the bounds of this proposal.

30

engagement with practices of resistance. In short, Rancière picks up where Foucault
left off, though in the end, the theoretical abstraction in the above discussion and its
simultaneous emphasis on actually practices points towards the importance of
empirical study to be outlined in the dissertation chapters before.
Before turning to the literatures on housing and policing, I briefly consider the
implications for the question of citizenship provided the problematic of Rancière’s
‘police order’ as multiple state governmentalities. As both a set of practices and a
bundle of rights, citizenship is typically understood as both a formal juridical status
as well as a substantively lived practice (Isin and Wood 1999). The distance and
relationship between these two notions is part and parcel of the practices of
citizenship as a process, particularly given the formal yet heavily curtailed
citizenship status of the majority of Skid Row residents.
12
The Marshallian promise of
formal and cultural citizenship is a farce, as Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts forcefully
reveals, such that “inclusion through citizenship and rights cannot resolve the
material inequalities of racial exploitation” (Lowe 1996, 23).

12
A citizenship status not ‘attained’ in 1868 with the passage of the 14
th
Amendment in
1868. Though never fully attained, the 14
th
amendment is the result, following George Lipsitz
(2006, 2008) of what W.E.B. Du Bois terms ‘abolition democracy’ (1935).

31

Following Barbara Cruikshank’s argument that “the critical question for
democratic theory is how citizens are constituted by politics and power” (1999, 6),
processes of citizenship formation and subjectification are central sites of
contestation. Understood as part and parcel of state governmentalities, citizenship
becomes both a vehicle for subject formation and a site of contestation, both
discursively and materially. Thus, while the police order of state governmentalities
interpellates individual subjects or populations as certain types of citizens, a focus on
the practices of democratic ‘politics’ emphasizes the claiming and enacting of “urban
citizenship” (Baubock 2003, Isin 2002), or “the right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996).
These resultant “insurgent citizenships” (Holston 1999) are the empirical practices of
democratic politics under consideration within this dissertation.
Destabilizing so-called “rights talk”, ‘the rights of citizenship’ from a
Rancierian position entails a shift from the question of “what is it?” to “who is its
subject?” (Rancière 2004, c.f. McClure 1992). As part of the police order’s
classification of individuals assigned their proper place, regimes of citizenship
recognize only the counted, those legitimate to speak. By contrast, enacting ‘politics’
for the supplemental “the count of the uncounted”, represents a double paradox for
“rights of citizenship”. For Rancière, because there is no predetermined subject of
politics, the “rights” putatively guaranteed by citizenship are simultaneously

32

universal and void. That is, the rights of citizenship are not “the rights of a single
subject that would be at once the source and the bearer of the rights and would only
use the rights that she or he possesses” (Rancière 2004, 303). The point is that even if
historically we understand citizenship rights to be inscribed upon the white male
propertied subject, that subject is not the source of the rights it claims. Put simply,
“equality must be posited if inequality is to be explained” (Rancière 1995, 82). Taking
‘the rights of citizenship’ not as a distributive thing to be achieved but as a question
of ‘subjectivization’ raises the axiomatic problem of equality in its confirmation or
denial (Rancière 2004, 303).
Centrally, through the democratic political act of claiming certain citizenship
rights, individuals act as subjects that do not have the rights they have and have they
rights they have not (2004, 304).
13
The processes of ‘politics’ bring the boundaries of
the police order into question. In this, the “part that has no part” exist as the
uncounted without the rights they have while simultaneously enacting politics as if
they are privy to rights they are denied. From this Rancierian perspective, the

13
Rancière’s example here of Olympe de Gouge is written in the past tense: “They
acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they had not”
(Rancière 2004, 304).

33

question of citizenship is inextricably bound to the question of ‘politics’, its subjects
and the socio-spatial practices of democracy.
Therefore, while politics “does not recognize relationships between citizens
and the state”, it does recognize “the mechanisms and singular manifestations by
which a certain citizenship occurs but never belongs to individuals as such”
(Rancière 1999, 31). In this way, citizenship is never a bundle of rights for Rancière
but only exists through the practice of politics, whereby the supplementary
uncounted enact rather than receive equality. Therefore, while citizenship is not a
term common in Rancière’s writing, his contentious notion of democratic politics
destabilizes citizenship as a thing to be had but rather the contingent outcome of the
restructured police order. An emphasis on Rancière’s notion of politics denies fixity
to notions of “urban citizenship” or “the right to the city”, shifting our focus to the
perpetual democratic challenge and practice of the work done by ‘actual existing
democracies’ (Fraser 1992, Massey 1995).
After what Palonen (2000) terms “polit- vocabulary”, I follow Rancière in the
concern for the related terms of politics and police with an etymological root in the
Greek polis, extended further to the term policy (Dikec 2005). Together these terms
bear specific social and spatial relation to the city both discursively and materially. In
this manner, the decision to focus on the policies of housing and policing are

34

reflexively both empirically and conceptually motivated. That state governmental
practices in Los Angeles are empirically and acutely active in the urban policies of
housing and policing is evident through the theoretical conception that housing and
policing policy falls within the general practice of “the police”.
Thus, understood within the theoretical problematic of Rancière’s ‘politics’,
scholarship on housing and policing is approached from the perspective of resistance
and contestation to the police order’s socio-spatial structuring of social space. The
unity, contradictions, contestations and fundamentally the breakdown of the
practices of “the police” can in part be understood as articulated through the struggle
over urban policy.

35

Chapter 2.
The Place: Los Angeles as research object, subject, and history

Existing Scholarship on Los Angeles

This chapter engages with scholarship on Los Angeles, a city historically
lacking in urban research, particularly in contrast to New York or Chicago (Ethington
2000).
14
Bearing in mind the generally promoted argument that “L.A. is probably the
most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of
its mythologizers” (Sorkin 1982: 8), I follow Greg Hise’s recent emphasis on the
importance of how the history and scholarship on Los Angeles is written (2006).
From this perspective, representations of Los Angeles promoted by City Hall, in the
media and the so-called Los Angeles School are all complicit in ignoring or actively
suppressing the alternative stories and counter histories of individuals and
communities. Scholarship on Los Angeles has persistently focused on the physical
and social fragmentation of sprawl and dispersed governance at the expense of
concrete empirical realities, emphasizing abstract over experiential forms of
knowledge (Ethington and Meeker 2002). Over the last decade however, a significant

14
Notwithstanding the work early work of Emory Bogardus and his students as well as
Carey McWilliams.

36

and growing body of scholarship has emerged that takes the lived practices of
individuals and communities in Los Angeles seriously. I therefore briefly review the
rise in scholarship during the 1980s associated with the LA School before turning to
the lack of scholarship on Downtown, particularly its historic center and Skid Row.
Finally, I end by focusing on the existing body of scholarship on what might broadly
be termed ‘socio-spatial justice’ that represents productive means forward for this
dissertation project.
One aspect of this dissertation represents the move beyond the rhetorical
bombast of the Los Angeles School of Urbanism. Emergent during the 1980s, a
number of Los Angeles based academics produced what has been recognized as a
significant body of scholarship on a relatively neglected region (Soja and Scott 1986,
later ‘codified’ in Scott and Soja 1996, Dear 2002). Of enduring importance is the
work of Mike Davis (1990, 1998), Jennifer Wolch (1990) on the shadow state, as well
as Ed Soja (1989), Michael Stoper (1997) and Allen Scott (1988) on urban restructuring
and post-fordism. Nevertheless, scholarship by Michael Dear (2000) and Ed Soja
(1996) on ‘postmodernism’ has come to represent for the LA School. Treated as such,
the LA School has never been about Los Angeles as a place, merely treating it as prop
and inspiration. An isomorphism is constructed between postmodern thought and
the material processes of urbanism that persistently emphasizes flux and chaos to the

37

detriment of any stability or coherence in the actually existing world. Far from being
a chaotically unplanned metropolis, other scholars have stressed the planned nature
of growth within the region (Hise 1997, Hise and Gish 2007). Likewise, Sonenshein
(1994, 2004) demonstrates the role and power wielded by Los Angeles County and
City Hall. In this respect, the LA School is empirically weak, pilfering the work of
others for its cause. With respect to contemporary urban scholarship, the LA School
has neglected what is broadly termed “the political” including the State,
neoliberalism, urban politics and radical social movements. In the end, the LA School
has been fundamentally incapable of reproducing itself, signaling not so much a
return to the idiographic but a turn to the solipsistic.

The Purloined Center: Downtown Los Angeles

Despite phenomenal growth through the twentieth century and particularly
over the last decade, downtown Los Angeles remains a remarkably understudied
place. In contrast to architectural critic Reyner Banham’s withering remark that a
‘note’ was “all that downtown Los Angeles deserves” (1971, 201), the city center
holds as a highly contested urban space. Specific research on downtown has focused
primarily on Bunker Hill (Parson 2005, Avila 2005, Hayden 1997), Civic Center (Soja
1989, 2000) and the Plaza (Estrada 2007, Ryan 2005). In this way, the material and

38

discursive thing of “downtown” can be treated as a differentiated and relational
whole. Work by Mike Davis on the ‘internationalization’ (1992) and the ‘infinite
game’ of redeveloping downtown (2002 [1992]) as well as Mara Cohen Marks (2004)
on the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) provides a general frame within
which to build in this dissertation. As will be outlined below in urban historical
context, ‘downtown’ is neither a fixed point nor defined boundary whereby its very
putative center shifts according to the latest attempt to ‘revitalize downtown’. Thus,
while not specifically focused on the historic core or Skid Row areas, the research
cited above on Bunker Hill informs the general framework for the destructive and
relational restructuring of downtown.
Within City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998), Davis turns his
characteristically lively prose to the tragically parodic conditions in Skid Row during
the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the contrast with the corporate towers
atop Bunker Hill. While Davis has been attacked for less than factual hyperbolic
muckraking, his sensationalist and absurdist writings about Skid Row appear to me
relatively correct. What Davis’s account possess in shock, it falls significantly short in
capturing the daily banalities of what it might mean to live and struggle with
“fortress Los Angeles”. Relatedly, the scholarship that focuses specifically on the
Historic Core and Skid Row Areas is dominated by a service-provision planning

39

model and classifications the homeless (Dear and Wolch 1987, Wolch and Dear 1993).
Wolch and Dear do provide useful overviews of the rise in homelessness due to
economic restructuring as well as an acute housing crisis. Nevertheless, this synoptic
perspective treats the homeless as incapable of individual or collective action as
exemplified in the titles of “landscapes of despair” or “malign neglect”. By adopting
a service-provisioning perspective, Skid Row is not a place but locational site for the
delivery of services to a dependent population. Finally, these accounts fall short in
their now historical status.
While I have argued that little research on gentrification in Los Angeles and
particularly its Downtown exist, one outlier is Bernard Harcourt’s Public Law and
Legal Theory Working Paper entitled, “Policing L.A.’s Skid Row” (2005). Harcourt is
a legal scholar who has written extensively on the mendacious failures of ‘broken
windows’ policing (cited above). While Harcourt recognizes that Skid row is the
“heart of an urban struggle…a battle over land and lofts” (2005, 8) he manages to get
just about everything else wrong. Harcourt’s touristic journey into Skid Row
represents what he calls “an experiment in real time” whereby “changes are
occurring as [he] writes” (ibid.). His research is based on LA Times Articles, a poor
selection of lawsuits and a limited number of interviews with homeless advocates
(not activists/organizers) as well as significantly relying upon developer Tom

40

Gilmore and restaurateur Cedd Moses. Gilmore also led Harcourt on walking tours
through Skid Row at night, reminiscent of Columnist Steve Lopez’s tours for Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa which has in part led to the Mayor’s embrace of the Safer Cities
Initiative (Blasi 2007). Harcourt concludes from his various sources that Skid Row
Advocates and Historic Core Developers actually want the same thing: a ‘gritty’,
‘noir’, ‘frontier-like’ urban experience that can only exist with some semblance of
Skid Row preserved. Further, despite Harcourt’s persistent criticism of ‘broken
windows’ policing, race and racism has never figured prominently in his analysis,
leading him to the conclusion in 2005 that the police would play a “backseat role to
high-end real estate developers, SRO advocates and city planning” (64).
In this way, he fails to understand then Mayor Hahn’s rejection of ‘quality of
life’ policing as well as to anticipate the already planned “Safer Cities Initiative” by
Bratton and Kelling at the time (Blasi 2007). Harcourt never talks with Skid Row
residents, looks to urban policies either new or extant, explores the wide number of
ongoing lawsuits against city redevelopment practices nor interacts with community
based organizations not involved in the provision of services such as the Los Angeles
Community Action Network (LA CAN) or Downtown Women’s Action Coalition
(DWAC). In this sense, he fails to distinguish between the work of advocates and
activist/organizers who “will work with you, not for you”. In this way, Skid Row and

41

its residents are consigned to the position of silence found in the work of Davis,
Wolch and Dear, as well as Mitchell to a lesser extent. Finally, Harcourt never
addresses issues of urban politics, political economy nor civil or human rights.
Despite Harcourt’s attention to the substantive issues at hand, his detached gaze,
inattention to issues of race and class, spotty methodology and lack of knowledge
about of current urban policies fails to capture the processes at work in Skid Row
today.
Two final scholarly outliers exist that help bridge the transition into the
following section. The first is Gilda Haas
15
and Allan Heskin’s “Community
Struggles in Los Angeles” (1981). Here they outline three community, though not
necessarily grassroots, struggles against developmental plans of the local state. The
first case focuses on Pico-Union area’s early struggles with the Community
Redevelopment Agency (CRA), where Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE)
would later emerge. Looking to Skid Row, Hass and Heskin highlight community
advocates struggle against the 1975 redevelopment plan that called for the wholesale
elimination of Skid Row. While this case will be examined in further detail in the

15
Gilda Haas is former director of Strategic Action for a Just Economy (SAJE) and co-
founder of the Right to the City Alliance.

42

section on Historic Context, Haas and Heskin focus on the role of homeless
advocates fighting back against the city’s plans.
Likewise, the second article of note is Edward Goetz’s “Land Use and
Homeless Policy in Los Angeles” (1992). Goetz focuses on the period between 1984
and 1989, highlighting the persistent land-use struggles around Skid Row and the
homeless advocates who worked to mobilize the various tent cities against the city’s
piecemeal affordable housing policies. Together, these two articles emphasize the
role of community struggle against the CRA-CCA-CCEA alliance, albeit its advocates
rather than the grassroots organization of the homeless and marginally housed
themselves. In this manner, policies are not simply thrust upon passive localities, a
fundamental inflexion missing from the accounts of Wolch and Dear. In the end,
however, research on downtown since the early 1990s, particularly the historic core
and Skid Row, is shockingly absent.
16
It is unclear why this is the case, though, it is
into this significant gap that this dissertation moves.

Scholarship on Socio-spatial Justice in Los Angeles

16
There does exist a reasonably large body of scholarship that obliquely considers Skid
Row Los Angeles that will be incorporated within my historical context.

43

In the shadow of the shadow State (Gilmore 2007), a theoretically informed
and empirical based body of research concentrates on the politics of socio-spatial
justice under a racialized neoliberal urban regime in Los Angeles (Homero and
Sanchez 2005). In direct contrast to putative instability and flux of postmodernism,
Roger Keil’s provides a book length account of the ‘multiplicity of processes’ that
have constituted “urban politics, movements and agency” (1998, ix) in distinction to
the LA School’s “lack of attention to movements on the ground” (2003, 210). Likewise
Gottlieb et al. (2005) directly engage with what it might mean to make “the next Los
Angeles” a more just place. The contested nature of growth coalitions and urban
regimes in Los Angeles represents the acute challenges of a heterogeneous and
spatially disperse urban region. The 1925 city charter and its subsequent reform in
1999 provide a unique lens with which to view state strategy and management of
legitimacy crises (Keil 2001, Purcell 2001, Schockman 1996). William Fulton has gone
so far as to suggest that the growth machine has collapsed under its own weight
(1997). In contrast to Fulton’s argument, others have extensively highlighted the
formation of alternative political coalitions (Boudreau 2003, Chung 2001, Pincetl
1999).
In this light, the most written about hotel in urban studies, the Bonaventure,
plays the double role as postmodern hyperspace (Jameson 1984, Soja 1989) and site of

44

labor mobilization. While Frederic Jameson, led by Soja and Lefebvre in tow, was
infamously getting confused and lost upstairs, Hotel Employees and Restaurant
Employees (HERE) Local 11 waged a Living Wage Campaign (Merrifield 2000).
Further, Cranford (1998) and Geron (1997) draw attention to the ethnicized and
feminized labor-capital relations while Nichols (2003) and Pastor (2001) explore the
emergence of a new organization infrastructure for progressive movements in Los
Angeles. In what Matt Sparke awkwardly labels a “new ‘LA School’ of geography, in
the streets”, Ruthie Gilmore’s work (2007) on prisons, the ‘anti-state state’, and
collective resistance by Mother Reclaiming Our Children (ROC) is highlighted along
with Laura Pulido’s scholarship on environmental justice (1996, 2000) and
particularly Third World Left’s radical activism in Los Angeles (2006). One final
example, but by no means the last (e.g. Garcia Bedolla 2005, Light 2002, Pincetl 1996
etc.) is Monica Varsayni’s focus on questions of citizenship surrounding
undocumented persons as well as the Bus Riders Union (2005, 2006, 2008).
Historical scholarship has likewise destabilized and rewritten both booster
and canonical accounts of the city’s past. Further, scholarship on Los Angeles’s past
necessarily intersects with the downtown area given the city’s urban historically
compact urban form in relative contrast to the contemporary ‘sprawl’. Notable
examples include William Deverell’s (2005) detailed account of the erasure of the

45

city’s Mexican past as well as Donald Parson’s book length presentation of the defeat
of public housing in the city through the process of red-baiting (2005). Similarly,
Mark Wild (2005) demonstrates the presence of early radical political traditions as
well as the multi-ethnic nature of Downtown’s neighborhoods during the early
twentieth century, presaging the contemporary vapid ‘celebrations’ of diversity and
“social-mix”. Other scholarship that directly informs this dissertation includes
community struggles against the state (Pardo 1998, Schrank 2009), racist mobilization
of public health discourses (Molina 2006), as well as fundamentally social justice and
the police (Escobar 1999, Haney-Lopez 2003, Vargas 2006). Taken together, this
significant body of scholarship exists and on ‘the political’ in Los Angeles that is
glaringly absent in the exported version of LA School. This political side of Los
Angeles fundamental shapes the production and reproduction of places through the
actions and practices of individuals and groups. It is here, rather than with
established meta-discourses that urbanism is lived and provisional knowledge is
built.

The Urban Historical Context: the shifting spatial urban governmentalities of
Downtown Los Angeles, 1940 to Present

46

This final section is a syncretic extension of the theoretical problematic of
Foucault’s multiple state governmentalities and Rancière’s police in conjunction with
the “Urban Historical Context” presented above. In this way, the urban historical
context of Downtown Los Angeles is presented through an archeology and
genealogy of shifting urban political rationalities, particularly those of housing and
policing. This approach represents a blend of Stephen Legg’s Foucaultian analysis of
Colonial Delhi (2007) and Mustafa Dikec’s Rancierian study of French urban policy
for the banlieues (2007). In doing so, a traditional urban history is stretched to focus
on shifts and continuities in urban policies linked to the histories of governmental
reason. A central concern of this chapter is to demonstrate how Skid Row has been
discursively and materially constructed as well as contested over time. Further, both
legal and political constructions of the spaces of Skid Row as they relate to housing
and policing will be considered. The outcome of this chapter will be to establish the
various ‘police orders’ that have existed over time and the multiple forms of ‘politics’
that have disrupted them. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to “excavate the future”
(Davis 1990) for Skid Row during the contemporary period through this brief history
of the present.
In spite of its relative scholarly neglect, Downtown Los Angeles exists as the
region’s largest job center, hub of civic and governmental functions, and home to

47

longstanding commercial and residential communities. Downtown redevelopment
has long been what Davis writing in 1992 terms an “infinite game” whereby since its
loss of unrivaled centrality in the 1920s (Longstreth 1997), downtown elites have
sought to rearticulate its position of dominance. Historically through to the present,
the downtown business interests of the Downtown Businessmen’s Association to its
contemporary forms in the Central City Association (CCA) and the Central City East
Association (CCEA), have made “revitalizing” downtown a central mission. From
Los Angeles’s first whitewashing into an Anglo city (Deverell 2005), the
contemporary processes remaking downtown reinscribe violent histories of erasure
that destroyed the first Chinatown for Union Station and Chavez Ravine for Dodger
Stadium.
Simultaneously the oldest and newest spaces of Los Angeles, current
conditions in downtown represent a layering of past rounds of redevelopment,
planning and erasure. Far from being fixed internally, downtown Los has assumed
different spatial form and function throughout time. From its original site near the
Placita and Olvera St., downtown has internally undergone the process of ‘migratory
mitosis’ (Ryan 2006), splitting and shifting its centers of gravity. The ‘center’ of
downtown moved from the original Plaza to 2
nd
and Spring by 1900, 7
th
and Hill by
1930, and symbolically atop Bunker Hill in the 1980s (Fogelson 1967, Parson 1993). In

48

this way, the ‘center’ downtown itself has not only shifted but expanded to
encompass an ever larger area, first through the appropriation and semi-flattening of
Bunker Hill, but also toward the west and south.
Finally, eschewing any unified notion of downtown, the previous ‘centers’
persist as differential focal points for the social lives of individuals and communities.
Concomitantly within the regional context, downtown has persists in the tension
between centrifugal and centripetal forces. While this project focuses on the period
from the mid-1990s to present, it recognizes that debates over the relation between
the city center and peripheral “suburban” areas date from planning commission
reports in the 1930s and 1940s (Hise and Gish 2007). At the regional scale, downtown
has long been in tension with interests in the Westside and Valley (Davis 1990) and
taking the 1920s as the high point for central cities, Longstreth (1997) documents the
dispersal of commercial and retail functions from the city center. Finally, past and
recent secession battles are premised upon the necessary relation between downtown
and the rest of the city-region (Keil and Bourdreau 2001, Sonenshein 2004).
Put simply, Davis’s ‘infinite game’ has intensively been at play since the late
1990s. In order to contextualize this latest round of redevelopment or ‘urban
relocation’, it is important to frame the contemporary period in light of historical
processes (Ethington forthcoming). Within downtown’s history we find that various

49

interests have sought to maintain and reinvent its central form and function through
urban policy and planning. In this manner, the state’s policy and planning have
always played a leading part function in the image and built environment of
downtown. Ultimately, while the strategies to re-center the historic core of a
polycentric region have significantly shifted over time, the outcomes of displacement
have not. Situated within Ethington’s final two ‘regional regimes’ (1940-1992, 1992-
Present), the following account focuses on the downtown area adding specificity to
the regimes, emphasizing the continuities and shifts in urban policy.

1940 – 1953
Taking 1940 as the starting point for this brief historical overview, several
general remarks on crucial pivots in the trajectory of urban growth are in order. First,
by contrast to other major American cities, the area and density of downtown of Los
Angeles has long been small in relation to non-central city areas (Fogelson 1967, 143).
While downtown is chronologically older and quantitatively larger than other
agglomerations such as Santa Monica, Long Beach or Pasadena, the region itself grew
in a relatively polycentric fashion. Internally, downtown emerged in the late 19
th

century with a high proportion of residential hotels and commercial establishments,

50

yet by the 1930s an increasingly large number of office buildings came to dominate
downtown’s built environment (Fogelson 1967, 151). Moreover, from the perspective
of urban morphology, the onset of the 1940s represented the shift from outright
growth to processes of infill and restructuring for the central areas of the City of Los
Angeles (Marchand 1986, 83, Soja 2000, 130). The immediately preceding period
between 1920-1940 represented a period of intensive growth in manufacturing, the
film industry, suburbanization (Sitton and Deverell 2001) and increasing globality
(Ethington 2007). With the onset of WWII and the rise in aircraft and automobile
industries coupled with massive in-migration shifted Los Angeles from a regional
center into a national metropolis (Ethington forthcoming 41, Sides 2003, Soja 1989,
195).
The mayoralty of Fletcher Bowron from 1938-1953 framed the first downtown
regime. From the perspective of downtown, this frame marked the brief period of
New Deal urbanism, the internal unrest of the Zoot Suit Riots and the forced
Japanese Internment. Coeval was the massive rise in Black American migration
(Sides 2003), the creative destruction of transportation infrastructure (Bottles 1987,
Roth 2007) and the expansion of the Civic Center (Schuchardt 1941). Given the
relative decline of Downtown in relation to the Wilshire Corridor and Hollywood by
this period (Longstreth 1997, Gish 2007), questions of the city center’s efficacy

51

increased (Hise and Gish 2007, 360). Into this void emerges the “Community
Redevelopment Act” of 1945, passed by the California state legislature. In accordance
with urban renewal projects nationwide, the redevelopment act sought to “protect
and promote the sound development and redevelopment of blighted areas” (Shiesl
1980). This led to the local 1948 formation of the Los Angeles Community
Redevelopment Agency (CRA/LA, hereafter CRA), who produced a document that
same year entitled “Blight. The Problem, The Remedy”, signaling CRA’s ability to
both define problems and their solutions.
As mayor, Bowron fought hard to bring federal renewal dollars to Los
Angeles, specifically Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine as well as maintaining federal
rent control monies (Sitton 2005). While the private business interests long sought to
redevelop Bunker Hill, the federal power of eminent domain was necessary to
navigate the quagmire of land owners. In what would have been the largest public
housing project in the United States with 10,000 units, the urban renewal projects
were red-baited out of existence (Parson 2005). Labeled as ‘socialist’, public housing
was defeated along with a bevy of other putatively anti-communist individuals and
groups from Hollywood to avant-garde artists (Schrank 2009).
17
Moreover, these

17
The unironically named group against public housing was named Committee
Against Socialist Housing or CASH.

52

conflicts also marked the rise of the LAPD’s Red Squads, presaging their eventual
role alongside the FBI’s COINTELPRO in suppressing and destroying left political
movements. Ultimately with Bowron’s defeat in 1953, New Deal programs in
downtown ended before they began, a fate not shared throughout the rest of the
region with the massive rise in homeownership loans and growth of the Military-
Industrial Complex (Hise 1997, Weiss 1997, Soja 1989).
Finally, while Skid Row has existed in Los Angeles in some form for well over
100 years, this period also marked shifts for the area. Historically home to transient
seasonal workers and the ‘traditional’ hobo at the end of rail lines (Anderson 1923,
Spivack 1998), the population of Skid Row’s residential hotels becomes increasingly
permanent (Rahimian et al. 1992). This transition from transience to relative
permanence was far from complete during this period and will later undergo
significant demographic shifts. Moreover, it is important to note the different spatial
arrangement of institutions present at the time. Today the three major Missions are
located on 5
th
and 6
th
Streets between San Pedro and Wall. However, in 1940 until the
1990s, the Union Rescue Mission stood at 2
nd
and Main, just south of City Hall, the
Los Angeles Mission at 3
rd
and Main and the Midnight Mission at 4
th
and Los
Angeles. These past locations placed the Missions much closer to the Civic Center
and within the heart of the then languishing central business district (CBD).

53

Further, at this time, many of the hotels that would eventually become
permanent SROs such as the Alexandria or Cecil Hotels maintained a greater mix of
socio-economic residents in contrast to the areas atop Bunker Hill. In this sense, the
decision to raze Bunker Hill rather than Skid Row can in part be understood by the
partial functional integration of the areas residential hotels within the extant CBD. By
contrast, Bunker Hill’s steep hills limited the expansion of downtown and the Civic
Center toward the north and west. Ultimately, while many Skid Rows were
eliminated during the period of urban renewal (Miller 1982), Los Angeles’s Skid Row
escaped the federal bulldozer at this time.

1953 – 1965
The end of Bowron’s mayoralty signals shifted away from a concern for social
welfare to the reconsolidation of the state-capital alliance in a shift toward
commercial and monumental modernism (Parson 2005).
18
The election of Norris
Paulson (1953-61), handpicked by the Los Angeles Times and downtown business
association against Bowron, as well as the ascendancy of Chief of Police William

18
While not sanguine about the socio-spatial justice found with the social welfare of
Urban Renewal Programs, the subsequent early transition Los Angeles to blatantly private and
corporate interests is worse.

54

Parker signaled the political move to the right (Schmidt 2005, Herbert 1997).
Although the actual bulldozing of Bunker Hill did not occur until 1963, this period
marked the complete turn away from social welfare to the concerted efforts to
construct corporate towers and expensive apartments. Likewise, the 150 foot (13
stories) height limit was removed in 1956, opening Los Angeles up to the possibility
of high-rise construction. Instituted in 1905, this height restriction kept skyscrapers
out of Los Angeles during a period of rapid construction in cities such as Chicago
and New York. In no small part, the lack of high-rise construction contributed to the
lack of visual downtown iconography for Los Angeles despite the area’s centrally
functional roles.
Created between 1960 and 1964, the Centropolis plan outlined the first
comprehensive downtown plan, calling for the oft repeated refrain of “central city
renaissance”. Produced by the Central City Committee composed of major business
stakeholders, the plan delineated the “need for a strong central city” organized
around renewed commercial and corporate vitality. Primary concerns focused on the
renovating the aging CBD, building a new Bunker Hill with gleaming corporate and
high-rise residential towers, the expansion of the Civic Center as well as
‘modernized’ parking and transportation networks. The plan placesd no focus on
Downtown residents outside of Bunker Hill and the area that would become the

55

Convention Center where its inhabitants would be displaced beginning in 1972 and
later during expansions in 1993 and 2000. Part of the ongoing difficultly in
identifying longstanding downtown populations was the prevalence of residential
hotels that are zoned commercial. Further, until 2006, residential hotels were under
the purview of Building and Safety rather than the Housing Department.
19
Zoning
maps and dominant representations of the Downtown area made Downtown and
Skid Row inhabitants’ place of residence invisible. In this way, the Centropolis Plan
included 1/3
rd
of Skid Row’s contemporary residential hotel housing stock as part of
the Central Business District, all without referring to the area by that name. Instead,
the plan discussed “East Downtown” presaging the 1970’s re-labeling as “Central
City East”. Further foreshadowing later containment politics and without any
allusion to Skid row, a “commercial-light industrial area” would buffer between
“East Downtown” and the ‘renewed’ CBD (1964, 39). Further, a ‘Social Service
Center’ would be added the small area around 5
th
and San Pedro streets to further
consolidate existing service providers.

19
The 2006 transfer of residential hotels from the Department of Building and Safety to
the Housing Department is the subject of Chapter 2 and the outcome of suit filed by LA CAN,
SAJE and the Legal Aid Foundation against CRA.

56

Coeval with the Centropolis Plan was Donald Bogue’s Skid Row in American
Cities (1963) who by contrast identifies a much larger Skid Row area (27). This
counter representation of an expanded Skid Row suggested early planning efforts to
curtail and appropriate its space. In the end, however, this period represented the
consolidation of a local state – capital alliance. While their ability to actualize
significant change during this period was limited, their efforts became highly
materialized in the following period.

1965 – 1978
The period following the 1965 Watts Uprising marked a significant shift in
Downtown. Put simply, the Centropolis Plan was discarded before it could be
implemented. The McCone Commission’s report intensified the already uncertain
economic conditions for downtown businesses forecasting “by 1990 the core of the
Central city of Los Angeles will be inhabited by almost exclusively 1,200,000
Negroes” (cited in Marks 1999, 136). With the LAPD’s similarly incendiary warnings
of an “imminent gang invasion” by black youth (cited in Davis 1992, 150),
downtown’s fortification, planning and development markedly intensified.
By 1970, the Los Angeles Planning Department issued the “first citywide
comprehensive plan in Los Angeles history” that articulated a vision for the greater

57

region containing “centers throughout the city”. In direct contrast, the downtown
Business Interests of the CCA and notably the CRA produced a 1972 counter-plan
known as “The Silverbook Plan”. Rather than a polycentric region with multiple
centers, elite downtown interests explicitly sought to “create a symbol of pride and
identity which gave the Central City a strong image as the major center of the Los
Angeles region.” This division between the city Planning Department and CRA was
significant. While the Planning Department putatively represented the entire city and
maintained limited control over zoning, the CRA worked only in its defined project
areas and possessed significant financial autonomy and control. Thus, in the interim
between the issuance of the Centropolis Plan, CRA drastically expanded its spatial
reach beyond Bunker Hill. Following the election of opportunistically pro-downtown
mayor Tom Bradley in 1973, CRA codified the Silverbook plan into practice in the
1975 “Central Business District Redevelopment Project”. Then the largest
redevelopment project in the country, the 1975 plan faced two primary oppositions.
The first related to CRA’s reliance upon Tax Increment Financing (TIF) while the
second concerned the explicit elimination of significant portions of Skid Row.
The fight against CRA’s mode of creative and extractive financing was led by
conservative Valley council representative Ernani Bernadi who objected to the
diversion of “billions of dollars of future tax increments (the increase in assessments

58

due to redevelopment) from general fund uses” (Davis 1992, 153). Bernadi sued the
CRA, claiming that “taxpayers outside the CBD would have to make up for the
property taxes CRA would drain from the CBD” (Marks 2007, 432), heightening
uneven regional development between the central city and other areas. The suit was
settled in 1977 placing a lifetime cap of 750 million dollars on the potential tax
revenues. This conflict highlighted the intra-urban competition Downtown faced in
its struggle of inter-urban competition during the transition from managerial to
entrepreneurial modes of urbanism (Harvey 1989).
Of particular importance to Skid Row, the 1975 redevelopment plan followed
Silverbook in its call for its elimination and rebirth as “Central City East”. In the
planned wake of Skid Row’s “deinstitutionalization”, the 1975 plan called for the
construction of a regional University center, metropolitan police station, massive
parking garages and a new central library (CRA 1975, 18).
20
The impetus for a
counter-plan emerged when a downtown Catholic Worker read the Silverbook plan,
and found “that if everything proceeded as planned both his services and
constituents would be displaced” (Hass and Heskin 1981, 555). A direct response
known as the “Containment Plan” emerged from service providers and homeless

20
Of which, only the Police Station was built, a bunker with solid brick walls on three
sides in the middle of Skid Row.

59

advocates in collaboration with the Mayor’s “Blue Ribbon Citizens’ Advisory
Committee” in a document entitled “Skid Row: Recommendations to the Citizens
Advisory Committee on the Central Business District Plan”. Here, the various
homeless advocates worked with the Police Department and planning officials to
draft a mutually acceptable strategy to cope with the “homeless problem” without
the direct participation of any homeless themselves. The recommendations of city
officials and advocates stressed the need to maintain rather than expunge Skid Row
from Downtown’s built landscape, at least for the time being. The containment plan
represented a concern for the welfare of dependent groups and individuals in need
of services while simultaneously providing the means to sequester the homeless
population in a confined space away from the redeveloping Financial Core to the
west. This ‘spatial apartheid’ functions through the LAPD who “just don’t let them
[homeless persons] get past Spring Street” (cited in Goetz 1992, 545). Although never
formally law, the plan became accepted though constantly contested practice until
the turn of the 21
st
century. Ultimately, the Containment Plan thus represented a
model of advocacy for the dependent rather than organizing with community
residents. Writing in at the time, Hass and Heskin (1981) stressed the contrast
between the community organizing of the Pico Union area with that of Skid Row and

60

its advocates. This limitation becomes further exacerbated in the following periods,
only to be directly addressed in the late 1990s with the formation of LA CAN.
One final facet of the 1975 Redevelopment plan was the call for “South Park
Village”, a 20,000 unit residential area around the convention center. Despite the fact
that South Park had only recently been constructed, it represented the first attempt to
significantly colonize the downtown area with affluent residents outside Bunker Hill
starting in the 1970s. Long before CRA and developers set their gaze upon the
historic core, this area was viewed as integral to the overall downtown renaissance as
the location of a ‘stable’ middle-class residential population. Today it actualizes that
vision as the displacement of dozens of apartment buildings and residential hotels in
and around the recent L.A. Live and current Convention and Staples Centers.

1978 – 1992
A new regime of intensive planning and development shifted with the
passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Although Prop 13 seriously crippled the ability of
governments to collect revenues, CRA was paradoxically emboldened. While the
flow of federal dollars dried up and municipal coffers increasingly empty, CRA’s
Downtown TIF schemes increasingly produced value, whereby “redevelopment
became a central pillar of the city’s economic policy” (Cohen-Marks 2007, 435,

61

Sonenshein 1993, 170). As urban space was increasingly mobilized as an
accumulation strategy (Harvey 1982), the function of urban land shifted from a
means to production to the object of production itself. Echoing Margaret Thatcher,
Mayor Bradley proclaimed about downtown redevelopment that “Blight is the Only
Other Alternative”. During this period, CRA cast the local state as entrepreneur
rather than manager (Harvey 1989), coordinating and promoting land use policies,
housing market arrangements, entrepreneurial strategies, and simply not interfering
with spatial practices, and therefore allowing the persistence of dynamics of
structural exclusion.
The fiscalization of land following the passage of Prop 13 heralds both
downtown’s emergence as a so-called “World City” and the ‘Homeless Capital’ of
the United States. Likewise, the majority of Downtown’s skyline was built as well as
sold during this period with 25% of major downtown properties foreign-owned in
1979 rising to 75% in 1985 (Davis 1991). Characteristic of conditions under late
capitalism, the Los Angeles city-region underwent restructurings of
deindustrialization and the flight of labor and capital overseas (Beauregard 1991, Soja
et al. 1983). Together, these processes led to massive layoffs in tradition mass
manufacturing and the displacement of labor, a system already dramatically closed
to post-WWII black migrants. Together these processes produced “permanent

62

unemployment, underemployment, and homelessness as a way of life” (Kelley 2003,
xvii, Vargas 2006). Concomitantly, the demographics of Skid Row shifted
dramatically from older white males (65% white in 1970 down to 32% in 1980)
toward the 75% black population today. In this vein it is important to highlight that
Los Angeles became the homeless capital of the United States not because the city
possessed a higher number of homeless but because of the lack of shelter. In Los
Angeles, only 21% of homeless were sheltered in contrast to over 90% in
Philadelphia, Denver or New York City (Blasi 2007). A particularly acute affordable
housing crisis emerged during this period through what the local state’s planned
obsolescence whereby Skid Row’s residential housing stock of about 15,000 units
during the 1960s was reduced through city code enforcement down to 7,500 units by
the early 1970s (Spivack 1998).
In response, as the towers rose on Bunker Hill and in the financial district,
housing advocates were able to pressure the CRA into diverting 25 percent of tax
revenues to subsidize over 5,000 units of new or rehabilitated low income affordable
housing units in Skid Row (Cohen-Marks 2004). The process of rehabilitation and
new construction of SROs was facilitated by the creation of the Single Room
Occupancy Housing Corporation (SRO Housing) in 1984 and later the more
independent Skid Row Housing Trust (Housing Trust) in 1989. SRO Housing was a

63

direct subsidiary of the CRA, severely limiting their ability to produce permanent
supportive housing outside the bounds of CRA’s dictates. By contrast, the Housing
Trust was created by Catholic Worker and advocate Alice Callahan as a more activist
alternative. While SRO Housing focused on a spatially concentrated area around 5
th

and Wall, the Trust took a more aggressive approach to secure the perimeter of Skid
Row. In this manner, the Trust built and converted housings in such a way that
intended to inhibit real estate speculation and the potential for a developer led land
grab. These practices were partially successful, developing SRO properties along
both Main and 7
th
Streets as well as in the eastern portion of Skid Row known as “the
bottoms”. However, the city’s implemented policy towards housing had been
piecemeal rather than comprehensive. Despite the productive rehabilitation and
construction efforts by SRO Housing and the Housing Trust, the number of
affordable housing units fell well below demand. Between 1984 and 1989, Goetz
(1992) documents the numerous tent cities erected both on Skid Row and across the
street from City Hall as activist attempts to push the issue upon city and county
governments. Ultimately, while homeless advocates were unsuccessful in their
attempt to force the city and CRA to produce sufficient housing, they did manage to
‘hold the line’ in maintaining the territorial space of Skid Row itself.

64

1992 – 1999
The economic downtown of 1990-1994 essentially halted the redevelopment
practices dominant since the late 1970s. In a generalized crisis of governance
following the recession and aftermath of the Rodney King Uprising, new forms of
civil society organization emerged from ‘ground zero’ (Pastor 2001).
In a regressive and reactionary vein, legislation passed that enabled the
establishment of business improvement districts (BIDs) in 1994 (Meek and Hubler
2006). Emergent throughout urbanized areas over the last thirty years (Ward 2007),

65

these territorially defined business associations are public-private partnerships
created by at least 50% of property owners the defined area. Once formed, all
property owners within the BID’s territory, including the state, must pay an annual
fee whether they wished to or not. These fees are not technically a tax and their
revenue went toward street cleaning, trash pick-up, tourist publications and notably
private security guards. Significant scholarship has focused on how these “rent-a-
cops” police public space, infringing particularly upon the rights of the homeless
(Mitchell and Staeheli 2008). Within downtown Los Angeles, the BIDs are managed
by the business interests of the Central City Association (CCA) and the Central City
East Association (CCEA) and by 1999 the majority of the downtown was overlain by
BIDs. Of consequence to Skid Row is the creation of the “Historic Core” BID in 1999.
Given the earlier discussion of downtown’s internal “migratory mitosis” (Ryan 2006),
fixing the notion of a single “Historic Core” highlighted the malleability and
selectivity of historical memory. As there have been numerous cores throughout the
past, this nostalgic recycling related to a specific Anglo moment of presumably the
1920s rather than the Placita. This BID includes Main and Spring, partitioning away
two streets heavily populated by large residential hotels and considered part of Skid
Row by its residents. The formation of the “Historic Core” also led to the erecting of
signs of the same name, further re-labeling the space away from its existing uses.

66

A second creation of this period was the formation of neighborhood councils
following city charter reform in 1997 (Pitt 2004). These councils were part of the
compromise with San Fernando Valley interests in an attempt to enable greater civic
engagement within what has historically been a closed political system with
remarkably low voter turnout and direct participation (Sonenshein, 2007). Provided
the city’s 15-member council, whose jurisdictions are the size of mid-sized cities,
neighborhood councils purportedly bring government closer to the people under the
pretense of participatory democracy. In actual practice, the neighborhood councils
have limited advisory oversight with no direct political power to initiate or halt any
plans or projects. Moreover, it can be suggested the Neighborhood councils are little
more than state sanctioned homeowner associations. With regard to this project, the
Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC) was founded relatively
late in 2002. Its role in downtown development has been largely ancillary to Council
and CRA interests and will be considered in greater detail in the dissertation itself.

67

68

Emphasizing the connection between neighborhood councils and the business
community, the current president of the DLANC is also the executive director of the
Historic Core BID.

The final form of organization and central focus of this dissertation is the
formation of grassroots level community based organizations (CBOs) or new social
movements (NSMs) such as the Bus Riders Union (BRU), the Los Angeles Alliance
for a New Economy (LAANE) and the Labor/Community Strategy Center (Gottlieb
et al. 2005, Nicholas 2003, Pastor 2001).
21
Within the context of Downtown we find
the organizations of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) in South Park and
the Figueroa Corridor and the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) in
Skid Row. In their own way, these organizations mobilize their base constituencies to
claim a variegated “right to the city” through both direct action and legal suit.
Individually and collectively these groups represent a fundamental challenge to state
entrepreneurial and developmental interests, demanding socio-spatial justice and
equity. Far from a merely oppositional relationship to the state, these groups

21
Other research on these organizations is discussed in earlier section “Scholarship on
Socio-spatial Justice in Los Angeles”. The Labor/Community Strategy Center formed in 1989, but
is included here for its integral role during 1990s movements on up to the present.

69

mobilize not only against but also within the realm of state urban policy. Without
going into further detail here, this dissertation focuses primarily upon the socio-
spatial practices of such organization, particularly LA CAN.

While little development occurred in downtown during this period, like that
of 1953-1965, it represented a phase of elite consolidation. Within the realm of urban
planning, a new downtown plan was unveiled in 1993, the “Downtown Strategic
Plan” (DSP). While the plan suffers a similar fate to Centropolis, begun in 1989 and
finished just after the events of 1992, the DSP called for Downtown’s gentrification,
emphasizing that “without residential neighborhoods, Downtown will continue to
lack a core group of people committed to supporting the critical infrastructure
necessary to continue attracting office workers, retail and restaurant establishments,
visitors, and tourists” (22). As with all plans produced in Los Angeles, whether by
the CCA or the Los Angeles City Planning Department, they were of little use until
codified by CRA, a process that would not occur for the DSP until 2002.
Writing throughout the 1990s, William Fulton went so far as to declare the
“collapse of the growth machine” downtown (1997). Such jeremiads have proven
unfounded given the ability of diverse groups to align around growth despite
aligned interests. By the end of the decade, new legislation and planning efforts

70

significantly reestablished mechanisms for the destructive processes of the ‘infinite
game’ in urban redevelopment. 1999 represented a pivotal year for the latest round
of development downtown. With the construction of the Staples Center and the
passage of the Downtown Adaptive Reuse Ordinance and the California state level
Downtown Rebound, a decade long speculative building boom is only now coming
to an end.
22
Building upon the first expansion of the convention center in 1993,
Staples Center stabilized the ground for the long planned new-build gentrification of
“South Park”, displacing residents despite a negotiated Community Benefits
Agreements with SAJE (Garcia 2002).
23

In urban policy, the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance initiated “the conversion
of older, economically distressed, or historically significant buildings to apartments,
live/work units of visitor-serving facilities.” The ordinance removed barriers for the

22
While the conversion or construction of buildings continues, new projects have
essentially halted. Further, at least four buildings that were planned to be sold as condominiums
have now gone rental. As will be considered in Chapter 2, the fact that a moratorium on the
conversion or destruction of the 3,400 units of SRO / Residential Hotels passed in 2006 did not
deflate the property market suggests the sheer greed and malice of developers in evicting and
converting very low-income housing.
23
While some displaced residents did actually receive the proper relocation benefits
unlike the previous two expansions, the Community Benefit Agreement must be understood
critically. For example, the jobs guaranteed by the agreement are dead end cashier or janitorial
work that nevertheless require background and credit checks. Furthermore, this area is now
home to the grotesque tourist and convention spectacle of “L.A. Live”, only increasing the
pressure on the few remaining affordable housing opportunities in the area.

71

flow of capital, eliminating or reducing parking and density requirements for
buildings older than 1974. Developers could also receive incentive through the 1996
Mills Act Property Tax Abatement Program which provides up to a 50% reduction in
property taxes as an inducement to rehabilitate. While parking has been an issue in
downtown since cars existed, lifting density requirements enabled the conversion of
a building zoned for tenement or SRO densities to become large condominium units.
Despite the fact that there were many actually ‘underutilized’ structures such as
vacant offices buildings, developers turned to long standing residential hotels for
conversion. Moreover, the ordinance did not carry tenant protections for any existing
residents in residential buildings that might undergo adaptive reuse. Ultimately, the
ordinance claims that its “revitalization will also facilitate the development of a “24-
hour city” and encourage mixed commercial and residential uses.” This inane mantra
of the contemporary planning functions as a vacuous cover of gentrification’s “social
mixing”, bringing bring wealthy consumer-residents into poor neighborhoods and
never vice versa.
One developer in particular, Tom Gilmore, is treated by the local media and
boosters alike as integral to the reinvestment in the “Historic Core”. In conjunction
with HUD and a state level program instigated by Gil Cedillo called “Downtown
Rebound”, Gilmore received significant federal and state subsidy in the conversion

72

of four buildings around the corner of 4
th
and Main. Establishing the “Old Bank
District” with official city signage, Gilmore not only owns buildings but restaurants,
a bar, a theatre and leases gallery space. As a New York City native, Gilmore has
doggedly materialized and capitalized upon an assemblage of urbane simulacrum,
leading the way in the path made clear by the state. While Gilmore is ultimately a
relatively small land holder, his role in altering the image of downtown living in Los
Angeles continues to be significant.
Taken together, legislative shifts and heavy subsidy opened a speculative land
grab orchestrated by the state on the western portion of Skid Row. After four decades
of urban policy that has persistently sought to reduce Skid Row, by 1999, the
mechanisms for its severe elimination were finally at hand. Aiding to erase the
landscape, the City of Los Angeles paid the three major Missions to move from their
location from the “Historic Core” east to the center of where the City has long sought
to sequester Skid Row around 5
th
and 6
th
Streets between San Pedro and Wall (Los
Angeles Mission (1992), Union Rescue Mission (1994), and Midnight Mission (2003)).

73

74

Recognizing that Skid Row is predominately housed rather than homeless
makes contestation over the state enabled gentrification through conversion of
residential hotels all the more acute. As “housing of last resort”, SROs often represent
both the last and first place of residence for a homeless person before or after jail,
prison, the street or one of the severely limited shelter beds. One means of
representing the effects of the 1999 legislative changes is to track the number of
residential hotel units. According to the Los Angeles Housing Department, 100 SRO
units were lost between 1995 and 1999 in contrast to the 982 units between 2000 and
2003. In parallel, since 1999 the Downtown Los Angeles BID reports that 7,000 new
market rate housing units have opened with 7,500 more currently under
construction. Thus, it is within this context, that the Los Angeles Community Action
Network emerges in 1999 to the contest the dispossession and eviction through state
led gentrification in Skid Row.

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Chapter 3.
In/Equality and the Politics of Method

There is a double purpose of this chapter on method. First, it is incumbent to
set forth the basic set of social scientific methods mobilized in the course of
researching this dissertation. This is typically treated a fairly straight forward
process. However, behind any method or set of proscribed methods lies a quagmire
of political and epistemological issues. Although such questions are typically
relegated to philosophy of science, the methods we use follow are neither objective
nor neutral. As such, I first outline the standard set of methods utilized before
exploring the politics of method through the question of equality.
Given the general absence of research on downtown Los Angeles, a mixed
method approach is necessary to capture the range of processes at stake. In doing so,
I seek to integrate post-structuralism thought and critical race theory with a
geographical imagination wherein racism and space are not aberrations but always
already fundamental social relations (Pulido 2002: 44). Taking the perspective that
theory is a form of writing, I avoid a sharp distinction between theory and method.
Nevertheless, the qualitative methods include content analysis, observation
participation, interviews, and geographic mapping, while quantitative measures

76

from the Census Bureau and Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority will provide
a fundamental demographic and socio-economic baseline.
Historic and contemporary documents are analyzed for content, including a
comprehensive account of urban plans, legal documents and newspaper articles for
the period under study. Archival and historical analysis are utilized to present a
broad view urban historiography of downtown Los Angeles building on existing
historical literatures. By framing the contemporary study with past redevelopments,
the contingencies and provisional nature of the present is brought to light. Content
analysis is performed on urban policy and urban development media
representations. Following Mustafa Dikec’s (2007) framework for tracking the
“state’s statements”, I focus on the constitution of the State’s spaces of intervention,
their articulation with different kinds of issues and problems, and changing forms of
intervention and their legitimization.
Another important aspect of the project is the application of critical visual
methods. While both field work and maps have largely been lost during the
contemporary period, they nevertheless remain indispensable. My participatory
position as the Skid Row Housing Trust largely focused on the updating and
production of new maps (Pulido 2008). In doing so, I produced the baseline GIS data
and map set to effectively map various spatialities such as the extent of Business

77

Improvement Districts and the location of all SROs, Missions and converted
gentrified housings. These maps also provide the basis for analyses of urban
morphological change since 1940. Another form of visual representation,
photography, is used to chart and document landscape change.
Rancière on Skid Row: “Lessons” for Spatial Politics

By means of introduction, I would like to contextualize my encounter with
Jacques Rancière and its ongoing articulation in my work. I began reading Rancière
the semester before beginning the formulation of my dissertation research. More than
simply a challenge to my interest in the interrelation between political theory and
geography, the force of Rancière’s thought altered the coordinates of my perception
of the sensible, putting into question the role of the academic scholar and the relation
of knowledge and ignorance. Afforded the time and space provided by trusting
advisers and reminded that “we only find answers to the questions we ask”, I began
“fieldwork” without predefined “research questions”. Coming from the perspective
of an observant participant rather than participant observer, I began to work daily as
a participant with, rather than an observer of ,the Los Angeles Community Action

78

Network (LA CAN) in Downtown Los Angeles.
24
A community based membership
organization founded and run by the housed and homeless residents of Skid Row, I
gradually entered into the daily struggles with LA CAN under the organizational
maxim that “I will work with you but not for you”. Over the years of organizing and
dissertating, Rancière and Skid Row have been materially and conceptually mutually
constitutive from the outset. Together, this collision of Rancière's thought and LA
CAN's actions enacted a different poetics of knowledge in my work, where dissensus
is both theory and method verified through the dual processes of writing and acting.
While my outlook is not unique
25
, it is at odds with prevailing models of academic
research and knowledge production. A case in point is an interaction I had with one
social scientist and planner who previously studied Skid Row. After hearing me
present on my research, she asked incredulously if I thought about Rancière while on
Skid Row. Much to her surprise and chagrin the answer was “yes, of course.”
These remarks serve to stage my encounter between Rancière and my work
with residents in Skid Row. To explore this ongoing and changing relationship, this
section proceeds in several sections. First, I explore the importance of attention to

24
The distinction between observant-participant rather than participant-observer comes
from Vargas (2006).
25
Pelletier (2009) explores the relationship between Rancière's method and Judith
Butler, Patricia Lather and Valerie Hey.

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Rancière's methodology before considering two “lessons”
26
of from his “method of
equality”(2009a). The first “lesson” focuses on the emancipatory potential of
Rancière's egalitarian method of reading and writing. The second considers the
implications of putting equality rather than inequality first in critical scholarly
analysis.
Rather than begin by directly attempting to mobilize concepts like the
distribution of the sensible or distinctions between politics and police, I step back
and pose a Rancierian question of Rancière. Mirroring his approach to Derrida in a
recent essay, involves exploring (1) what issues are considered political problems, (2)
what concepts are set to work or avoided in addressing them, and (3) what
theoretical frame is built up to form judgments? (2009e). These questions point to
Rancière’s method and the answers pivot on the “lessons” of his equality. As such, I
focus on the poetics found most explicitly in Rancière's early work and set them in
relation to recent self-reflections on his “method of equality” (2009a). In doing so, I
highlight Rancière's persistent emphasis on equality as central to emancipatory
practices immanent in both the argument and action of his work. Put otherwise, the

26
Notably Althusser's Lesson (1974) and The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation (1991 [1987])

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centrality of equality in the approach to and writings on historiography, pedagogy,
politics, aesthetics etc.
Rather than aim to uncover the hidden, Rancière himself provides
methodological signposts in his “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques
Rancière” (2009b). Here, Rancière adopts the objective narrative mode to write about
himself in the third person. Several points are worth quoting:
1st: A method means a path: not the path that a thinker follows but the path
that he/she constructs... to know where you are, to figure out the characteristics of the
territory you are going through, the places it allows you to go.... Examining a method
thus means examining how idealities are materially produced. This idea of what
‘method’ means should never be forgotten when it comes to Jacques Rancière. (114)
2
nd
: [H]is books [Rancière's] are always forms of intervention in specific
contexts. He never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature,
cinema or anything else...The works of Rancière are not ‘theories of’, they are
‘interventions on’....This means that they imply a polemical view of what ideas are
and do.
3
rd
: [T]he only optimistic perspective about politics is that which thinks
about the ‘power of the people’ from the moments of utmost effectiveness of that
power, from the moments of disruption of the hierarchical order. This has nothing to

81

do with the worn-out and pointless discussions about spontaneity and organization.
(118)

4th: [The following] is the main intuition underpinning Rancière's ‘method’:
there is not, on the one hand, ‘theory’ which explains things and, on the other hand,
practice educated by the lessons of theory. (120)

& : This makes for some confusion...he [Rancière] is not responsible for the
confusion and [it] is not incidental ...it is those situations of confusion that make
thinking an interesting and possibly useful activity. (123)

The above quotations provide remarkably direct reflection for approaching
Rancière. Together they signify the stake and overall method without telling us much
the object. That is, equality, which for Rancière stems from the equality of any
speaking being with any other speaking being. Its significance is the insistence on an
equality of intelligences. Glossing over, for the purposes of this argument,
contentions around this claim, Rancière's disruption of Aristotle's claim that a slave
comprehends their master's orders but does not possess language, seems sensible.
This equality does not deny that there are not masters and workers, but rather entails

82

enacting equality by acting “as if” these predetermined roles are not determinant,
verifying that “masters are not the masters of their workers”. Stated differently
“equality must be posited if inequality is to be explained” (1995, 82). The import of
these statements brings us to the knot of Rancière's politics whereby politics emerges
from the presupposition of equality or the verification of a wrong.
In this way, equality is both a condition and a productive process. Following a
surprisingly generous reading by Badiou, “Equality is a condition insofar as its
declaration institutes a new relation to knowledge, in the creation of the possibility of
knowledge or its distribution in unanticipated spaces.” Likewise, “Equality is a
production insofar as the new configuration of knowledge brings about a space of
equality that did not previously exist. (Badiou 2009, 43). Neither post or anti-
foundational, Rancière is perhaps a-foundational refusing to ontologize the gap.
Instead of making “equality” a principle or ontology of the political, Rancière puts
equality “just as a supposition that must be verified continuously —a verification or
an enactment that opens specific stages of equality.” (2003, 15).
From above points there are two “lessons” with Rancière's method of equality
I elaborate upon;

Method 1: Rancière's sensibility in reading and writing

83

The first relates to Rancière’s egalitarian method of reading, which is to say
perceiving, that is in turn reflected in his style of writing. The import of the equality
of speaking beings leads Rancière to refuse distinctions between the academic and
the floor layer as potential or legitimate sources knowledge (1989 [1981]). This
distinction is carried throughout Rancière's work, including workers/intellectuals,
masters/followers, the articulate/inarticulate, or artistic/non-artistic.
Each voice, text or action is considered equally in relation to the question of
consensus and the foreclosure or potential for the enunciation of equality. Rather
than founding a systematic political science, Rancière emphasizes a poetics of
knowledge that traces “back an established knowledge — history, political science,
sociology and so on— to the poetic operations” that make sensible a narrative,
description or metaphor (1994[1992], 2009a). This egalitarian method of reading or
literarity is not confined to the printed word but is constituted through distributions
of the sensible (2004d [1998]).
The politics of perception, with an equality of subject matters conjoined with
the democratic quality of words as orphaned letters, is stylistically evident in aspects
of Rancière's writing. While nearly all of Rancière's published work disregards roles
and position as determinant of knowledge, some of his early texts take this a step
further. Following James Swenson's characterization of Rancière's stylistic mode of

84

enunciation as “free indirect discourse”, The Nights of Labor and The Ignorant
Schoolmaster are good examples mirroring the modernist novels of Flaubert and
Woolf (Swenson 2009). In these books, Rancière's method stays very close to the
material and it is rarely clear how far representation goes. Through the third-person,
Rancière blurs the distinction between exterior narration and the internal worlds and
words of the text's would be “characters”. The aesthetic effect is to create an
egalitarian literary space where distinctions between authorities is disrupted, both
between the academic and idiot but also the author and their putative object. It is
often impossible to distinguish between Rancière or Gauny or Rancière and Jacotot,
and this is the point, though Rancière himself didn't indicate this as such until later
texts and interviews (2009a, among others).
To conclude this section, I suggest that the first aspect of this “lesson”,
refusing to distinguish between floor layers and university professors as sources of
knowledge, is not only a possible, but seems a necessary, practice for the academics.
I will return to this point the next section. The second aspect of the “lesson”, free
indirect discourse, is more difficult provided academic publishing's prevailing police
order. While further consideration of both free indirect discourse and the politics of
disrupting the publishing police fall outside of this paper I think they are important
to raise. For example, Rancière has plenty of examples of direct discourse, such as

85

Disagreement or Politics of Aesthetics, that find immediately receptive audiences. The
point of this lesson or intervention, perhaps, is to ask the questions again and press
the method of equality to create different audiences with new spaces of equality and
modes of expression.

Method 2: Mastery, Incapacitation and the Critical Academic Love of Inequality
The second “lesson” builds upon Rancière's polemical The Philosopher and His
Poor (2004a [1983]) as it relates to critical scholarship today. A central question in this
inquiry is to consider what happens when an analysis or explanation starts from the
assumption of inequality rather than from the assumption of equality? In The
Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière examines the distinct but persistent placing of the
poor outside the bounds of thought, speech and action despite the would be
dedication to emancipation in Marx or Bourdieu. Stated slightly different, Rancière's
point is that scholarship concerned with emancipation is often framed in the fashion
of Isaiah Berlin's negative liberty, that is, emancipation from inequality. This posits
equality as a goal and in Rancière's words to do so “is to hand it over to the
pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they
will abolish.” (2004c, 223). Jumping straight to the end, one “lesson” to draw here is
that “by posing inequality as the primary fact that needs to be explained, it ends up

86

explaining its necessity.” What is at stake in this lesson of methodological equality is
the very possibility of emancipation according to Rancière. While Rancière highlights
several philosophers and their poor, we can readily identify a proliferation of
academic social scientists that have their own poor, whether it is the Philosopher and
their prisoner, their homeless, their immigrant, their other and well on through to the
embarrassing etc. Here we find the mission of critical social science to make visible
the hidden and provide the truth to the ignorant, reproducing a dependency model
for those who are incapable or simply have no time to think (2010c; Biesta 2010 and
Bingham and Biesta 2010).
At this point, I consider one symptomatic example, Peck and Tickell's
“Neoliberalizing Space” (2002). Here, neoliberalism is characterized as the structural
transformation of just about everything everywhere with a few passing salutary
remarks about “bottom up” political action. Whether this tendency is endemic to
regulationist or structuralist representations of the world is beside the point here.
This “critical” account only focuses on the inequalities of neoliberalism's actor-less
architectures without granting any consideration to individual and collective
disruptions. The analysis poses neoliberalism's inequalities as the primary fact to
that needs to be explained, and in doing so, explains its very necessity. Further, it is
not secondary that this “critical” article on neoliberalism has also been rewarded by

87

that same system of inequality it critiqued garnering the most citations in the last
RAE.
27
Without any positive affirmation of equality or attention to any democratic
practices, the diagnosticians of Maggie Thatcher's ‘There is No Alternative’ lead us to
the same conclusion.
At work here is what Rancière calls a metapolitics, or the mobilization of
principle other than equality as the principle of politics (1999 [1995]). By contrast, a
method of equality posits disagreement as positive claim for equality rather than a
merely negative denunciation against inequality. In effect that has been more than
enough “explanation” that is “left in form, right in essence” or yet “another class
struggle in theory”. Recognizing that the reading of Peck and Tickell as presented
here is woefully incomplete I believe it nevertheless points to the consensus of certain
critical perspectives that puts inequality rather than equality first, removing
dissensus and reinforcing the very object of critique.

Established descriptions by academics characterize Skid Row as the site of
“malign neglect”, “a case study in disaffiliation”, “Dante's Inferno”, and “landscape
of despair”. One quickly gets the sense of a paternalistic concern for the poor people

27
As noted among other places on Adam Tickell's website.

88

incapable of much of anything. In turn, Urban Policy reads fairly similarly if it even
notices, counts or includes Skid Row within its distribution of the sensible. It is not
necessary to go into the newspapers or the blogs to recognize these analyses as
representative and constitutive of the police order.
By contrast, a research method of equality in Skid Row with residents,
places attention on the processes of affirmative egalitarian practices in the disruption
of the police distribution of the sensible. Working with rather than on Skid Row’s
residents involves participating everyday rather than observing occasionally. I want
to distinguish this research practice from the French Maoist Gauchistes whereby
academics were “called to serve the workers and peasants”. This is not merely an act
of symbolic solidarity but what Rancière has referred to as an “aesthetic
community”: a sharing and a division of what is perceptible, sharing in the same
constitution of what is and is what is not a possible object of sense (2009c). In this
way, my research is attentive to the individual and collective politics both
spectacular or otherwise as the logical proof of equality verified through action.

In the end, or perhaps the beginning, equality is the knot that binds Rancière's
overall work together as the principle of political action that is also an aesthetic
intervention into the distribution of the sensible. One reason I have focused on

89

Rancière's method is his aversion to Platonism and philosophical systems in general.
I believe this more syncretic approach is necessary in order not to displace the
contextual specificity of dissent and the promiscuous application of Rancière's
related but discrete distinctions are collapsed and dulled. Thus, Rancière's originary
'dramaturgy' of politics enacts “a way to make sense of the aporias of political
legitimacy by weaving threads between several configurations of sense.”
Rancière's work is imbued with a certain hesitancy that an individual
expecting answers or directions to action would no doubt find frustrating. Rancière
does not offer proscriptions for democratic emancipatory practices. This suggests
that it is perhaps not the role of the individual as intellectual or academic to do so.
Instead what is required is an alternative disposition, what Rancière's calls his
method of equality, that pays attention to the messiness of the poetics of knowledge
and the practices of equality. This thematic of disagreement and struggle is therefore
continuous with a relational notion of the political as division and polemic.
Ultimately, this attentiveness enables the recognition of politics when and where it
happens, putting equality first rather than demonstrating and perpetrating
conditions of inequality.

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Chapter 4.
Skid Row Contextualized: Engaging the Real & Imagined Place

The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN)

The Los Angeles Community Action Network was founded in 1999 as an
autonomous organization having worked as part of the Coalition to End Hunger and
Homelessness since 1994. LA CAN’s mission statement as adopted by members in
1999 is “to help people dealing with poverty create and discover opportunities, while
serving as a vehicle to ensure they have voice, power and opinion in the decisions
that are directly affecting them.” LA CAN’s aim to “organize and empower
community residents to work collectively to change the relationships of power that
affect our community” distinguishes it from the social service providers and
charitably organizations that have saturated Skid Row since its start. While there
existed a saturation of service programs designed to aid depended subject, typically
the deserving poor, there was no venue for community organizing and leadership
development. As is evident in the above history of downtown, housing and homeless
activists have long been present but the model of engagement was one of advocacy
rather than organizing. Working under the pretext that “I will work with you, not for
you”, LA CAN focuses on resident driven organizing around homelessness, health,
housing, and civil rights, organizing what has been described as “an unorganizable

91

area” by both city officials and academic scholarship on community. Beyond a
merely advocacy model, Co-Director and founder Pete White stresses of LA CAN
that “organizations must embody the will and spirit of their constituents. The only
way that an organization can truly be grassroots and truly be community based, is
that the composition of the organization has to mirror and reflect that community.”
Thus, from the original 25 residents who formed LA CAN in 1999, the organization
has grown to six full time staff, 100 core members and a general membership around
500, 95% of whom are current or former Skid Row residents.
Recognizing the Skid Row is saturated with non-profit organizations (501c3),
it is important to stress the vast differences in their form and function. While LA
CAN is a 501c3 like the various Missions or the SRO Housing Corporation its mode
of operation is radically different. Unlike the Midnight Mission with over 50 million
dollars in assets and $150,000 salary for its CAO (Midnight Mission 990 tax form,
2006), LA CAN represents the latest version of a grassroots based community
organization rather than a corporation (INCITE 2007). Moreover, LA CAN’s work in
this time of “black genocide” (Vargas 2005) must be understood in relation the Black
Radical Tradition (Robinson 2000[1983], Kelley 2002). With 75% black population, LA
CAN’s struggles carry forward the challenge of Du Bois’s ‘abolition democracy’,
simultaneously produced and productive of the black radical tradition itself.

92

Taking seriously Cedric Robinson’s invocation that his book Black Marxism:
The Making of the Black Radical Tradition represented a challenge “for those who
identify with the Black struggle who are tempted by the transubstantiation of Black
history to European radical theory”, I cautiously establish theoretical resonances
between Rancière’s work on politics with the Black radical practices of LA CAN.
While Robinson is explicitly referring to Marxism, the broader question of any
radical European theory’s appropriate applicability in important. Without any
intention to transubstantiate the practices of the black radical tradition into French
post-structuralist or post-Marxist thought, several aspects of Rancière’s work need to
be brought out. First is Rancière’s break from his Althusserian Marxism root through
a critique of the stark distinction between the “scientific knowledge” of the
Communist Party intellectual and their relation to the proletariat. Against the
vaunted role of the intellectual or scholar, Rancière finds “academic” or “scientific”
knowledge impotent. Rancière’s Nights of Labor further disintegrates any notion of
unity to the proletariat as a class while simultaneously affirming the role of ordinary
individuals in producing knowledge and theory (1981). Likewise, Rancière has been
placed in an “anti-philosophical” tradition (Badiou 2005). In Philosophers and their
Poor (1983), Rancière critiques the entire western tradition of political philosophy
from Plato to Bourdieu for relegating the poor (the demos, the people) to silence. In

93

this manner, Rancière’s work persistently seeks to displace the police order’s
classification of legitimate knowledge and action. Rancière’s concern for practices
above all else ought to place the mobilization of his theoretical outlook with actual
practices as well. In this way, my focus on the work done by LA CAN members looks
to their practices as the source of theoretical knowledge and praxis. In the end, I
understand a Rancierian outlook to be a-formal, negating the potential for sublating
LA CAN’s specificity away. Ultimately, these questions are far from solved and will
necessarily need to be better explored, interrogated and integrated through the
course of research and writing.

Demographics and Skid Row

The act of counting populations has been a defining facet of modern nation
states. The word 'statistics' literally means the "science of the state" and can be
understood as the “knowledge of the state in its different elements, dimensions, and
the factors of its strength”
28
In this regard, counting "difficult spaces" such as Skid
Row presents both an problem and opportunity. Challenges lie in the basic difficulty

28
Foucault, M. 2007[2004]. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France.
1977-1978. ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 100.

94

of any census exacerbated in this case by a relatively mobile population with a
disproportionally high number of individuals without mailing addresses. However,
these functional issues also represent potentials. In its capacity to both define
"problems" and their "solutions", the state apparatus is able to actively shape the
terms of 'reasonable' technocratic
solutions. Let us be clear, there
are racist and classist politics
behind counting homelessness
and Skid Row in particular.
As such, this section
outline sthe broad schematics of
existing Skid Row counts to
arrive at a best approximation of the
neighborhood's demographics. Central issues
include how to define Skid Row's geographies as
well as the time period under consideration.
Historically, Skid Row existed in a much larger
area than the 50-sq blocks typically referenced today. Donald Bogue’s 1963 Skid Row

95

in American Cities identified nearly the entirety of downtown as Skid Row.
29

Likewise, the 1976 advocate "Containment Plan"
3
, delineated Skid Row's general
sphere of influence, infrastructural basis and a reduced core area. Today, one
searches the official city map in vain for "Skid Row". With the incursion of Business
Improvement Districts (BIDs) and other labeling like Gallery Row, the state attempts
to erase Skid Row from its cognitive map.
For the purposes of this
investigation, we take Skid Row to cover
the territory that includes the low income
housing of single resident occupancy
hotels or SROs. The emphasis on housing
is to raise the fact that while Skid Row is the largest concentration of homelessness in
the “Homeless Capital of the United States", the majority of residents are in fact
housed. Despite the preponderance of BIDs surrounding and infiltrating Skid Row,
the area is home to many. According to the Los Angeles Housing Department, there

29
Bogue, Donald. 1963. Skid Row in American Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
p.273
Los Angeles Community Design Center (LACDC) 1976. “Part 4: Physical Containment”

96

are approximately 9,000 residential hotel units in the downtown area.
30
The vast
majority of these are focused in Skid Row as indicated in blue on the map above. As
will be detailed below, roughly two thirds are housed in residential or single-room-
occupancy (SRO) hotels while one third are homeless, living on the street, in
transitional housing or in emergency shelter. This makes Skid Row home to the
largest concentration of both affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles.

Homeless Counts in Skid Row
From the perspective of standard counting methods, there are several spatial
containers with which to measure statistical data. Zip Code 90013 (not pictured)
captures much of Skid Row, but also covers the "Arts District" by the Los Angeles
River and the gentrifying Little Tokyo.

30
Settlement Agreement, County of Los Angeles v. Cmty. Redevelopment Agency of
City of Los Angeles, (L.A. Super. Ct. No. BC276472).

97

The basic demographic unit for the United States Census Bureau is the "tract".
Skid Row covers Census tracts 2062, 2063, and 2073 . However, the statistics from the
Census are woefully inadequate when “ground trothed” to even the most minimal
degree. Also, data are only collected every ten years and then are not released for
several years. As such, the 2000 census provides the most recent tract data.

These data are not only incommensurate with common sense experience; the
spatial extent of Tract 2062 also encompasses Little Tokyo. Moreover, the decennial
Census is notorious for undercounting the homeless, as if the U.S. Government
wishes it could simply make homelessness disappear. Instead of dedicating resources
to affordable housing, the Federal Government has developed byzantine formulas
used to count the number of homeless. This has led to such bizarre counting methods
as “Point In Time” (PIT) head counts. The counts, required to be held the last week of
every other January, are conducted nationwide by local volunteers who are asked to
count the heads of people they see sleeping outside. These numbers are added to the
number of people residing in “HUD funded emergency shelters and transitional or

98

supportive housing programs.” This unsystematic process results in a gross
undercounting.
Symptomatic of unlearned lessons and lack of concrete or comprehensive
progress, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) released
the first "comprehensive federal plan to end homelessness" joining the legions of ten
year plans now on their third version. Entitled Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan To
Prevent And End Homelessness, the report simultaneously notes that there were
643,067 homeless people during the last PIT count and 956,000 homeless students in
public schools. Despite this impossibility, the Census Bureau reports that it worked
to improve their counts for the 2010 decennial census.
The local source of statistical information is the Greater Los Angeles Homeless
Count, conducted every two years by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority
(LAHSA). Making matters difficult, Los Angeles has a very high proportion of
unsheltered homeless in comparison to other large American cities such as Chicago
or New York. Additionally, as one can imagine, different counting methodologies
predictably produce different results.
31
Without publicizing or emphasizing their
changes in methodology, LAHSA altered how they counted homelessness in the

31
Economic Roundtable (ERT). 2009. Where We Sleep: Costs When Homeless and
Housed in Los Angeles available at http://www.economicrt.org/ p.4-7

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2005, 2007, and 2009 count. Each successive count incredibly found less people in
homelessness. For example, between 2007 and 2009, LAHSA counted 38% less
homeless
people
even
though poverty rates increased and the number of available affordable housing units
in fact declined. Empty rhetoric and boilerplate recitations about coordinated efforts
and the mythical "continuum of care" do not explain where the tens of thousands of
homeless people disappeared to.
32
Nevertheless, LAHSA's counts are the most
complete statistical snapshot of homelessness in the Los Angeles Region. One
positive of the LAHSA count is that it seeks to enumerate in detail census tracts in
areas such as Skid Row. In this sense, the data for Skid Row is less conjectural than
the various statistical wizardry involved in guesstimating the 450 sq. miles of the
entire county.

32
Besides Los Angeles, New Orleans (whose 2007 data reflects the ongoing aftermath of
Katrina) and Detroit (who also changed methodology) the national trend showed an increase in
homelessness according to counts over the same period. See U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development. 2010. The 2009 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Available at
huduser.org

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While the methods used for the greater Los Angeles area have very likely
produced a severe under-count, the results for the direct enumeration in Skid Row
were in fact closer to experience. We can say closer because LAHSA's count was
conducted only once during the year over the last 10 days of January. Besides picking
the coldest time of year, counts throughout the year would normalize seasonal
variation. In this regard, it can fairly convincingly be suggested that the numbers
were low for in Skid Row.
Looking specifically at the numbers, the drop in the unsheltered population is
a direct result of the Los Angeles Police Department's so-called "Safer Cities
Initiative". This putatively "public safety" program has resulted in record numbers of
arrests and citations, criminalizing the basic facets of homelessness, addiction, and
mental illness. In parallel, the reported drop in sheltered population is likely a
distortion and has been protested by service providers. Extended lines each evening
for the few open beds indicate a vast demand for the severely limited supply of
shelter.
33

33
It is worth noting that the Midnight Mission's roof-less and open air courtyard is a
funded "shelter".

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The publicly available 2009 LAHSA documents do not provide a racial/ethnic
breakdown for the Skid Row area. The decision to withhold such information could
not be unintentional, seeking to elide the massively disproportionate impacts.
However, as outlined in various Economic Roundtable reports
34
, the overall racial
and ethnic breakdowns have remained constant despite low numbers recorded over
the past two counts. Provided this consistency, the 2007 Skid Row numbers were
reasonable approximations for 2009
35
:
• Blacks (69%) are over-represented by a factor of 7
• Native Americans (1%) are also over-represented by a factor of 2
• Latinos (20%) are under-represented by a factor of 2
• Whites (8%) are under-represented by a factor of 4
• And Asian Americans (2%) are
under-represented by a factor of 7
In comparison to the summary
statistics on ethnicity for the
entire region, in Skid Row we find a higher proportion of Blacks and lower

34
ERT 2009 op. cit.
35
Data calculations found in Inter-University Consortium Against Homelessness. 2007.
Ending Homelessness in Los Angeles, p. 11 with details at n.39 on p. 26.

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percentages of Whites and Hispanics. Ultimately, the disproportionate
numbers of Blacks on Skid Row and the highly uneven response of the LAPD
reinforces long histories of racialized state sanctioned violence.
One final aspect to consider in the enumerating the homeless population is
overcoming the limitations of Point in Time counts. The National Survey of
Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC) has developed ratios to
calculate for annual to point-in-time homeless populations. For single individuals,
the ratio is 3.02:1. This means that accepting that there were 3,802 homeless people in
Skid Row on that January night, approximately 11,500 homeless folks were in Skid
Row during the course of the year. Further, NSHAPC's ratio is an aggregate figure.
The massive concentration of services and police occupation suggests that the
number of people coming to Skid Row on any given day is likely much higher.
Ultimately, then, we can suggest that the homeless population on Skid Row ranges
upward from LAHSA's January count, when the winter shelters are open outside of
Skid Row, of 3,800 to somewhere in the range of 5,000.

Housing Residential Hotels
While Skid Row is typically portrayed in the media as Dante's Inferno with
hundreds of mentally ill homeless drug addicts on the streets, as noted above, the

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majority of the Skid Row community is housed. Residential Hotels are the primary
housing opportunity for the Skid Row community. While most people think of hotels
as a place of temporary stay on a vacation, residential hotels are permanent housing
and have been for decades. Residential hotels provide some of the last truly
affordable housing in the city of Los Angeles for extremely low income residents,
with nearly three times the remaining units of public housing.
In response to community driven legal suit following the 2002 CRA
redevelopment plan and several blatantly illegal evictions, the Los Angeles Housing
Department (LAHD) was directed to conduct an inventory and study of residential
hotels.
36
LAHD's survey was conducted in mid-2005 and focused on Downtown Los
Angeles in consultation with the Skid Row Housing Trust and the SRO Housing
Corporation. The inventory found over 19,000 units citywide and 9,113 residential
hotel units in Downtown Los Angeles, only 1/3rd of which are run by relatively safe
and stable nonprofit housing developers. The approximately 9,000 units were
typically single resident only and serve as a reasonable proxy for the number of total
residents.

36
Los Angeles Housing Department, August 22, 2005. Report Back on Motion Regarding
Preservation of Single Room Occupancy Housing. Los Angeles City Council File 04-2-87.

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Demographically, LAHD's survey found that SRO residents were a
predominantly male (78%) and Black (72%). The average median income for SRO
residents was found to be $4,588 per year or 10% of area median income (AMI) for an
individual.
37
This placed the entirety or vast majority of the housed Skid Row
population below the 30% mark for "very low income" according to the Census
Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It is worth
considering that half of GR recipients were homeless, whose "benefits" have been
fixed since 1993 when the monthly amount was reduced to $ 221 a month or about
$2,600 a year. Likewise, the large proportion of SRO residents on SSI assistance has
fallen to between $ 50 and $ 100 per month in California over the past year, totally
about 10-12,000 dollars a year. Other survey results include a 10% employment (not
unemployment) rate
38
and 45% mental illness or disability.
Concluding Notes
In closing, it is worth taking a best educated estimate at the aggregate
demographics for the Skid Row Community. In its numerous publications and press

37
Updated by author from 2005 to 2010 AMI levels. State of California Department of
Housing and Community Development. June 17, 2010. Official State Income Limits for 2010.
38
Additionally, when estimating the overall average income and employment
information Census data is a helpful bench mark. The 2000 Census data reports an
unemployment rate of 25% with 50% of area residents no longer seeking work.

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materials, the Los Angeles Community Action Network reported that Skid Row is
home to approximately 13-15,000 people, about 75% Black and 95% extremely low
income. At the end of the day, these numbers are about the best that can be
generalized. To summarize:

Community reflections on a community organized

Interview material from my public interest law article Los Angeles I Do Mind
Dying
39
highlights some of the fundamentally important aspects of community
organizing through the housing and civil rights work of the Los Angeles
Community Action Network (LA CAN)
40

39
Nicholas Dahmann Co-Author
40
The title of this article refers to the classic and timely 1975 book, Detroit: I Do Mind
Dying, which focuses on the forgotten role of black labor during the 1960s struggle against racial
and economic injustices. Our organizing picks up that torch and our victories result from
ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

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If it wasn’t for our work with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, the police,
the developers and city hall would have swept Skid Row clean and not a goddamned thing
would have ever been said about it. Anybody that had a voice or the power to say something
about it was in cahoots with these dogs. LA CAN means life and the future. It means a
tomorrow fight. It means my get up and go. That’s what it means. We’re still here. We ain’t
going nowhere. If it wasn’t for our work at LA CAN, it would have been a Katrina. It would
have been genocide down here. If you look at it from that perspective, just starting from there
and look at all the things that we have done, helped with, and stopped, all that comes into
plain view…LA CAN is a support system, it’s a friend, and also it’s a lover because we love
everybody. We’re all neighbors. We’re all brothers and sisters because we’ve developed that
bond through the struggle.
– General Dogon

The “Homeless Capital” of the United States with the largest extant Skid Row,
Los Angeles is also simultaneously the last major American downtown to undergo
widespread processes of gentrification. Put simply, Skid Row in downtown Los
Angeles is the site of a protracted racialized class struggle over land and resources.
Community struggles around Housing and Civil Rights have formed the two
primary pillars of organizing work at LA CAN since its founding in 1999. As state
strategies to displace us from our community, the housing market and the criminal
(in)justice system have emerged as distinct but often parallel paths to gentrification.
Far from separable, however, struggles over housing and civil rights form a dialectic.

107

As community resident and organizer Deborah Burton puts it, “If I can protect my
housing, I can protect my civil rights. If I can protect my civil rights, I can protect my
housing.”
Here, the basic rights to adequate shelter and freedom from racial and
economic discrimination by the police are framed within universal and fundamental
human equality. The same is true of LA CAN’s parallel work on healthy living,
including food, nutrition and fitness, and women’s rights organizing led through the
Downtown Women’s Action Coalition (DWAC).
This following chapters on housing and civil rights work serve to frame our
decade long struggle against state-led gentrification and displacement from our
community. Let us be clear, this is an ongoing racialized class struggle over land and
resources. As a truly community based organization, this struggle is about Skid Row
residents organizing with each other not outside experts advocating on our behalf, as
has so often transpired. The work and efforts outlined below are the results of
ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And while this essay is written through
the collective pronoun “we”, interspersed are accounts by individuals responsible for
the work. These personal narratives highlight the extraordinary work of ordinary
folks, the ones newspaper articles and history always miss. Embodying the will and
spirit of our community, these individual voices join to form our collective history.

108

The struggle continues today but our ongoing presence and flourishing in Skid Row,
our community, is owed to these efforts. In the spirit of carrying forward, we turn to
the past as we carry it with us each day. As James Baldwin writes, “history is literally
present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we
owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” (Ebony, 1965)

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Chapter 5.
The LAPD: Uniformed Police with Police Power Writ Large

The Stakes

Turning now to question of policing, it necessary to situate the role of the
uniformed or petty police within the general ‘police order’. Rancière instructively
notes that, the petty police is just a particular form of a more general order that arranges the
tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in a community. It is the weakness and not the
strength of [the police order] in certain states that inflates the petty police to the point of
putting it in charge of the whole set of police functions. (1999, 28)

Today it can be stated without exaggeration that the uniformed police have
been elevated in Downtown Los Angeles to the position of carrying out general
police functions they have no capacity to fulfill. This situation has emerged in the
wake and crisis of liberal Keynesian governmentalities where “new power blocs can
form around the remaining legitimate areas in which the state’s power can be
exercised, such as law and order, local development, and moral directives on civilian
behavior” (Gilmore 2007, 55). From this perspective, the question of petty policing
works within the broader literatures on the prison industrial complex (Davis 2005,
Gilmore 2007) focusing specifically on the rise the rise in private security forces and

110

the privatization of public space (Mitchell 2003, Ward 2007) and in scholarship on
policing policy itself, on the rise of the new paradigm of ‘community’ policing’
(Herbert 2006). These diverse literatures highlight the multiple modalities in the
incredible rise of racialized incarceration within this country, focusing on multiple
scales and sites of articulation.
This body of scholarship, particularly urban policing programs, has been
highly effective in documenting the shifts in policing tactics surrounding revanchist
zero-tolerance policies and the proliferation of “broken windows” policing (Wilson
and Kelling 1982, reviewed in Yarwood 2007 after Fyfe 1991). Significantly, scholarly
effort has debunked the multiple rhetorical screens surrounding such policing from
criminology perspectives (Harcourt 2001, Sampson and Raudenbush 1999) with
remarkably little emphasis on its racialized content outside of the work of Stewart
(1998). In parallel, the work of Don Mitchell highlighted the multiple ways in which
the legal system has been mobilized to “annihilate” space, removing the place of the
homeless in public space and criminalizing their existence (Mitchell 1996, 2003,
Mitchell and Staeheli 2008, see also MacLeod 2002, Merrifield 2000). The tactics and
policies highlighted above were legitimized through a paradigm of “community
policing” that purports to produce “order maintenance” through mutual
partnerships between the policing and neighborhood residents. Even working within

111

relatively affluent communities, Herbert (2006) finds police-neighborhood relations
highly uneven, justifying greater techniques of both surveillance and discipline (also
Herbert and Brown 2006). Ultimately, far from fostering community, such saturation
policing programs tear targeted neighborhoods apart through incarceration and
increased levels of distrust between residents.
The primary issues with this body of scholarship revolved around the lack of
focus given to socio-spatial practices of resistance within the context of a specific
place
41
as well as the presumption the New York under police chief William Bratton
and Mayor Rudy Giuliani remains the paradigmatic case of revanchism (Vitale 2008).

Outside the work of Gary Blasi (2007) and an ongoing project with the Southern
California Library
42
, there is little scholarly recognition that Los Angeles was not just
the site of fast policy transfer but currently Bratton’s laboratory for the latest iteration
and admixture of ‘broken windows’ and ‘community policing’. In Los Angeles,
Bratton’s “Safer Cities Initiative” in Skid Row concentrated 50 to 110 additional

41
This lack is less true outside the geographic literatures, e.g. Escobar 1999 and
particularly Vargas 2006. I maintain a general focus here on the geographic literatures but will
necessarily need to include a broader scope of scholarship for the dissertation itself.
42
An ongoing and evolving project organized by Christina Heatherton and Yusef
Omowale to include written contributions by academics Robin Kelley, Clyde Woods and Cedric
Robison, actress Lisa Gay Hamilton, reporter Anat Rubin, organizers and directors of LA CAN
Becky Dennison and Pete White, and finally, myself.

112

officers to a 50 block area. The City of Los Angeles paid over half a million dollars to
George Kelling (of ‘Broken Windows’ “theory”) to orchestrate this destructive ‘order
maintenance’ scheme. Ultimately, these developments were not simply a re-dux of
“Giuliani Time” (Smith 1997) but a mutative architecture of enmity that demands
examination.
With regard to individual or community based resistances to policing
programs (homeless or otherwise), there is little study of how shifts to revanchist
policy are being contested either through direct and daily actions such as policing the
police or through the mobilization of the law. Steve Herbert’s Citizens, Cops and Power
(2006), highlights the limits of community involvement in within the putatively
collaborative ‘community policing’ paradigm. Herbert ably demonstrated that
‘community policing’ is not about better communication or involvement with a
neighborhood, but the re-legitimating of the police with the state. While revealing the
blatant contradictions and harmful effects of ‘community policing’, Herbert
nevertheless adopts a police-centric perspective. In this way, community
involvement was limited to the channels produced by the police such as ‘public
comment periods’ rather than the disruptive and contentious practices found in
community organizing. While these practices may not be present in the communities
he studied, Herbert’s account falls short both empirically and theoretically to deal

113

with the brutality and racism of the police particularly within the context of black
and brown communities under saturation policing. Ultimately, there is no room
within Herbert’s account for the practices of radical democratic contestation with ‘the
police’, petty or otherwise, leaving no space for autonomous social movements
within civil society itself.
Despite marked differences, Don Mitchell’s scholarship on the ‘annihilation’ of
public space bears certain relation to Herbert’s shortcomings. My critique of
Mitchell’s work focuses less on what he does but what he fails to do, concentrating
on his political choices of selective essentialism. An openly professed “armchair
radical” (2008), Mitchell’s work on public space and homelessness focused on
juridical definitions as well as terms of public discourse rather than situated
ethnography or observant participation (Vargas 2008). While Mitchell was at aims to
disrupt common-sense notions of “the homeless” he also choses to engage in his own
essentialism as a political choice (Mitchell 2003, 158-159). Thus, he treated ‘the
homeless’ not as “pathological individuals needing treatment or other forms of
paternalistic intervention” but as a “class with a set of common interests” (ibid. 159).
Without questioning Mitchell’s political motives, this move theoretically and
empirically unified ‘the homeless’ as a category and masks the multiplicity of
individuals or differentiated collectives to act. Without being sanguine about the

114

privatizations of traditional public spaces or denying that ‘the homeless’ are under
attack by the legal and executive systems, Mitchell’s account only focused on the
negative juridical destruction whereby ‘the homeless’ are acted upon but themselves
are treated as incapable. This treatment of mere presence and existence of ‘the
homeless’ as resistance is not enough. As with the ‘critical critique’ of neoliberalism
outlined earlier, Mitchell closed his Right to the City with a very brief consideration of
past struggles over public space such as the IWW or black civil rights activists. To
that end, Mitchell overly myopic failed adequately to consider the multiple
modalities through which the homeless and housed can and have mobilized to
produce or reclaim the publicity of public spaces (Iveson 2007).
Two strands of existing research provide productive means forward in
contestations with the petty police. First, if space can be annihilated by law, it can
also be produced. Gary Blasi has written on various mobilization of litigation
through the law to enact homeless rights (1987). Likewise, the work of Randall
Amster (2008) and Talmadge Wright (1997) addressed questions of reclaiming
putatively public spaces through multiple and creative of socio-spatial strategies.
Thus, while cities such as Los Angeles have numerous anti-homelessness laws such
as LAMC 41.18d that forbid individuals from “sitting, sleeping or lying upon the
sidewalk or any public way”, there have also been lawsuits that contested and

115

partially reversed these ordinances. The second but related area of research is on
neighborhood mobilizations against the police such as the Black Panther Community
Alert Patrols (Hilliard 2008, Hilliard and Weise 2002, Pulido 2006, Seale 1970). This
shifted the focus from the rhetorical screens of “community policing” to community
residents policing the police. However, remarkably little scholarship focused on
historical or contemporary practices of policing the police. A noted exception is the
work of Joao Vargas (2006) who performed an ethnography working with the
Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and Community in Support of the Gang
Truce (CSGT) in South Central Los Angeles. Vargas highlighted CAPA as a modified
continuation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) practices, situating their work
contesting police brutality in the context of both community organizing and within
the judicial system. As Vargas noted, these practices of community organizing rely
upon “seizing public spaces and creating public facts.” (2004, 415) Nevertheless,
significant work remains to understand the contemporary socio-spatial practices of
CopWatch or the Los Angeles Community Action Network’s Community watch,
particularly during the current period of popular support for the LAPD in both the
media and public. These questions are taken up more substantively in the case
studies elaborated later.

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Perspective from the Community
43

In 2009, Los Angeles was named the “meanest city” in the United States. After
a comprehensive review by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty
and the National Coalition for the Homeless, the city and police policies in Skid Row
were cited as the most egregious criminalization of poverty and homelessness in the
country (NLCHP and NCH 2009). Thus, in Skid Row we experienced in particularly
acute ways in which the rights putatively guaranteed by formal citizenship and the
US Constitution fail to fulfill their promise for our poor and mostly Black
community. More than a farce, the annual lip service played to “constitutional
policing” by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) masked the deadly and
daily effects of the criminal (in)justice system on Skid Row.
Joe Thomas: I’ve been in civil rights a long time myself and to demoralize a
community the way the city, the county and federal governments do, is beyond the 4
th
, 8
th
and
14
th
amendment, beyond the US Constitution. It’s about human right.
I don’t want to sit up here and just be a part of something for a little amount of time. I
don’t want to be the sort of person who says I didn’t do my duty, and I didn’t pass the torch.

43
This section draws upon Los Angeles I Do Mind Dying: Reflections on Urban
Revolution in Skid Row

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Sometimes I feel like a soldier and I look at our future posterity, I’m looking at the kids, the
grandkids behind that.
I’m a person that is saying,”Hell no, we ain’t having no extension. Black folks ain’t
going to be blocked out.” If you look at history from every war we’ve been through, we’re still
standing, we’re still here. That’s just my gut feeling. And until my last day, I’m going to
always be here.

Historically, the police have been active in ‘containing’ Skid Row residents to
a particular area, picking up drunks, or conducting periodic sweeps of the
community, all taken to the extreme during the 1984 Olympics or a visit from the
Pope. Over the prior ten years, however, the role of public and private policing
reached new levels of legislated criminality. From our perspective, the LAPD’s motto
to “protect and serve”, the Business Improvement District’s mantra to “live, work
and play” and the notion that the criminal justice has anything to do with justice
were all empty rhetoric that mask the destructive material consequences on our lives
and our community.
By the end of the 1990s, nearly every block in downtown was patrolled by
private security guards controlled by Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). Known
as “Red” or “Purple” shirts for their uniforms, these security guards acted as

118

‘ambassadors’ to tourists and upper-income residents, but harassed and intimidated
homeless individuals and residents through illegal searches, detentions and ‘move-
alongs’. For the first several years, the BID guards were generally white males
carrying 9mm guns. Responding to the rampant civil rights violations, community
residents went to the public Law Library to learn about the BID guards and
ascertained that they had no more authority than any other citizen. Using this
information and other evidence gathered from documenting their practices a lawsuit
was filed which lead to a settlement that forced the BID guards to drop their 9mm
guns, hire women and persons of color, stop the illegal ‘move-along’ practices, and
undergo sensitivity training.
Deborah Burton: I looked at TV as a kid sitting on the floor and I saw police spraying
people with water. When I moved to California I saw the Black Panther party, and I saw what
they were doing because of police abuse. Then, when I moved down here, it wasn’t the police
at first but the BIDs over-exerting their legal power.
When they put the uniform on, it changed they changed. Me being a woman, a Black
person, if I’m not committing a crime, I don’t think you should be pushing up on us; just
because we’re poor, or just because we’re black.
Again, this takes me back to my roots. Just because I was black, I couldn’t do this or I
couldn’t do that. But the white folks could, they could break all the laws. The seed goes so

119

deep. When I see abuses, I automatically go into that self defensive, self protection mode.
Knowing right now that they’re trying to push us out of our community, if I don’t do
something, it’s like I’m forgetting about my past and my future.

Despite initial victories, by 2005 the BID guards were back to their old tricks of
harassing residents. Taking action against these civil rights abuses, a Community
Watch program was launched to monitor and document the practices of BID guards.
Community Watch builds upon earlier Community Alert Patrols and is composed of
four LA CAN members who patrol the neighborhood on foot daily, armed with
clipboards and a video camera. Community Watch inverts the intentions of home
owner association’s “Neighborhood Watch” or LAPD “community policing”. Instead
of monitoring and snitching on your neighbors, Community Watch practices policing
the police. This shift focuses attention on those perpetrating violence against our
community rather than facilitating the process. Indeed, during the first year of the
program, Community Watch focused on reducing the abuses against community
residents by the BID guards.
However, the year 2006 marked the occupation of Skid Row by LAPD.
Recalling that gentrifying Skid Row is a struggle over land and property, by 2006 the
people were winning - with several legal settlements and policies passed that halted

120

the speculative dumping and selling of Residential Hotels. In effect, the strategy to
remove the Skid Row community through the eviction and displacement from
housing was halted. Just months after the victories to preserve our housing, Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Bratton launched the “Safer Cities
Initiative” (SCI) on our community. The Mayor claimed that SCI was a public safety
program to increase law enforcement resources to target serious crime, focusing on
the outside criminal element that “prey on the vulnerable” while not targeting
homeless folks or residents. The reality was the exact opposite with the community
itself being criminalized.
General Dogon: I was there when the officers first came out the station, the first day.
They came out of Central Division, and I’ll never forget it. 50 rookie officers walked out in
single file like they were in the military marching. What stood out the most was one, their
shiny uniforms with hats on; two, their plastic rubber gloves; and three, all had plastic
handcuffs tied to their waist. It was premeditated; they already knew what they were going to
do. [The police] had said that they would be doing outreach but on the first day there wasn’t
any outreach. It was outreach to get you in. They first hit a big tent encampment that was
between Wall and San Pedro on 6
th
Street. It was after lunch and there were probably 80 tents
up. They just went and arrested everyone. They arrested disabled folks, lifted people out of
their wheelchairs handcuffed them, put them back in the wheel chair and rolled them to jail.

121

And there was a line…From that day on I knew it was going to be hell. SCI was going to be
something else.
What distinguished SCI from previous policing efforts was the escalation,
intensification and extended duration of the drastically increased police presence.
Since 2006, the 110 additional police officers focused in just 15 to 50 square blocks of
Skid Row issued 36,000 citations and made 27,000 arrests in our community of about
15,000 people. These record numbers of citations and arrests were mostly for so
called “quality of life” crimes executed through the casting of a wide net, detaining,
ticketing, searching and arresting homeless and other very poor people. Before the
launch of SCI, Skid Row was one of the safest communities in Los Angeles according
to LAPD’s statistics. Despite the incredible saturation of resources, SCI has not
proportionally reduced crime more than elsewhere in the city. Instead, SCI has been
effective at displacing residents to the criminal (in)justice system or other areas of the
city.
This racist policing program functions through the demonization of our
community by rearticulating age old racial stereotypes around violence, indigence
and mental illness. Treating individuals and entire communities as “broken
windows” in need of whitewashing, conscious and deliberate actions by the Mayor
and LAPD perpetrated genocide in broad daylight. In order to combat these blatant

122

human rights violations, our fight against SCI took on numerous forms against the
ongoing willful intransigence of governmental officials at all levels. Community
Watch teams were more active than ever and through the course of observation,
numerous violations of civil rights have been documented, providing the basis for
legal action, the criminal defense of residents and ongoing reforms in LAPD
practices. The Community Watch Program was formally recognized by The Nation
magazine as one of the “Top Ten Things You Need to Know to Live on the Streets”.
Each week we conducted a “Know Your Rights” training that educated
residents on how best to deal with the LAPD or BIDs when there are stopped,
harassed and questioned. Moreover, given the record number of tickets issued to
residents in no position to pay, a Citation Defense Program was launched in
conjunction with our Legal Clinic. Here, residents brought their jaywalking and cross
walk violation tickets to be represented in court by a pro bono lawyer. A majority of
tickets have been thrown out in the interest of justice. Our program has been so
successful that the City Attorney’s office set up their own watered down version of
the program to deal with tickets the City itself is issuing.
General Dogon: The police are supposed to be "protecting and serving". But we
don’t have any property for them to protect and the only serving they’re giving us is tickets,
beating us over the head with billy clubs and trying to push us out of our own community.

123

Either you’re going to stand up and snatch that stick and say, “You aren’t going to hit
me anymore”, or we’re going to continue to get beat.
Deborah Burton: In the 1960s, I remember when it felt like civil rights was going
strong. When some of the leaders, particularly Martin and Malcolm were killed, change for
black folks seemed to stop. And look what happened: It’s like it never happened. You can’t let
that happen again. We can’t let it happen again. It is time.
I started late in being part of the movement. But if I don’t do something now, if I don’t
be part of it now, Malcolm and Martin passed the torch to me, and it is up to me to pick up
that torch and pass it on to someone else. There are a lot of young folks out there ready for
change and I think it would be sinful, it would be wrong of me. It would be like everything
that they did was in vain. We dropped the ball, and I was late in picking it up, but I’m picking
it up. We dropped the ball and it’s time to pick it up and run.
Just as with our housing work, we had a standing committee of community
residents dedicated to ridding our community of the over-deployment of LAPD.
Beyond the range of direct actions, including a campout on the steps of Central
Division and the takeover of City Hall, we engaged in pushing and changing urban
policy. During our weekly meetings we planned and strategized next steps for
combating the injustices of SCI and police practices. While the courts continued to
side with communities, the intransigent LAPD attempted to continue business as

124

usual. Fighting back involved collective leadership development to conduct
numerous delegation visits and public speaking opportunities at the Police
Commission and within City Hall. In this way, we acted as a true civilian review
board for the residents of downtown Los Angeles.
Our organizing and ongoing struggle for our homes and community in Skid
Row was simultaneously produced and productive of the black radical tradition. The
existence of a predominately black community in Skid Row is intimately related to
the long histories of residential segregation, the racialized judicial apparatus and the
unemployment attendant to the deindustrialization of the greater Los Angeles
region. LA CAN charged forward as a symbol of hope in these times despite being
told time and again by experts that there was no way to stop gentrification.
While our work is based on the defense and preservation of our community,
our definition of the scope of our community was changing. We remained a Skid
Row based organization, but our membership expanded to the west and south of
downtown partially due to our growth and partially due to forced displacement. We
were also constantly working to connect our struggle with others around the city,
nation and the world. At the local scale of Los Angeles we were engaged with other
community based organizations fighting for increased tenant protections, the
preservation of our affordable housing and preventing displacement and

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gentrification. This collaborative work involved bringing our members together to
build solidarity across race, ethnicity, language and geographic diversity. We became
part of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) and the Campaign to Restore
National Housing Rights, both of which link grassroots organizations to raise our
voice and presence in national policy issues. Internationally, LA CAN has facilitated
visits from two United Nation’s Rapporteurs to Los Angeles. Finally, we utilized our
Community Connection newspaper to reach new members and build alliances as it is
read in local communities, in prisons, and globally as part of the North American
Street Newspaper Association and International Network of Street Papers.
In the final analysis, the distance between the planned state sanctioned
elimination of Skid Row from 1999 to 2002 and the ongoing preservation and
improvement of our community was a clear signal for the need to stand up, organize
and actively confront power. LA CAN has shown that grassroots efforts are an
effective and often overlooked means of challenging and ultimately changing the
state’s actions to continue to oppress and forcibly displace poor people and
communities of color. Out of our organizing and political engagement, new
knowledge, new questions and new strategies continued to be formed. It is
imperative, then, that we face the core decisions such as how to build upon our
successes and learn from our failures; to expand and connect local, national and

126

international movements for human rights; incorporate our histories into our
present; and ultimately to deepen our understanding and analysis while fighting
battles every day.
To conclude, we wanted to emphasize that we are political prisoners in our
own community inside Los Angeles. There is no need to board a plane and leave the
country to find human rights violations leading to mass premature death. The
situation in Los Angeles reflected and continues to reflect, the same crises existing
worldwide wherein fiscal concerns override human rights. While police and prison
spending are offered as solutions, they actually represent much of the problem: the
turn away from collective social welfare to a war on the poor further decreases our
chances of being adequately housed while punitive policies persistently remove and
eliminate precious life chances for our community and others across the world.
Ultimately, our struggles and victories are beacons of hope in the ongoing fight for
human rights because a changed city is not only possible but necessary.

Policing the Police: community contestation of the “Safer Cities Initiative”

This chapter focuses on the dramatically increased role of the Los
Angeles Police Department in the attempted elimination of Skid Row. Following the
urban policy victories discussed in Chapter 3, by May 2006, governmental strategies

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remaking Skid Row through housing had been blocked. Four months later, the City
of Los Angeles rolled-out an updated policing solution, the Safer Cities Initiative.
This policing program added between 50 and 110 police officers to the 50 square
blocks of Skid Row (varied over time) under the auspices of order maintenance
through targeting the “criminal element”. This policy of legislated criminality had
the effect of criminalizing the neighborhood itself through an admixture of
“community policing” and “broken windows” theory, resulting in 24,000 minor
citations and 19,000 arrests (Blasi and Stuart 2008). While the police have long been
used to ‘contain’ Skid Row, since 2005 they have been mobilized to incarcerate its
residents.
Far from passive, the community fought back through several distinct
modalities organized by LA CAN including a “Community Watch” program, a legal
clinic and suits against police practices and finally a Federal Department of Justice
Complaint against the City of Los Angeles and the LAPD. “Community Watch” is a
program with broad equivalence to Black Panther Community Alert Patrol.
Composed of four LA CAN members, Community Watch teams patrolled the
neighborhood on foot daily, armed with clipboards and a video camera. They
observed the police during the regular operation of their duties, occupying public
space and exercising the right to observe public officials. Through the course of

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observation, numerous violations of civil rights have been recorded. Prominently,
documentation by Community Watch provided the basis for the Fitzgerald
Settlement, an injunction that severely limits the LAPD’s ability of carry searches
without clearly defined probable cause. Another suit, successfully filed against the
LAPD, Jones vs. City of Los Angeles argued against the city’s municipal ordinance
(41.18d) that prohibits sitting, sleeping or lying on any sidewalk, Jones stipulated that
between the hours of 9pm and 6am, 41.18d would not be enforced.
44
Related to police
violations of the Fitzgerald injunction, Community Watch teams documented
instances of breach and reported them to the appropriate lawyers or directly file
complaints with the LAPD. As such, Community Watch represents a radical
appropriation of public space, enacting the right to unfettered presence against the
petty police violence.
After two years of organizing at the local city level through existing municipal
channels such as filing misconduct complains, providing testimony to the LA Police
Commission and meeting with the mayor’s staff, LA CAN members decided to file a
Department of Justice (DOJ) complaint against the LAPD and Mayor’s office.
Jumping scale, this “Color of Law” civil action called upon President Obama and

44
Without going into further detail here, the Jones Settlement represents the production
of space by law, not merely Mitchell’s regressive annihilation.

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Attorney General Holder to investigate and provide remedies due to policies and
practices that foster a pattern of LAPD misconduct, highlighting racial profiling, lack
of officer training, and discrimination against disabilities, among others. On
Wednesday, March 11 2009, LA CAN held a rally at the Federal Building in West Los
Angeles to signal the complaint’s submission. More recently, organizer Deborah
Burton managed to hand President Obama a copy of the 300-page complaint at a
town hall meeting in Los Angeles. Further, the DOJ offices in both Washington and
Los Angeles initiated preliminary investigations, while Representative Dennis
Kucinich as chair of the Domestic Policy Committee committed to opening a
Congressional investigation.
Ultimately, SCI has no end date or stated final goal, thus creating a state of
interminable detention that perpetually produces more prisoners. Despite
injunctions against illegal searches (Fitzgerald) or ticketing for sitting or sleeping on
the sidewalk after 9pm (Jones), Community Watch teams persistently found the
LAPD in breach. Nevertheless, the various multi-scalar and territorialized struggles
against SCI continued in concerted efforts to enact the right to occupy and thrive in
the space of one’s neighborhood.

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Community Watch, Public Accountability (or lack) with Board of 2006-
Present
45

Allocation of Officers Not Supported by Data

Chief Bratton touted his use of Compstat and other crime data to ensure that
officers are assigned to areas most in need. However, there is no data to support the
three-year allocation of additional uniformed officers and dozens of undercover
officers in the Skid Row area.
For example, the number of violent crimes per officer in Newton and 77
th

Divisions are 240 percent higher than in Central Division. Newton and 77
th

Divisions, both in South Central Los Angeles, are low-income neighborhoods home
to predominately Latino and Black residents. Central Division has been rapidly
gentrifying over the past 5 to 10 years and, outside of the Skid Row community, is
largely home to wealthy white people. The number of officers assigned to these
divisions is clearly not based on the levels of violent crime, as promised by Bratton,
but on the needs of wealthier residents and developers.

45
This section is elaborates upon “Safer Cities Initiative Analysis” September 2009,
Nicholas Dahmann Co-Author

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Even within Central division, the allocation of officers had little to do with
serious crime. The total arrests in the SCI area of Central Division were almost twice
that of the non-SCI area. However, Part I crimes were more than twice as frequent in
the non-SCI area. There is an inverse, and illogical, relationship between serious
crimes, allocation of officers, and arrests within Central Division, where there are 7
arrests made for every 10 residents within the SCI area, and only 2 arrests for every
10 residents outside the SCI area.

Personal and Financial Costs of SCI
The City spends $6 million annually for the additional police officers on Skid
Row – about the same as it spends on homeless services for the entire City each year.
But the actual cost of the Safer Cities initiative far exceeds the cost of additional
officers.
According to the city’s own estimates, each SCI arrest costs taxpayers $4,300 in
LAPD processing fees, prosecutor/public defender time and jail time. By these
estimates, which Deputy City Attorney Jose Egurbede called “conservative” because
they do not include court and other relevant costs, the initiative has thus far cost
taxpayers more than $102 million in arrests alone. This astronomical figure does not
include the court processing and hearing costs associated with the 36,000 citations

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SCI officers have handed out for so-called “quality-of-life offences” such as “crossing
the street against flashing red hand.”
Over one 14-month period under SCI, more than 1,200 people were arrested
simply for unpaid or unresolved citations. An arrest almost guarantees that someone
will lose their shelter bed and often leads to losing permanent housing as well. This
means that about $5 million was spent to “enforce” jaywalking and actually increase
homelessness over 14 months. As Safer Cities officers arrested poor and homeless
people for unpaid jaywalking tickets and other minor crimes, important criminal
justice needs, such as the widely publicized and yet-to-be resolved issue of DNA
testing of evidence from rape and other violent crime scenes., were ignored. The rape
kit backlog could have been resolved for the same cost as the jaywalking arrests,
bringing justice to thousands of women and protecting countless more.
Dozens of Skid Row residents have been arrested at least 10 times during the
almost 3 years of the Safer Cities Initiative. Among this group of people with
multiple arrests, three homeless, disabled people have been arrested a total of 104
times for nonviolent offenses (with most of the arrests occurring on the same corners)
at an estimated cost of $450,000.
Because of the SCI strategy to escalate charges from possession to sales,
largely through the use of buy-bust teams, thousands of drug addicts are facing

133

prison terms instead of probation and treatment. As they are released and likely
return to Skid Row, they will be ineligible for federally-funded housing and food
stamps, putting additional financial strain on city and county and forcing people to
be homeless for longer periods of time. The incredibly expensive effort has had no
significant effect on violent crime in the Skid Row area, which has historically had
one of the lowest levels of violent crime among the city’s divisions.

The wasted police resources are on display daily on Skid Row, where dozens
of officers respond to minor and nonviolent incidents. For example, on one August
evening, at least 10 uniformed officers were on the scene at 7th and Ceres. The
crime? A black male was parked in the red zone and was “suspiciously” looking for
something in his own trunk. The officers stayed on the scene for at least 30 minutes.
The Mayor and Chief Bratton promised at the SCI launch that the policing
would be accompanied by additional services in a “carrot and stick” approach. But
the carrot was limited to the so-called Streets or Services (SOS) program, an
ineffective “diversion” program intended to force people into housing and services.
In the past year, the City allocated about $600,000, about 10% of the annual cost of
the uniformed and less than 2% of the annual cost of arrests, to provide shelter
through SOS for a miniscule percentage of those arrested.

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Although no data on the SOS program has been released since 2009, previous
data showed that the program served 1 percent of misdemeanor offenders with a
“success” rate of 7 percent. Success, by this program’s definition, means that
someone stayed in a shelter for 21 days – not that the person was housed and less
likely to be targeted by “quality of life” policing.

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Community Perspective based on Participatory Survey
46

When Mayor Villaraigosa launched the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI) in
September 2006, Los Angeles’ Skid Row became home to arguably the largest
concentration of standing police forces in the country.
47
In a community with a
population of approximately 12,000 – 15,000 residents, the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) made over 19,000 arrests and issued roughly 24,000 citations in
the Initiative’s first two years. In 2007, a UCLA study found that the number of
citations issued in the first year of SCI came at a rate up to 69 times higher than those
found in other parts of a city already notorious for intense police activity.
48
While
citation rates were slightly reduced since 2007, arrest rates remained similar in the
third and fourth years of SCI (2008-2009) Concerned with the sustained intensive
policing of homeless and other low-income residents of Skid Row, and the lack of
intervention by public officials, the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA

46
The material in this section draws from COMMUNITY-BASED HUMAN RIGHTS
ASSESSMENT: SKID ROW’S SAFER CITIES INITIATIVE Los Angeles Community Action
Network, December 2010, Nicholas Dahmann Co-Author
47
Gary Blasi and Forrest Stuart, “Has the Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row Reduced
Serious Crime?” (Los Angeles: UCLA Law School, 2008).
48
Gary Blasi, “Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness?” Los Angeles; Inter-University
Consortium Against Homelessness.

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CAN) sought to document some of the impacts to residents after four years SCI
policies and practices.
LA CAN, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA), and other pro bono
legal partners operated a weekly free legal clinic to provide representation for
infraction citations, as well as address other legal issues that confront community
residents. Legal clinic participants began to paint a startling picture of the Safer Cities
patterns and practices, and the impacts on low-income people. For example, among
other accounts of police interactions, physically-disabled residents reported receiving
crosswalk violation citations as a result of their inability to cross an intersection in
sufficient time due to their use of wheelchairs, walkers and canes. Among almost 600
tickets handled by LA CAN’s legal clinic in 2009, 90% were for crosswalk
violations/jaywalking and, among those that reported their disability status, 60%
were people with disabilities. Given the fact that the fine for pedestrian signal
violations is generally between $159 and $191, and that many Skid Row individuals
live on fixed incomes between $221 and $850 per month, residents were often unable
to pay monetary penalties. In just a few months, the fines can increase to over $600
dollars, the person’s driver’s license may be suspended, and a warrant is often issued
for arrest.

137

In addition to citations, residents came to the legal clinic with issues related to
Safer Cities including criminal cases, police misconduct, and other issues beyond our
current capacity. Through these stories and other incidents documented on
videotape, it became clear that Safer Cities’ impacts went beyond the police-reported
statistics. To gain a more comprehensive description of resident-police interactions as
well as more general information regarding citations and arrests, LA CAN conducted
a survey of more than 200 Skid Row residents during August and September of 2010.
Over the course of two months, trained volunteers gathered information from
respondents who lived and/or received services in the Skid Row community and
who were primarily not already affiliated with LA CAN. Survey respondents were
identified by their initials and year of birth, to avoid any duplication. Forrest Stuart,
PhD Candidate in UCLA’s Department of Sociology, served as a key advisor to the
survey project, including oversight of interviewer protocol and data analysis.
The survey results demonstrated the vast impacts of the intense policing of
Skid Row: incredibly high incidences of citation (56%) and arrest (54%) in the past
year; loss of housing (52%) and/or services (42%) due to arrest; being subject to
handcuffing and/or searches (75%) due to minor crosswalk violations; and a

138

prevalent perception of racial profiling by police officers (75%). The full survey data
is summarized on the following pages.
49

Demographic Impacts
The demographic characteristics of survey respondents mirrored other records
of the Skid Row population. Racially, respondents were predominantly Black
(60.1%). Non-Hispanic Whites (14.3%) and Latinos (10.8%) are the next largest racial
groups.
The majority of respondents were male (68.7%), and the average age of the
sample was 52.5 years old. Nearly half (48.5%) of respondents lived in permanent

49
Note that the number of respondents in each section may vary due to respondents’
choice to not answer, or due to the fact that certain questions are only relevant to, or asked of,
particular subsets of respondents.
Race/Ethnicity
Response
Count
Response
Percent
Black 122 60.1%
Asian or Pacific Islander 0 0.0%
Caucasian/White (Non-Hispanic) 29 14.3%
Hispanic/Latino 22 10.8%
Native American/American Indian 7 3.4%
Multi-Racial 2 1.0%
Other 21 10.3%
Total 203 100%

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housing, with 28% homeless and living in emergency or transitional housing, and
14.5% homeless and living on the streets. Almost three-quarters of respondents
(73.8%) reported either a physical or mental disability.

Citations
Residents were asked to estimate
the number of citations they had
received since the beginning of SCI in
2006. While not all respondents report
receiving a citation, the average was 4
citations received per person. Because
these estimates were over the course of four years, inquiring about the number of
citations received in the last year would likely have produced more accurate results.
When asked only about the previous year, 122 respondents (55.7%) reported
receiving a citation. Jaywalking/Crosswalk violations (71.7%) were by far the most
frequently cited infractions, followed by drinking in public (20.4%), open container
(12.4%), and sitting, lying, or sleeping on the sidewalk (12.4%).

140

While receiving the citation, respondents reported several police behaviors
that seem excessive for
minor violations, could
violate constitutional rights
and, more specifically,
likely violate the 2009
“Fitzgerald” Settlement
50
.
A majority (81%) reported having their background checked while receiving a
citation, 75.2% report being searched, 66.7% report being handcuffed. Almost half
(47.6%) of respondents reported being physically or verbally abused by the officer
while receiving a citation. According to respondents, citations have had negative
effects beyond the officer abuse, fees and penalties. As a result of their citations, 31%
reported losing social services, 26.8% reported losing housing, and 16.9% reported
losing employment. Proponents of Safer Cities often claim that enforcement activities
actually benefit poor and homeless people by connecting them to services. When

50
Case no. CV 03-1876NM (RZx); Fitzgerald vs. City of Los Angeles; 2009 Settlement
Agreement states, among other things, “A search incident to arrest is not permitted when a
person is merely cited and released in the field for an infraction or misdemeanor.”

141

asked if they felt they had benefitted from their citation, 86.6% felt that they had not
benefitted.
Arrests
Residents were asked
to estimate the number of
times they had been arrested
since the beginning of SCI in
2006. While not all respondents reported an arrest, taken as a whole, the average was
2.8 arrests per person. Because these estimates were over the course of four years, it
was likely more beneficial to inquire about the number of arrests in the last year.
Limiting responses to the last year, 103 respondents (53.6%) reported being
arrested. This arrest rate is astounding when compared to the 2009 adult arrest rate
in California (4.9%)
51
and the 2010 arrest rate in the City of LA (approximately
3.9%)
52
.
Outstanding warrants were cited as the most frequent reason for arrest
(24.4%), with drug possession as the second most arrested offense (18.9%). As a
result of their arrest, 51.5% of respondents reported losing housing, 42.4% reported

51
Office of the Attorney General, State of California. http://ag.ca.gov/cjsc/keyfacts.php.
52
Estimated using Citywide Compstat reports through 12/4/10. www.lapdonline.com.

142

losing social services, and 16.4% reported losing employment. Over half (59.1%) of
those arrested reported physical or verbal abuse by officers.

Stops/Detainments without Citation or Arrest
In addition to citations and arrests, Skid Row residents complained of police
harassment in the form of frequent and warrantless stops and detainments. The
majority of respondents (67.2%) confirmed the occurrence of such practices,
reporting a stop/detainment resulting in neither a citation nor arrest.

143

In the prior year, the
average number of such
stops/detainments was 5.3 per
person. During these
stops/detainments, the majority
were handcuffed (60.3%), searched (74.6%), background checked (75.4%), and asked
if on probation or parole (76.2%).
As is the case with those receiving citations or being arrested, close to half
(41.3%) of respondents reported physical or verbal abuse by officers during a
stop/detainment.

Impact of Homelessness
on Police Treatment
Respondents who
are homeless and living on
the streets reported
staggering rates of citations, arrests, and stops/detainments compared to the already
high rates among all survey respondents.
Homeless (N=29)
All Respondents
(N=203)
Citations 24 (82.8%) 122 (55.7%)
Arrests 23 (82.1%) 103 (53.6%)
Stops/Detainments 25 (89.3%) 131 (67.2%)

Category of Victimization of
Homeless People
Percentage
Reported
Police Harassment 37%
Assault 24%
Robbery 18%
Domestic Violence 9%
Sexual Assault 7%
Rape 6%

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Among the homeless individuals currently living on the streets surveyed,
82.8% reported receiving a citation, 82.1% reported an arrest, and 89.3% reported a
stop/detainment in the last year.

Attitudes toward Skid Row Policing
The LA CAN survey also assessed respondents’ attitudes toward policing in
Skid Row. Interest in this information stemmed partially from an analysis of
previously-unpublished findings from a 2009 Los Angeles Homeless Services
Authority (LAHSA) survey, administered as part of their bi-annual homeless count.
Through a public records request, LA CAN obtained data from the survey to conduct
a secondary analysis specifically in relation to the question of victimization. Over
one-third (37%) of homeless respondents in LA County reported being a victim of
police harassment since becoming homeless. This was the most prevalent form of
victimization reported, exceeding assault (24%) and robbery (18%).
Fear of or actual victimization by the police was of even larger concern among
homeless and other very low-income residents of Skid Row. Among all respondents
in the LA CAN survey, 146 (78.5%) reported that they do not feel safe from police
violence. The same number reported that they do not feel safe from police

145

harassment. A similar majority of respondents (74.6%) reported being profiled by
police in the last year due to race, economic status, or residence in the Skid Row area.
The Los Angeles Police Department and other City Officials continued to tout
the positive aspects of Safer Cities policing, primarily through the use of heavily
critiqued crime data but also by claiming improvements in residents’ lives and access
to needed services. This survey data painted a different picture for homeless and
poor, and mostly Black, residents of Skid Row – one in which people become
disconnected from housing and services due to policing; in which mass arrests,
citations and detentions have become the norm; where 8 out of 10 residents did not
feel safe from police violence and harassment; and where frequent and aggressive
police interactions produce anger and fear.
The experiences of residents represented by this report clearly illustrate the
human rights violations created by the Safer Cities Initiative and the human toll
residents are expected to shoulder in exchange for simply living in their own
community. Survey results and ongoing data collection through LA CAN’s legal
clinic added to growing evidence that it is impossible for the City of Los Angeles to
police its way out of homelessness and extreme poverty. These results also illustrated
why more than 3,600 Skid Row residents and workers signed petitions to end the

146

Safer Cities Initiative, submitted to LAPD Chief Beck in September 2010, but to this
day continue to be ignored.

Police, Law, and Space: Contested elimination of public space by law
53

Legal Action
“Color of Law - Civil Application- Request for Investigation and Remedies for
Violations of Title 42” was a formal request for the Department of Justice to seek civil
remedies due to policies and practices that foster a pattern of misconduct by
employees of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division. This section
begins with a description of this application as it illustrates the key legal issues
surrounding police and contested space in Skid Row and sets the stage for this
section of the dissertation.
The Los Angeles Community Action Network submitted this civil application
with the intent to initiate an investigation of color of law abuses by the Los Angeles
Police Department and, specifically, the Safer Cities Initiative in Downtown Los
Angeles/Skid Row. Patterns and practices that deprive persons residing in the Skid

53
This section draws from Federal Bureau of Investigation Color of Law - Civil
Application- Request for Investigation and Remedies for Violations of Title 42, U.S.C., Section
14141 (Police Misconduct Statute)”
This application was a formal request for the Department of Justice to seek civil remedies
due to policies and practices that foster a pattern of misconduct by employees of the Los Angeles
Police Department’s Central Division. Coauthored by Nicholas Dahmann

147

Row community of their rights were outlined in this application, and supporting
evidence was included. The application was based on the belief that policies and
practices intentionally instituted as part of the Safer Cities Initiative, as well as illegal
policies and practices that have become commonly acceptable, have created and
fostered a pattern of misconduct by Los Angeles Police Department officers working
in the Central Division.
The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) works in the Skid
Row community, primarily engaged in community organizing and advocacy on
issues of housing, women’s rights, health, and just policing with more than 450
members, all of whom are low-income residents of downtown Los Angeles. For two
and a half years (2006-2008), LA CAN employed multiple strategies to ensure that
the Los Angeles Police Department stopped illegal and/or unfair practices in our
community, including filing misconduct complaints, giving testimony to the LA
Police Commission, litigating, meeting with the Mayor’s staff, and others. Yet, there
was no concrete response from any decision-makers and the majority of violations
have continued. Therefore, on this basis, LA CAN requested through formal legal
action that the Federal Bureau of Investigation intervene.

The Prevailing Situation

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In September 2006, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo launched the Safer Cities
Initiative (SCI) in the Skid Row community of Downtown Los Angeles. At the SCI
launch, 50 additional uniformed officers were deployed to the 50-square block area
(0.85 square miles) of Skid Row -- the equivalent of adding 470 new officers to
LAPD’s Rampart Division or 700 officers to the 77
th
Street Division in South Los
Angeles
54
. In addition, dozens of undercover narcotics officers were deployed to the
same area, resulting in an unprecedented concentration of police resources in a
neighborhood with relatively low rates of serious and violent crime
55
.
At the time Skid Row was home to between 13,000 and 15,000 residents, about
75% of whom were Black. Additionally, about 95% of residents were extremely low-
income and approximately one-third are currently homeless. For decades, Skid Row
had seen the most extreme and concentrated poverty and racial segregation in Los
Angeles. Yet, instead of instituting policies and programs to address racism, poverty
and homelessness, a law enforcement strategy to attack the symptoms of extreme
poverty was developed and implemented. This expensive and ineffective response

54
Blasi, Gary and the UCLA Fact Investigation Clinic. “Policing Our Way Out of
Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row” September 2007. (pg. 50)
http://www.law.ucla.edu/docs/policingourwayoutofhomelessness.pdf
55
Id. (p. 41)

149

to homelessness and poverty resulted in massive civil and human rights violations
against poor and mostly Black people.
A thorough evaluation of the first year of the Safer Cities Initiative was done
by Gary Blasi of the UCLA School of Law. Among many other findings, the report
showed that in the first year of SCI, approximately 9,000 arrests were made in the
Skid Row target area, or about 64 arrests per 100 residents. Additionally, in the first
10 months of SCI, 10, 342 citations were issued, of which about 90% were written by
the 50-officer SCI task force. This reflected a rate of citation issuance that is between
48 and 69 times greater in Skid Row than the rest of the City
56
.

Summary of Patterns and Practices that Foster Misconduct
The stated purpose of SCI was to increase law enforcement resources in order
to target serious crime. However, the implementation resulted in six core patterns
and practices that demand investigation:
1) Citizen complaint processes that treat complainants as adversaries;
2) Lack of justification by officers on incidents involving the use of force;
3) Racial profiling;

56
Blasi, Gary and the UCLA Fact Investigation Clinic. “Policing Our Way Out of
Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row” September 2007.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/docs/policingourwayoutofhomelessness.pdf

150

4) Lack of training of officers;
5) Discrimination against people with disabilities; and
6) Unequal protection in enforcement against drug and alcohol possession.

1. Citizen complaint processes that treat complainants as adversaries
The Los Angeles Police Department has a long and well-documented history
of systemic misconduct, especially in communities of color. Yet, the misconduct
complaint process is seriously flawed. Pursuant to the Federal Consent Decree, the
Office of the Inspector General performs annual audits of the LAPD misconduct
complaint process. For three years in a row, these audits have identified widespread
problems with LAPD’s investigations.
One report (OIG Complaint Investigations Audit FY 2007/2008) included
troubling findings, such as: 1) Nearly half (29 of 60) of the sampled complaints had
one or more quality concerns such as not completing an investigative step; and 2) in
many descriptions of individual complaints investigators’ summaries include
statements exonerating officers that do not appear in taped statements or are directly
contrary to the testimony purportedly summarized.
Based on the long-standing problems with the complaint process as well as
other reasons, communities of color in Los Angeles have often implemented

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monitoring processes to prevent, or document, civil rights abuses by LAPD officers.
In LAPD’s Central Division, LA CAN’s Community Watch program monitors police
activity; team members wear shirts with LA CAN’s name and logo on them and at
least one team member carries a camera. The Community Watch team, as well as
other residents they encounter, often file LAPD Misconduct Complaints and/or raise
ongoing complaints to the Police Commission based on their documentation. In
response, LAPD created a hostile environment for those who file complaints against
officers implementing the Safer Cities Initiative, especially those who exercise their
right to monitor police
The Senior Lead Officer for the Skid Row community has been especially
adversarial toward LA CAN monitors and complainants. Senior Lead Officer Deon
Joseph has posted many entries on LAPD’s blog, as well as handed out printed
materials on the street, targeting LA CAN complainants and Community Watch
participants. These written documents included many hostile statements, including
the following statements about the complaint process:
“Most activists today believe that their agenda is far more important than the
individual human being affected by the situation they claim to be trying to improve.
By this I mean that they do not care how many people get stabbed, overdose, or
robbed on skid row. It doesn’t matter how many officers’ good names they smear, or

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how long they stymie the system, as long as in the end they get what they want.”
(March 2, 2007 entry)
“They have been allowed to tell lies, and use racial and homophobic language
against officers and myself that patrol the skid row area. But when we respond to
them even in a respectful manner, they run down to Central Station, and encourage
others to follow suit in filing false complaints. ….. Yet instead of being honest about
these positive changes, they purposely seek out ways to (in their minds) catch police
officers with their pants down.” (Undated entry titled, ARE THEY REALLY FOR
YOU?)
Hostile and adversarial responses to complaints have come from higher
ranking LAPD officers as well. For example, in an October 5, 2007 radio interview,
Chief Bratton responded to LA CAN protesting the first year of the Safer Cities
Initiative by saying, “Let me make something perfectly clear as you go out and listen
to the rants and raves of that group of characters. We are engaged in the same effort
– to save lives. I think what I’m doing, what the city government of Los Angeles is
doing, is much more effective than what they are doing with all of their ranting and
raving.”
In a television interview, Chief Bratton disregarded complaints filed about a
June 2007 police abuse incident by framing LA CAN as a non-credible source. In

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response to questions about police brutality against a Black woman, Chief Bratton
states, “……I’m sorry, it is none of those things. Brutality is only after we find out
what happened. So, let’s take a step back. You have a group, LA CAN, that’s
constantly alleging that the department is engaged in improprieties in Skid
Row…..Skid Row has the lowest rate of complaints of use of force against our
officers……”
In addition to the above public statements and street interactions that treat
complainants as adversaries, the most blatant targeting of complainants was the
arrest and incarceration of three LA CAN staff working on a Community Watch
team within an eight-month period. None were convicted of any type of crime or
offense.
A. On February 1, 2008, Darren “Pete” White was arrested near 5
th
and Towne
Streets, while photographing a large-scale LAPD raid on a residential
building. The original charge was pedestrian in the roadway. Two
Community Watch members were present at the scene and in the crosswalk
while the light was green, but only Mr. White, who had the camera, was
arrested. The later charge was failure to sign a citation, which was not
presented for his signature until he was transported to Central Station. He

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was held in 77
th
Street jail for one day. This charge was dismissed by the court
on February 29, 2008 “in the interest of justice.”
LA City Councilmember Bernard Parks made a written request to the Police
Commission for an investigation of this incident, based in part in response to a letter
from LA CAN’s Board of Directors. The Police Commission did not investigate or
contact LA CAN.
B. On April 10, 2008, Steve Richardson was arrested on Winston and Los Angeles
Streets, held in Men’s Central jail overnight, and released with a $25,000 bond.
He clearly identified himself as an LA CAN member performing Community
Watch duties while he was detained on the scene, and also was wearing an LA
CAN teeshirt. He was charged with a felony assault on an officer, for which
he faced a third strike, after officers claimed he twisted a finger of an officer
while in handcuffs. On November 26, 2008, the case was dismissed.
C. On September 9, 2008, Deborah Burton was arrested on 6
th
and Maple Streets
for interfering. She was asked to move from a public sidewalk while
documenting an LAPD enforcement action on a clipboard. There were dozens
of other residents on this sidewalk, yet she, in her Community Watch uniform,
was the only one targeted by LAPD officers. Within minutes she was

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handcuffed and transported to Central Division. After being held, questioned
and searched at Central, she was released without any charges.
These cases demonstrate that to implement their stated intensions, LAPD
must improve their complaint investigation process but, more importantly, must
have policies to ensure the protection of complainants of any kind against retaliation,
harassment, and adversarial statements. As the cases indicate, this type of behavior
erodes trust and leads to further violations of civil rights.
2. Lack of Justification for Use of Force
Under SCI, the use of force against poor people, Blacks, women, people with
disabilities, and community organizers has been widespread, including numerous
incidences of police abuse and violence. One component contributing to this
problem was the extremely high number of officers at each incident creating tension
and increasing the risk of force and violence. There was no response to community
calls for accountability and the justifications for these incidents have either been non-
existent, incomplete and/or based on factual errors. Below are descriptions of a
variety of use of force incidents over the SCI period and LAPD’s response, if
available.
A. On June 3, 2007, Faith Hernandez, a black female Skid Row resident, was
beaten severely by 4 officers on 6
th
St in front of dozens of witnesses. Hernandez, a

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90-pound, mentally ill woman, was beaten bloody and then arrested for resisting
arrest and battery on an officer. The alleged assault against an officer happened with
an ink pen. Misconduct complaints were filed by witnesses on June 5 and June 13,
2007. Only one witness, O.C. Hasson, reported being contacted by LAPD, when
officers came to his apartment soon after the incident. Mr. Hasson informed the
officers that he would like to cooperate, but was not comfortable talking to them at
his residence. He gave officers his cell phone number and was never contacted
again.
Because of the severe nature of the use of force, several non-profit
organizations submitted a letter to Councilmember Huizar, requesting his
involvement. Amy Yeager, from the Councilmember’s office, responded with a two-
sentence email that she would look into it; there was no further response. Torie
Osborn, special advisor to Mayor Villaraigosa, was also contacted for assistance.
There was no response.
LAPD offered no reasonable justification for this incidence of violence. The
only public version of the incident was described during Ms. Hernandez’s trial. In
the transcript, during cross-examination, a substantial amount of force was described
but many discrepancies were discovered. In fact, Officer Kevin Royce stated that he
punched Ms. Hernandez twice with a closed fist, near her armpit. When asked

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whether this was part of his training, he replied, “No. I just wanted to cause some
pain to her to let go of my wrist.”
Although there were numerous witnesses describing abuse of force, and the
officers themselves offered questionable justification, neither LAPD officials nor the
Police Commission (who heard testimony from witnesses on June 12, 2007 and
subsequent dates) ever released the results of any investigation. There was no
attempt to explain the situation to the public or re-establish confidence.

B. On July 24, 2008, James Foster, a black male Skid Row resident, was
standing on 6
th
and San Julian Streets when officers jumped out on him and
demanded that he open his mouth. Seconds later, two officers slammed Mr. Foster’s
face into the concrete wall and started punching him in the face and ribs. When
many more officers arrived he was thrown to the ground with a pile of officers on
top of him. Mr. Foster was removed from the scene in an ambulance and later, at his
arraignment, was deemed mentally unable to stand trial and the arraignment was
postponed until mental health assessment and care was provided. He was
subsequently brought to trial for resisting arrest and drug possession. A misconduct
complaint was filed by Herman Jones, who was never contacted for investigation.

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C. Later in the day on July 24, 2008, a young black male and his mother, Greta
Hunter, were resting on a bench in San Julian Park. Two LAPD officers rode up to
them on horses and woke up the young man. The young man answered their
questions and put his hands up when told, yet the officers picked him up off his feet,
slammed him head first into the concrete and punched him several times. When his
mother tried to intervene to protect her son she was swung around like a rag doll,
and both mother and son were arrested. The charges against Greta Hunter were
dropped on January 14, 2009. Her son was encouraged to take a plea deal resulting
in a conviction for assault on an officer. A misconduct complaint, with five witnesses
and partial video coverage, was filed on July 30, 2008. Letters were sent to
complainants stating their complaints had been received, but no public justification
resulted.
D. On October 28, 2008, Benny Allen, an Black male Skid Row resident, was
shot by an LAPD bicycle officer. According to eyewitnesses, he was following
instructions by officers to get off his own bike and put his hands up when the officer
shot him. There was no investigation at the scene; in fact, witnesses and especially
those with cameras were moved away from the scene immediately and none were
later interviewed. There was no reassurance to the public that LAPD would be
conducting a later investigation to ensure accountability in this incident. Instead,

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within 15 minutes of the shooting, witnesses heard LAPD Officer Vernon tell the
news media that Mr. Allen had rushed officers with a knife (counter to other eye-
witness statements), and then he credited Central Division officers for not using
lethal force more often. No results of an investigation into the shooting were
released. No witnesses were contacted by LAPD; witnesses have been contacted by
Mr. Allen’s public defender as he faces a trial for two counts of assault on an officer,
as well as a possession with intent to sell charge.
The Benny Allen shooting, as well as a shooting a couple of months earlier,
was justified in later media statements by claiming that assaults on officers in Central
Division were on the rise and officers had to protect themselves. LAPD
acknowledges that four of those charged with assault were hospitalized after their
arrest, yet most LAPD injuries were reported as minor. This discrepancy between
force used by officers versus force used by those arrested raises serious concerns and
exemplifies the troubling situation between the LAPD and Skid Row residents.
E. On November 21, 2006, Cheryl Willard, a white female Skid Row resident,
was dragged from her home on 6
th
Street by two central division officers. She was
handcuffed, assaulted, then transported to Central Division. She was not charged
with any crime, but was transported to the UCLA psychiatric ward against her will
for a 72-hour hold and released within 24 hours. A misconduct complaint was filed

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on December 13, 2006. Ms. Willard was never contacted about this complaint and
never received notification of the outcome of the investigation.
F. On December 5, 2006, Russell Reynolds, a black male Skid Row resident
was standing outside his hotel on San Julian Street when he was handcuffed and put
up against the wall. While he was handcuffed, two officers beat him - grabbed him
by the neck, slammed his face into a gated door way, twisted his arms to take him to
the ground where a knee was placed on his neck to hold him down. Afterward, the
two officers threw his arms up high behind his back, and they walked him in this
position from 5
th
& San Julian Street to Central Division. When he was transported to
Parker Center, the desk sergeant refused to book him. He was released without any
charges. His arm was in a sling for 2 weeks. A misconduct complaint was filed on
December 21, 2006. Mr. Reynolds was never contacted about this complaint and
never received notification of the outcome of the investigation.
These examples of use of force under the Safer Cities Initiative in Central
Division, all of which are documented by video, photos and/or witnesses, indicate a
problematic level of force and violence present in Skid Row policing and a lack of
sufficient response by LAPD. In not one instance did LAPD officers or their
Commission discuss an investigation, give a comprehensive justification, respond
appropriately to misconduct complaints or make any attempts at community

161

dialogue to ease fears. It is not surprising that the community experiences fear and
distrust of officers and proactive steps must be taken to repair and earn the trust of
poor and homeless residents. There must be concrete assurances provided that use
of force will be employed only when appropriate, that the process for explanation
and justification will be open and comprehensive and LAPD will be accountable to
the community when force is misused.

3. Racial profiling
Central Division, the main target of this complaint, has by far the worst record
within LAPD of racial profiling, particularly against Blacks. In October 2008, the
ACLU of Southern California released an in-depth report about the prevalence of
racial profiling within LAPD (http://www.aclu-sc.org/documents/view/47). The
report finds “prima facie evidence that Blacks and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-
frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.” Although the results are primarily
focused Citywide, the report analyzes data by LAPD precinct as well. Key findings
include:
A. Stop rates:
• Per 10,000 residents Citywide, the Black stop rate is 3,400 stops higher than the
White stop rate, and the Hispanic stop rate is almost 360 stops higher.

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• Per 10,000 residents in Central Division, the Black stop rate is 16,455 stops
higher than the White stop rate, and the Hispanic stop rate is almost 5,186
stops higher.
• The Black stop rate per 10,000 residents in Central Division is 21,447; more
than 2 stops per Black resident and more than 4 ½ times the already disparate
Black stop rate Citywide.
B. Citation rates:
• Per 10,000 residents Citywide, the Black citation rate is 893 citations higher
than the White citation rate; the Hispanic citation rate is actually 255 citations
lower.
• Per 10,000 residents in Central Division, the Black citation rate is 5,053
citations higher than the White citation rate, and the Hispanic citation rate is
almost 3,306 citations higher.
• The Black citation rate per 10,000 residents in Central Division is 8,783; close to
9 citations per 10 Black residents and almost 4 times the already disparate
Black citation rate Citywide.
C. Arrest rates:
• Per 10,000 residents Citywide, the Black arrest rate is 685 arrests higher than
the White arrest rate; the Hispanic arrest rate is 118 arrests higher.

163

• Per 10,000 residents in Central Division, the Black arrest rate is 6,651 arrests
higher than the White arrest rate, and the Hispanic arrest rate is 1,000 arrests
higher.
• The Black citation rate per 10,000 residents in Central Division is 7,165; or 7
arrests per 10 Black residents and almost 8 ½ times the already disparate Black
arrest rate Citywide.
A Police Commission hearing on racial profiling and the ACLU report was
held on January 13, 2009. The report was primarily refuted by LAPD and no changes
were recommended. In fact, the LAPD said that one reason they could or should not
respond was that this was a problem that affected police departments nationwide.
This is likely true, but not a reasonable justification for not addressing this problem.
The Commission also provided no direction to address this systemic problem
Citywide or in Central Division where the problem is disturbingly concentrated. The
only clear direction by one Commissioner, Andrea Ordin, was that she thought the
report was useful and the Department should utilize it; Chief Bratton told the
Commissioner LAPD would not use the report.
4. Lack of Training of Officers
A. Policing of People with Mental Illness:

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In other parts of the city, the LAPD used “SMART teams” consisting of two
non-uniformed oficers to respond to situations involving people with severe mental
illness. These teams were created because the department found officers in uniform
were especial threatening to people suffering from illnesses such as paranoid
schizophrenia. One of the stated goals of the SMART teams, as reported on LAPD’s
official website, was to prevent unnecessary incarceration and/or hospitalization of
mentally ill individuals. But instead of avoiding arrests in Central Division through
the SMART team, people with mental illnesses were arrested and incarcerated at
alarming rates.
On Skid Row, where at least one-half of the population has a mental illness,
officers often respond to a single, nonviolent incident with 10-15 uniformed officers
instead of employing the SMART team. Community residents living with severe
mental illness have been particularly negatively affected by the Safer Cities Initiative.
With no place to go because they are more likely to be excluded from housing and
shelter programs, they become more vulnerable to frequent and intense police
interaction and jail stays. SCI policing has made it more difficult for housing and
service providers to serve this population, which is already the most underserved.
As a result of arrest and incarceration for petty crimes, dozens of mentally ill

165

homeless people, with whom service providers had worked for years, lost their
housing and went back to the streets.
Central Division officers were not sufficiently trained in dealing with people
with mental illnesses, as evidenced, among other things, by the over-concentration of
uniformed officers responding to minor incidents. Former Central Division Captain
Rick Wall publicly acknowledged this problem at a 2008 community mental health
meeting almost immediately upon his arrival in the Division, yet no resolution
followed.
Additionally, since LAPD has developed a fairly successful SMART team
model, it is unacceptable that specially-trained SMART officers are not regularly
present or accessible within Central Division. Protocol states that SMART officers
are to be called whenever an apparently mentally ill person is taken into custody.
This simply was not happening in Central Division where about half of those
arrested are persons with a mental illness.
B. Illegal Detentions and Searches:
In 2003, Skid Row residents represented by the ACLU of Southern California
and others filed an action to prohibit the LAPD from a policy and practice of stops
and searches that violated their rights under the Fourth Amendment and California
law (Fitzgerald v. City of LA). Plaintiffs entered a settlement agreement in December

166

2003 providing for a stipulated permanent injunction prohibiting a variety of
practices that violated the Fourth Amendment.
In late 2006, soon after the launch of the Safer Cities Initiative, dozens of
downtown residents reported violations of the Fitzgerald injunction. As one
example, SCI officers illegally utilized the issuance of citations as a tool to cuff and
search residents of Skid Row. A crosswalk violation was deemed a sufficient reason
to cuff someone, place them up against the wall, search their person and run a
warrant check. Because of the overwhelming number of officers, it became almost
impossible for Skid Row residents to avoid being a victim to illegal searches and/or
witness to this public humiliation. LAPD misconduct complaints were filed and
public testimony on this issue was provided to the Police Commission, yet the
practices continued.
The ACLU of Southern California presented this evidence to the Court and
moved for an order extending the injunction. The preliminary injunction was
extended in April 2007, based on evidence that LAPD was not obeying the
injunction. In granting the extension, the U.S. District Court ruling stated: “This is a
direct admission, from the Officer in Charge of the Safer Cities Initiative, that
Defendants have a policy of searching Skid Row residents solely on the basis of the
resident’s parolee or probationer status without knowledge of any search conditions

167

imposed. The law does not allow such searches. Accordingly, the Court finds that,
even viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Defendants, they have
admitted to an unconstitutional policy. “
In January 2009, plaintiffs and the City entered into a final settlement
agreement. The settlement agreement clearly outlined agreement between the
parties on the laws that govern searches, detentions, handcuffing and frisking, as
well as the training deficiencies that led to the prolonged practice of illegal
detentions and searches. LAPD agreed to develop and implement new training
materials and protocols as part of this settlement, explicitly acknowledging the lack
of training for Skid Row officers and, particularly, Safer Cities Initiative Task Force
officers.
This recent Fitzgerald settlement agreement may begin to address the lack of
training of officers. However, this case highlighted the lack of training issue in
Central Division and the lack of response to community complaints. The community
did not have the resources to file lawsuits for every training and implementation
issue. This training deficiency could and should have been identified through
misconduct complaints and public testimony, yet those complainants were
summarily dismissed.

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4. Discrimination against people with disabilities
Approximately 12,000 citations were issued in Skid Row during the first year
of the Safer Cities Initiative. As reported in the LA Daily Journal, these citations total
14 percent of all pedestrian citations citywide, although Skid Row residents comprise
less than 1 percent of the population of Los Angeles. LA CAN operates a citation
defense clinic, in which more than 90 percent of the citations are for crosswalk
violations and more than 95 percent of participants have disabilities and/or are Black.
The discriminatory policies and practices associated with the issuance of
citations have dire impacts. Citations for infractions have fines between $117 and
$270, making payment for homeless and other extremely low-income people almost
impossible. When the fines are not paid, warrants are issued and people are
arrested. LAPD citation and arrest policies under the Safer Cities Initiative have
effectively created a “debtor’s prison” for low-income people with disabilities.
In November 2007, an amended complaint in Quarles et al v. City of Los
Angeles was filed in federal court. Among other unlawful police practices, the
complaint alleged LAPD is, “citing the visually, physically and mentally impaired
homeless residents of Skid Row for ‘quality of life’ violations with full knowledge
that well more than 60% of the homeless population of skid Row suffers from some
form of disability.” The complaint also articulated the basic civil rights of Skid Row

169

residents to be free from unequal enforcement of pedestrian laws and to be free from
targeted enforcement based on disability.
The Quarles lawsuit sheds critical light on the targeted enforcement on
crosswalk violations and the impacts on people with disabilities. The amended
complaint says, “In the Skid Row area, the traffic lights are timed in favor of vehicles
and against pedestrians crossing the street. The City has known about these short-
timed signals since the Justin litigation in 2000, but has done nothing to lengthen the
time to cross the streets…..” The complaint argued that discriminatory policies and
practices of citation issuance in Skid Row must be investigated and corrected.

5. Unequal protection in enforcement against illegal drug and alcohol
possession
In the first two years of the initiative, officers made 19,000 arrests in the area,
the large majority of which were drug related. One tool used to ensure longer
sentences for addicts arrested for possessing narcotics was to escalate the charges. Of
the first 1,400 arrests made by SCI officers, 1,093 were categorized as “possession
with intent to sell”. LAPD also deployed undercover buy-bust teams in order to
generate drug sales charges. As documented in the Quarles lawsuit, during the first

170

year of SCI, the average amount of drugs confiscated in each of these cases amounted
to about $20 worth of crack cocaine.
Just months into the initiative, public defenders saw their caseloads double
with homeless drug addicts, many of them disabled, arrested for selling small
amounts of crack cocaine to undercover officers, thereby converting simple
possession to the much more serious charge of drug sales. This program began at
the same time the District Attorney adopted a “no plea” policy solely for drug sales
in Skid Row. The result was hundreds, and possibly thousands of ordinary addicts,
most of them mentally disabled and/or Black, entered the state prison system, where
they faced a health and mental health system already found to be unconstitutionally
inadequate. Again, the lawsuit argued that these charges are not commensurate to
the actual crimes; they are based solely on the neighborhood of arrest.
The intentional practice of escalating charges resulted in incarceration of those
struggling with the disease of addiction, instead of the treatment required by
Proposition 36 and supported by 61% of California voters. When people return from
jail, their drug sales record makes them ineligible for federally-funded housing and
food programs and they are forced to live on the street, where they cost taxpayers at
least $40,000 each year as they continue to circulate through shelters, emergency
rooms and jails.

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Enforcement against alcohol offenses has also disparately impacted poor,
mostly Black residents of Skid Row under the Safer Cities Initiative. The most
blatant example of unequal enforcement has regularly occurred during downtown’s
Art Walk, which targets the area’s newer, wealthier residents for gallery viewing and
other activities. LA CAN organizers documented numerous incidents of LAPD
officers chatting and socializing with Art Walk attendees, who are mostly White,
while they drink alcohol on the public sidewalks and streets. On those same dates,
LAPD officers cite and arrest poor, mostly Black residents for public alcohol
consumption. Videos taken at the time clearly demonstrated the double standard in
LAPD’s practices that result in two sets of enforcement policies based on race and
perceived income or homelessness status.
As with the citation policies, the unequal treatment and enforcement for drug
and/or alcohol possession against low-income Black residents based on race and
simply the community in which they reside are issues that must be investigated and
addressed. Basic civil rights are at stake and law enforcement must be held
accountable for equal protection under the law for every citizen. Again, the Quarles
awsuit argued that the LAPD’s Safer Cities Initiative must stop all policies and
practices that promote unequal protection, especially in drug and alcohol possession
offenses.

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Conclusion
After two and a half years of the Safer Cities Initiative and its illegal and
unfair patterns and practices, the Los Angeles Community Action Network called on
the Federal government to investigate LAPD’s Central Division based on the
information in this complaint. LA CAN has additional written and video records for
review in almost every section of this complaint. Along with more than 35
organizations opposing the Safer Cities Initiative, LA CAN organized hundreds of
residents to raise their complaints in various public settings. There was almost no
response by LAPD, the Police Commission or elected leaders with LAPD oversight.
The only concrete response to community outrage was a public hearing held
by the Police Commission, purportedly to evaluate the Safer Cities Initiative and its
impacts. This hearing was held on November 18, 2008. During the hearing, the
Commission heard formal testimony from organizations and individuals who both
opposed and supported SCI. They also heard general public testimony, in which
about 90% of the individuals who testified raised serious concerns about SCI. The
Commissioners also received a packet of written materials outlining the major
problems and violations occurring in Central Division under Safer Cities. At the end

173

of the hearing, they thanked participants and left the room. There was no further
discussion or direction by the Commission.
Again, the community acted upon every local opportunity for intervention, to
no avail. The Quarles lawsuit urged the LAPD to thoroughly investigate this
complaint.

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Chapter 6.
The Housing Question

Introduction

While the practices of the petty or uniformed police are easily imagined as
part of the ‘police order’, housing too plays an integral role in the operation of the
‘police’. From this perspective, housing functions as one modality in the ordering of
bodies that assigns each to their proper place. This assignment is anything but
arbitrary, articulating class, gender and racial constraints (Hayden 1981, Massey and
Denton 1993, Wright 1981). The “housing question” has long been integral to the
legitimacy and functioning of the state that has repeatedly demonstrated that its
solution is to move the problem around, resulting in a perpetual housing crisis
(Engels 1935, Marcuse and Keating 2006). These partial solutions, in turn, always
entail that the crisis continues in new and altered forms. Likewise, Pierre Bordieu
highlights the state’s double construction of housing policy to produce both demand
and supply (2005). In this way, state governmentalities of the police order mobilize
housing as one important spatial and social ‘solution’ to fix the contradictions of
capital accumulation while tenuously seeking to maintain its own legitimacy (Walker
1981).

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One important body of scholarship on housing as it relates to this dissertation
is that of gentrification. Since Ruth Glass’s initial invocation of the term in 1964, the
processes of residential gentrification have notably altered while its outcomes of
displacement have not. From this perspective, several persistent issues plague the
“gentrification scholarship” of urban studies and geography: 1) a narrow focus on
specific types of cities and landscapes, i.e. the mews or brownstones on inner-city
London or New York 2) the production classification typologies of what does or does
not count as gentrification, (conversion vs. new build construction), 3) internally
conducted debates, most notably the two decade long dispute over “consumption”
vs. “production” side explanations (Smith 1996 vs. Ley 1996), 4) the inattention or
focus on the racialized content of gentrification processes instead relying upon
narrow notions of class, 5) the reliance on a teleological stage model that begins with
pioneering artists and bohemians that ends with expensive condos and gourmet
groceries and finally 6) an under appreciation for the role of the state
governmentalities in enabling development through the flexible regulation of land
markets, the construction of demand and the provision of tax abatements and
subsidies, as well as the outright bulldozing of entire neighborhoods. Further, while
gentrification scholarship has a strong critical tradition (Hartman et al. 1982, Smith
1996), Slater (2006) highlight the contemporary “eviction of critical perspectives”. The

176

emphases found on eviction and displacement in the late 1970s to the 1980s has
significantly diminished while the destruction of development is more intensive than
ever. Nonetheless, despite this critical tradition, there has never been a significant
body of scholarship on community based practices of resistance to gentrification
outside the preponderance of scholarship on the dramatic events in Tomkins Square
Park in the early 1990s (Abu-Lughod 1994, Smith 1996). By contrast, today the
perspective from the literature is that the resistance has been displaced (Hackworth
2002, Smith 2002, Wilson and Grammenos 2000).
Entering the above morass, this dissertation makes several strategic
interventions. The first is to emphasize that the gentrification literatures have
persistently avoided the racialized content of the process instead focusing on a
relatively narrow notion of class, if at all. While there is a broad acceptance of the
racism present in historic practices of red lining, covenants and housing segregation,
processes of gentrification have rarely been understood in this light.
57
More often
than not, the place of ‘race’ in gentrification scholarship looks to “black gentrifiers”
(Taylor 1992, Boyd 2000). Notable exceptions include Smith’s general work on
revanchism as well as Wendy Shaw’s (2006) study of whiteness in the gentrification

57
Recent scholarship on predatory lenders and mortgage forclosures have been notably
better in their attentiveness to the central of racism.

177

of the Redfern area in Sydney. Taking the perspective that “race…is the modality
through which class is lived (Gilmore 2007,39 after Hall 1980, 341) the fact that most
gentrifiers are white and most existing residents are black or brown legitimates
hegemonic notions of “empty frontiers” to be colonized.
A second engagement is to emphasize along with Hartman, Smith and Slater
the importance of a critical perspective that nevertheless focuses specifically on
community based organizing and resistance to development and displacement.
Outside Hartman’s Yerba Buena, a small but robust body of scholarship has focused
on struggles over urban property regimes (Blomley 2004), the collectivization of
housing (Defilippis 2004) and racialized community based struggles over
dispossession (Betancur 2002, Fraser 2004, Gregory 1998 and Mele 2000, Newman
and Wyly 2006, Robinson 1995)
58
. To date, however, ethnography remains
remarkably rare in studies of gentrification and displacement (Gregory 1998, Rinaldo
2002). Finally, and of particular significance to this dissertation, connections between
homeless organizing and displacement are sparse with the notable exceptions of

58
This body of scholarship, struggles of land and resources, is massive when
considered outside the typical urban context of gentrification scholarship and will necessarily
need to be better incorporated in the dissertation itself.

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Frances Piven and Richard Cloward (1977) and David Wagner (1993) (see also
Roschelle and Wright 2003).
Working explicitly from a place based perspective in Los Angeles, other
empirical realities depart from the norms of gentrification scholarship. First, Los
Angeles has never been an intensive site of scholarship on gentrification despite the
multiplicity and repetition of its occurrence.
59
Within the scholarly realm there exists
one short monograph by Rogers (1996) and an unpublished dissertation by Sensiper
(1994), both on the West Adams neighborhood north of USC.
60
The question of
empirical work on Los Angeles will be taken up in the following section, but suffice
to say, there has been no place based study of downtown gentrification nor the
organized contestation within it.
Third, building upon Paul Groth’s emphasis and study of the residential hotel
(1994), gentrification scholarship has treated Skid Rows and Single Resident
Occupancy (SRO) hotels a thing of the past. In Los Angeles, by contrast, a fifty block

59
Typical of Los Angeles School pronouncements, Ed Soja states without recourse to
any empirical evidence that “gentrification has not been a major theme in Los Angeles, largely
because neighborhood change has been so rapid and intense, and so complex in its racial, ethnic,
and class mix, that the simpler gentrification theories of “rent gap” and yuppie incursions seem
to shed little light on the more kaleidoscopic and heterogeneous local and regional patterns of
residential restructuring” (2000, 226).
60
An area still under intense developmental pressure from USC’s latest master plan
where local community organizers and students are working together to contest dispossession
from the land.

179

Skid Row exists, replete with 9,000 units of SRO housing in the downtown area
alone. While many American cities have destructively expunged their Skid Rows the
types of housing stock they represent are understudied (c.f. Kasinitz 1984). That is,
there has long been an overemphasis on the destruction of formal public housing
projects and contemporary focus on the mortgage foreclosure crisis without due
consideration of the multitude of other more numerous forms of federally subsidized
housing such as Section 8 (in its various incarnations), rent control or residential
hotels. As Groth notes, “in 1990, hotel residents numbered between one million and
two million people. More than lived in hotels than in all of America’s public
housing” (1994, 1). While historically, Skid Rows and their SROs have been
considered the first to disappear under processes of gentrification (Hoch and Slayton
1989), in Los Angeles they represent the contemporary “frontier”.
Fourth, in conjunction with the destabilized trajectory of the “natural”
gentrification process, the role of the state has always played an important role in Los
Angeles both conceptually and empirically. Without explicit recourse to a
Foucaultian approach to the state, Rachel Weber (2002) usefully emphasizes the
state’s role in the uneven spatial depreciation and devalorization of the urban built
environment. The obsolescence, planned or otherwise, of certain land-uses enables
their shift to new “productive” uses. Far from “returning” as Smith and Hackworth

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(2001) suggest during the ‘3
rd
-wave’ of gentrification in the late 1990s, the state has
never been absent. In a related vein, the initiating role of artists as pioneering
gentrifiers finds little traction in Downtown Los Angeles. Instead, developers
instigated legislative policy changes that enabled the conversion of “under-utilized”
buildings into residences. Later, a “Gallery Row” was initiated when only three non-
contiguous galleries existed, labeling and signing a 27 block area. Thus, the typical
chronology of artists first, then developers is reversed. Far from accidental or
‘organic’, the production of residential and gallery space in Downtown Los Angeles
has long been the explicit aim of the planning and business community.

2002 CRA Redevelopment Plan and the Residential Hotel Preservation
Ordinance [2002-2006-2008]

Building upon the previous chapters, a focus is placed upon the grassroots
mobilization against and within urban policy since 1999. The first case is the CRA’s
2002 redevelopment plan which arrived earlier than the projected 2010 because the
spending cap of $750 million imposed by Valley Councilmember Bernardi in 1977
was reached. Just as the CRA’s 1975 plan codified the CCA’s Silverbook plan, the
2002 plan further enacted the goals of the 1993 Downtown Strategic Plan. While the
Adaptive Reuse Ordinance opened the possibility of converting SRO Hotels, the 2002

181

CRA plan made their conversion a priority. Of the 9,000 residential hotel units
downtown, the CRA slated 3,400 all within the “Historic Core” for conversion into
condominiums. In calling for the explicit destruction through conversion of SRO
housing, the CRA treated the inhabitants of Skid Row as transient and expendable
like so many urban renewal programs before. Through a mixture of direct action and
legal suit, LA CAN, SAJE and the Legal Aid Foundation were able to successfully
challenge the plan. The campaign was finally settled as Wiggins et al. v. CRA in
April 2006, resulting in significant changes to housing regulations and tenant rights
as well as the establishment of the public existence of the Skid Row community prior
to redevelopment. Further, challenging the 2002 plan has also proved integral to the
Skid Row community and the development of LA CAN. In a formative sense, the
organizing and legal struggles against the redevelopment plan are constitutive of the
politicization of the population and place of Skid Row during the contemporary
period.
The second case study is the creation of a Residential Hotel Preservation
Ordinance. After the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance and the 2002 CRA
Redevelopment plan, downtown’s historic core became a highly speculative land
grab. In order to stop the destruction of Skid Row’s housing of last resort, a
temporary moratorium or Interim Control Ordinance (ICO) on the conversion or

182

demolition of SROs was passed in City Council 2006. After two more years of
struggle and mobilization, the ICO was made permanent. These ordinances function
by exempting residential hotels from the Ellis Act, which allows property owners to
evict tenants under the pretense of going out of the rental business. While the Ellis
Act may have legitimate purposes, slumlords utilize it as a pretense to shift from
rental to condominium. Thus, by exempting Residential Hotels, 19,000 units citywide
and 9,000 units in downtown must permanently remain SRO. Once again, the focus
is placed squarely on the practices and strategies mobilized that greatly stemmed the
flood of speculative capital into the everyday lives of social reproduction. The overall
emphasis on this chapter is to highlight the range of practices that enabled these
victories to occur, focusing on the multiple socio-spatial practices that vary from the
details of the legal suit to delegation visits and speaking at City Council to other
direct actions. Together these struggles establish landmark victories that shift the
ground of contestation itself, altering the policies and practices of what follows.
Put simply, the 2002 Community Redevelopment Agency’s plan for Skid Row
called for the explicit destruction through conversion of 3,400 units of Single
Resident Occupancy or SRO housing. However, the plan was successfully challenged
by LA CAN and the Legal Aid Foundation through protracted direct actions and

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legal suit. The campaign was settled in April 2006 resulting in the establishment of
the public existence of the Skid Row community prior to redevelopment.
Here, we find an example of the creation of what Rancière describes as the
emergence part that has no part, disrupting the normal operation of the police order,
enacting equality in the subjectivization of the Skid Row community. The enactment
of this so-called poor people's movement contains an aesthetics of politics, that is a
repartitioning of space and time of the practice of survival. This involves both a
repartitioning of space and time, the relations between Skid Row residents continued
social reproduction and their place in both public and private spaces. This includes
altered forms of visibility, shifting the community's noisy police aesthetic and policy
invisibility into subjectivization and collective voice. This people's organizing and
partial emancipation was an aesthetic revolution that disrupted the Platonic edict
that they had no time to do anything but work. The “revolution” was the reframing
of the space-time of their place, reconfiguring the partition of experience invalidating
policy's partition of space and time.
In empirical terms the outcome of these joint efforts is nothing short of a sea
change. While the 2002 plan called for the elimination of most all low income
housing in the form of residential hotels, by 2006 coordinated organizing and legal
strategies had won a one-for-one no-net loss policy protecting our homes. Where

184

long term residents were initially treated as transients with no tenancy rights, equity
now exists between tenants in residential hotels and all other rent-stabilized tenants
throughout Los Angeles. While the initial plan did not even consider residents as
persons living in homes, the City was required to hire locally for CRA funded
projects. Ultimately, the multitude of challenges to the 2002 redevelopment plan, still
in force in 2017, fundamentally altered how any future redevelopment is carried out
in Downtown with impacts citywide. If emancipation means something, it means
precisely a rejection of this distribution of places, roles and identities. And here, Skid
Row emerged as a subject of politics to declare a wrong that are heard as voice rather
than merely noise, forcibly altering the prevailing police logics.

After the Storm: Holding onto and Expanding controls over rental housing in
general [2006-2008-Present]

This section focuses on three residential hotels in the period following the
2006 passage of the Residential Hotel Preservation Ordinance and Wiggins
settlement explored above. While these ostensible victories ought to have protected
the low-income or affordable housing stock, issues the state’s enforcement of its own

185

laws and the practices of developers emphasizes that there is “no guarantee” (Hall
1985). Together, these three large residential hotels within the “Historic Core” have
been negatively affected impacted since 2006. While the previous section
predominately addresses issues of public space in Skid Row’s streets and parks, this
section substantively focuses on the vagaries or urban property.
Located at 5
th
and Main Streets, the Rosslyn Hotel was built in 1914. By the
1960s, the hotel’s 450 units had been become SRO housing, making it one of the
larger residential hotels in the Downtown. The hotel was bought by Rob Frontiera
and renamed “The Frontier” along with the 264-unit annex across the street in the
1970s. Following the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, Frontiera obtained permits from
CRA to convert the top floor of the Frontier to loft apartments in 2005. Frontiera
decided to convert the top three and without legal recourse to evict current tenants,
offered various incentives such as two or three months free rent to move across the
street, far less than the required relocation benefits. Just before the passage of the
2006 ICO prohibiting conversion, Frontiera had completed his renovation and
applied for permits to convert the remaining floors 3-9. While these permits were
initially granted, the City revoked later them when it became apparent through LA
CAN members that Frontiera had converted two additional floors in addition to
empting the building in preparation for conversion. In violation of the ICO, Frontiera

186

was sued by the City for $1 million dollars for illegally dumping the building.
Despite the fact that the city eventually enforced its own laws, the building rents start
at $789 per month triple prior to renovation.
Situated two blocks away at 6
th
and Spring, the Alexandria Hotel was
constructed in 1906. For decades the Alexandria attracted such Hollywood
luminaries as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo as well as three Presidents although
by the 1980s the hotel’s 470 units had become housing of last resort. While the
Alexandria was spared the fate of adaptive conversion, the hotel was bought in 2006
by the Amerland Development Corporation with the aid of $ 35 million dollars in
city bond money. A for-profit developer from San Diego, Amerland primarily
rehabilitates and manages smaller affordable housing projects. The stipulations
attached to the city bond dollars held that rehab to the Alexandria would be done
without displacing current tenants while preserving current affordability rates for 55
years. In acquiring the Alexandria, Amerland was exempted from the City’s rent
control through political connection and ‘a loophole’ because a small portion of the
corporation is non-profit with technical ownership of one unit in the building.
Through this exemption, Amerland was not permitted to raise rents but altered the
terms of tenancy. These changes included shifting the day of rent payment, for
example from the 5
th
to the 1
st
. For an individual who lives month to month on a

187

fixed income such as SSI or GR, monthly checks arrive after the 1
st
. Likewise, tenants
were bombarded with a bevy of paperwork and forced to sign new leases with
stricter rules. Finally, in order to facilitate the rehabilitation of units, residents were
shuffled out of rooms where they may have lived for years.
Together these changes resulted in significant disruption and confusion for
elderly and mentally disabled tenants leading to at least 100 evictions. It should be
noted that rent levels remained the same so long as a tenant remained a tenant. Once
a room was vacated or rehabilitated, the rent could rise as high as 750 dollars a
month, potentially more than 3 times the previous rent level. Made aware of the
ongoing practices within the Alexandria by members and non-members alike, LA
CAN sought to mobilize and organized the building. In December 2007, a suit was
filed against the CRA and Amerland with 10 named plaintiffs.
The final case in this section is the Cecil Hotel at 640 South Main Street,
constructed in 1924 with a very high 615 units. The hotel was bought after the
passage of the ICO by developer Fred Cordova in May 2007 who is also chair of the
CCA’s Economic Development Committee. Cordova led his joint investors to believe
that there were no regulatory laws constraining the conversion to upscale hotel.
Cordova was eventually deposed, placing Bill Lanting of the Lanting Hotel Group in

188

charge.
61
According to the Los Angeles Housing Department’s Hotel (LAHD)
Inventory the Cecil Hotel is a residential hotel, thereby prohibiting any conversion or
loss of very low income units. Despite LAHD’s categorization and the presence of
long term residents, current Cecil ownership has sued the city over the classification
claiming to be a commercial tourist hotel. In direct disregard for the ICO, Cecil
management converted the first three floors or 138 rooms of the hotel without
rehabilitation permits to a brightly colored hostel named “Stay”. Opened in
November 2008, the hostel is designed to “cater primarily to backpacking foreign
tourists, students and young professionals.” To date, mobilizing within the Cecil
Hotel has proven difficult for LA CAN in part due to a lack of resident members but
also the management’s staunch hostility to door knocking and organizing. Given the
City’s inability to monitor the status of the Residential Hotel Preservation Ordinance,
LA CAN is the named plaintiff with LAHD against the Cecil’s attempted
reclassification as a commercial hotel.
Together, the examination of these three hotels opens new perspectives
on both the micropractices of contemporary gentrification as well as modes of
contestation and resistance. These cases demonstrate the perpetual challenge of

61
Lanting is a graduate of USC’s Marshall School of Business.

189

maintaining victories through urban policy in a system that had no place for such a
challenge in the first place.

Negative Human Rights Impact of Public Housing Divestment
62

Housing Authority of Los Angeles (HACLA) 2010-11 Annual Plan included
more than 7,000 Public Housing units in the City of Los Angeles for potential
"disposition", effectively terminating their longstanding role as publicly owned and
operated housing.
63
As defined by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), disposition is the "sale or other transfer of a public housing
project". Beyond outright demolition, disposition is the primary mechanism
permitted by HUD for housing authorities to "dispose of a public housing project".
64

Although HACLA has verbally described tenant protections within the proposed
disposition plans, the fact remains that, if disposition occurs, the housing is no longer
a public.

62
NEGATIVE HUMAN RIGHTS IMPACT OF PUBLIC HOUSING
DISPOSITION:HOUSING AUTHORITY OF LOS ANGELES (HACLA) PLANS FOR 2011
Prepared for the Office of Congresswoman Roybal-Allard, Los Angeles Community Action
Network (LA CAN), coauthored by Nicholas Dahmann
63
http://www.hacla.org/attachments/files/355/2011DraftAgencyPlan6-23-2010Final.pdf
64
42 USC § 1437p; United States Housing Act of 1937 as Amended by the Quality
Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998.

190

This short policy brief outlines the impacts of disposition on the lives of public
housing residents. The root issue with disposition is that the formerly public housing
is no longer fully publicly owned and operated. Far from simply providing a larger
funding subsidy, disposition to project-based vouchers alters the terms of tenancy
and removes significant rights held under public housing.
Right to Organize - In contrast to public housing where funding exists for
resident participation, the protected right to organize is not provided by either statue
or regulation in project-based vouchers. Moreover once disposition occurs, the
Housing Authority or the private non-profit that owns the property is not long
required to submit annual or five-year plans. As they currently exist, resident input
on annual plans are meant to guarantee accountability. Taken together, the loss of the
right to organize and the elimination of participatory planning mechanisms removes
government’s accountability to residents.
Eligibility - The shift to a Section 8 funding stream limits both eligibility and
accessibility to the human right to housing. First, while families with immigrant
members without documentation are currently accommodated in Public Housing,
there are different regulations under Section 8 which make it likely that families will
either be ineligible or their required rent will increase beyond their capacity to pay.
The new owner of the developments can also create additional eligibility

191

requirements without public input that exclude current or future tenants in need, as
has been found in privately-owned Section 8 properties.
Rent Setting and Grievance Procedures - Beyond limiting who is qualified,
following disposition, rents are almost guaranteed to increase to the maximum
allowable amount. This would have the effect of deepening rent burdens on those
least able to pay. Additionally, new fees and minimum payments that negatively
impact those on fixed income or dealing with unemployment may be established. As
with organizing rights, tenants of disposed properties lose the right to contest the
terms and conditions of their lease. This curtailment of basic rights is carried over
into grievance procedures. Following disposition, tenants would find no statutory
requirements for denied applicants. Meager regulatory procedures provide written
notice without the provision of substantive modes of recourse or redress.
The disposition of public housing ends the only truly permanently affordable
housing available. Disposition is literally the disposal of the public housing as a
publicly held good; discarding a program that has functioned and persisted for over
70 years, through all manner of political upheaval and economic downturns. Far
from ensuring access to affordable housing, HACLA's disposition plan guarantees
diminished eligibility and availability. The loss of these rights curtails organizing,

192

democratic participation in planning processes and removes protections that enable
the maintenance and preservation of our affordable housing.

Urban academics scholars in opposition to the proposed Transforming Rental
Assistance Initiative and the Preservation, Enhancement, and Transforming
Rental Assistance Act of 2010
65

In the context of these events in Skid Row, a group of academics came
together to protest National housing policies proposed at this same time. In their
congressional testimony they stated that as academics and researchers of urban
policy and planning committed to equality and social justice, they strongly oppose
the Obama Administration and Department of Housing and Urban Development's
Transforming Rental Assistance (TRA) initiative, and its legislative proposal, the
Preservation, Enhancement, and Transforming Rental Assistance Act of 2010
(PETRA). This opposition was based on a critical analysis of the drafted PETRA
legislation in relation to the department's year-long promotion of TRA. The solution
TRA presents is debt financing through the conversion of 280,000 public housing

65
Written testimony, submitted to the House Committee on Financial Services regarding
full committee hearing on "The Administration’s Proposal to Preserve and Transform Public and
Assisted Housing: The Transforming Rental Assistance Initiative"; May 25, 2010

193

units to Section 8 contracts. That is, to leverage $7 billion by mortgaging 25% of all
remaining public housing units. As a multi-year initiative, Secretary Donovan stated
that the goal of TRA for the Federal Government is to "not require any capital
funding for public housing in a separate account."
66
In other words, formal
divestment and the end of public housing that residents have called home for over
seven decades.

Public housing is real estate, that is all it is...it needs to perform the way the rest of the
world does in real estate, so we can maximize what we can do with it.
~ Sandra Henriquez, Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing

After forty years of decreases and eliminations to social spending, TRA
represented the latest attempt to remove safety nets long ensured as collective public
goods. Fundamentally, TRA did not enable more funding for the existing public
housing program. Instead, TRA opened up public housing as a new source to feed
the addiction to credit. Under the banner of preservation, public housing ceased to be
public as it passed into the cradle of debt and leverage with its future mortgaged off

66
Donovan, S. March 2010. Response to questions from Senator Murray, Senate
Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Related Agencies.

194

to banks for profit in the hands of private interests. As such, TRA, like the preceding
shifts in federal assistance to Section 8, was not meant to truly help poor households
and individuals but a means of getting the federal government out of the low-income
affordable housing business.

This testimony analyzed the false premises, problematic characterizations, and
misplaced priorities of TRA. This testimony began by emphasizing the significant
differences between TRA as a "signature initiative" presented by high-level officials
and the specific authorizations sought in the PETRA legislation. The remainder of
this testimony detailed the potential and likely disastrous implications of TRA and
PETRA.

Socio-economic change and housing affordability since the 1970s
While public housing was first implemented in 1937, approximately half of the
public housing stock was constructed by the newly formed HUD between 1965 and
the 1973 “moratorium”. The breakdown of legitimacy for the production of
affordable housing coincided with a generalized crisis in the market system not
dissimilar from our current situation. In response to that crisis, federally assisted
rental policy shifted to subsidizing rent in the private market through vouchers.

195

Instituted in 1974, the multiple varieties of Section 8 grew to provide approximately
three times the number of remaining public housing units. Despite the expansion of
vouchers, the vast majority of low-income tenants lived in non-federally assisted or
private units. In 1970 there were 130 affordable units for every 100 low-income
households whereas today there only are 38 units. For low-income tenants, 1978
marked the tipping point to greater need than to supply while very low-income
households reached that point in 1970. By 1978 the shortfall ballooned to 1.8 million
units.
It is not a coincidence that access to affordable housing diminished for
federally assisted and private market housing during the recessionary 1970s. The
economic system that emerged post-crisis (and recently crashed) achieved growth
and distributed wealth in far more unequal terms. The role of banks and financial
industries increased through deregulations and the extension of credit to non-
traditional borrowers. As real wages stagnated or declined for everyone but the
super-wealthy and the use of credit became increasingly important not only for
financial industries but for leveraging household consumption and
homeownership.
67
Following a model of asset management and further engaging

67
Harvey, D. 2010. The Enigma of Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

196

mixed financing, since 1995 HUD has authorized the demolition of approximately
165,000 units of public housing following congressional removal of one-for-one
replacement. In parallel, 360,000 units of federally assisted housing units, particularly
project-based Section 8, have been lost primarily due to private owners opt-out.
68
By
2010 HUD reports that 335,000 project-based section 8 units are up for renewal
during the coming year.
69
More Section 8 units were gained and lost during a shorter
period of time compared to longevity of public housing. While PETRA introduces
additional aspects to Section 8, the huge losses indicate the instability and risk to the
long term affordability of privately owned and operated rental assistance.

TRA is a re-branding of Bush's FY03/04 plan to mortgage and project-base
public housing

Put simply, the TRA "signature initiative" of the Obama Administration's
HUD is a more extreme version of George W. Bush's twice rejected "Public Housing
Reinvestment Initiative" (PHRI). Other examples exist,
70
but the parallels between

68
Rice, D. and Sard, B. 2009. Decade of Neglect has Weakened Federal Low-Income
Housing Programs. CBPP p. 17.
69
Galante, C. March 24, 2010. Testimony on the "Housing Preservation and Tenant
Protection Act of 2010"
70
Bill Clinton's 1996 Blueprint for Reinventing HUD proposed to transform public
housing into what was then tenant-based certificates, moving it away from all project based and
existing subsidies for operating and capital costs. The Blueprint legitimizes these changes in the

197

Obama's Transforming Rental Assistance and Bush's Public Housing Reinvestment
Initiative are more than happy accident. In FY03 and 04, the Bush Administration's
HUD submitted PHRI as part of the budget and both times they were rejected. PHRI
sought to enact the same framework TRA is currently pushing: using private
financing to rehabilitate properties though mortgages, the argument that without
private-sector money PHAs will be unable to address the capital improvement
backlog, an emphasis on market discipline through "asset management" principles,
the conversion of public housing to project-based voucher subsidies with use
agreement matching the previous public housing project, and even the opportunity
for residents to move after living in a converted development for only one year
(rather than 2 with TRA).
71
An important difference is the slightly more modest scale
of operation limited to leveraging $500 million in 2003 and $1.7 billion in 2004 during
the first year.
Ultimately, the conceptual differences between TRA and PHRI are minimal to
non-existent. What distinguishes the two proposals are the untold sums Obama's

name of streamlining operations. In 1997 bills in both houses of Congress sought to eliminate
HUD: one proposal for public housing included conversion to vouchers in the name of choice
and mobility while the other advocated block grants to increase competition and efficiency (S.
1145, H.R. 2198).
71
http://www.hud.gov/offices/cfo/reports/04estimates/phcf.pdf

198

HUD has spent on promotional outreach, interactive webcasts, stakeholder
discussions and PowerPoint presentations. Nevertheless, after months on the road
and countless interactions, the core of Bush's PHRI remain intact in TRA.
Several congressional members were present during the two PHRI proposals
and delivered incisive comments and questions that are more relevant now than
ever. These points particularly emphasized objects to the privatization of a public
good and the risk associated with mortgages and foreclosure. Given the recent
market collapse and subsequent bailouts it’s even more evident that there is no such
thing as "market discipline"; that the private market has always relied upon the
public and Federal Government for its existence; and that ultimately it is the market,
banks and lending agencies that need to be disciplined, not the public housing
residents.

Processes of privatizing public housing: mainstream housing market

HUD officials repeatedly claimed that TRA does not privatize public
housing.
72
Treating privatization as a thing rather than a process, this oft repeated

72
Transforming Rental Assistance: A Presentation on the Future of Rental Assistance
Programs. April 2010, p. 24

199

statement could only be true if an exceedingly broad definition exists. Indeed, the
PETRA legislation provides that PHA owned is to "include a project or unit owned
by an entity in which the agency or its officers, employees or agents hold a significant
direct or indirect interest and which has among its purposes the ownership or
management of affordable housing." [8(m)(2)M(2)] Nowhere in PETRA is "indirect
interest" defined; however, the TRA's budget website's FAQs indicates that a "third-
party management company" could be hired should the PHA choose. Additionally,
when considered against the standards established by a Congressional Research
Service Report on the matter, the PETRA legislation more than exceeds the multiple
minimal standards.
73
It is clear that TRA includes a multitude of privatizations
including ownership structure, management policies and funding streams that
remove public protections and these will be considered in later testimony due to
space.

73
Kosar, K. 2006. Privatization and the Federal Government: An Introduction. Congressional
Research Service Report for Congress; Privatization as "the use of the private sector in the
provision of a good or service, the components of which include financing, operations
(supplying, production, delivery), and quality control." Of the three components, quality control
in the form of "physical inspection of properties" [8(n)7(a)] is the only role HUD maintains while
encouraging private financing to the point of denying public funds and allowing PHA's to
contract third parties.

200

Mortgaging public housing, its lack of regulation and PETRA's foreclosure
protections

Neither TRA presentations nor PETRA specify the mechanisms for debt-
financing $7 billion from the $290 million requested in the budget. Provided the
centrality of private equity and investment in the TRA initiative, this oversight is
particularly glaring. HUD's failure to disclose significant details on the legislative
authorization, the structuring of tax-credits, mortgages or other financing
mechanisms underscores the minimal transparency affected during the TRA process.
Provided that there is no new debt-financing authorization in PETRA
HUD intends to utilize an existing but under or unused legislation creating the
Capital Fund Financing Program (CFFP). Through CFFP, PHAs are able to borrow
against the future allocation of their capital fund to leverage modernization funds.
From 2000-2010, 3.6 billion dollars were approved for 136 projects.
74
Nevertheless,
there is no discussion of the CFFP as a mechanism to address the unmet capital
backlog in TRA presumably because it operates under the capital fund which is set to
be eliminated.

74
http://www.hud.gov/offices/pih/programs/ph/capfund/cffp/chroncffplist.xls

201

An obscure but likely candidate is the Public Housing Mortgage Program
(PHMP). Approved in 1998 but only used 6 times since, PHMP authorizes "a public
housing agency to mortgage or otherwise grant a security interest in any public
housing project or other property of the public housing agency."[42 USC 1437 30(a)]
Furthermore, "no action taken under this section shall result in any liability to the
Federal Government."[30(c)]. In November 2009, a notice for comment was released
that ended in January 2010 soliciting comments "from interested parties to inform
[HUD's] efforts to structure a program"
75
It seems likely that the PHMP or an
updated version (that replaces the DOT with TRA's HAP etc.) would be used at the
mechanism for TRA. Unlike the CFFP which is limited a percentage of annual
appropriation, the PHMP can be secured against the property. Currently public
housing is run at a loss so there is no surplus capital to pay debt services ;but the
conversion to Section 8 through TRA would enable PHMP to function due to the
larger subsidy.
If the PHMP, used only a few times, is the mechanism for leveraging $7 billion
from 280,000 public housing units in the first year, is seems to me that Secretary
Donovan has gone too big in his call to "Go big or go home."
76
Furthermore, PETRA

75
http://www.hud.gov/offices/pih/programs/ph/capfund/prop-phmp-notice.pdf n.p.
76
Webcast from hud.gov, May 19, 2010

202

essentially fails to specify any mortgage regulation. Specifically, PETRA does not
place a cap on the interest rate for a PHA's loan nor is there any no provision
prohibiting the loan's bundling or securitization, keeping it out of the into the
secondary mortgage market.

Failure to address the backlog of capital needs improvements

Estimates of the capital improvement backlog used in TRA presentations are
based on decade old data,
77
a general concern expressed by the House
Appropriations Committee last year.
78
The new Capital Needs Assessment will not
be finished in October.
79
In the face of these uncertainties, senior HUD officials have
testified to Congress with a figure that "may exceed $20 billion", $26.4 billion, and the
more common refrain of $20-30 billion.
80
The lack of a definitive inventory,
unspecified debt mechanisms place the reported $7 billion leverage figure in the
realm of speculation.

77
Abt Associates Inc. 2000. Capital Needs of the Public Housing Stock in 1998: Formula
Capital Study;
78
House Report 111-128: DOT, HUD and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill, 2010
79
PHADA, Dec. 2009 "Capital Backlog Study Moves Forward", Advocate 24(20): 1,7.
80
Donovan before Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs "may
exceed $20 billion" 4/15/10, Henriquez's verbal testimony before House Subcommittee on
Housing and Community Opportunity, 4/28/10

203

More problematic, PETRA establishes no provision to prioritize properties in
need of significant capital improvement, the same issue raised in the rejection of
Bush's FY03 HUD proposal.
81
Properties eligible for conversion need only
demonstrate that they will "promote the rehabilitation, energy-efficiency, and long
term-financial and physical sustainability of properties" [8(m)(2)(i)]. The ability to
"promote" "rehabilitation" bears no necessary relation to a project's backlog.
82

Provided that banks lend against both the ability to maintain debt service payments
and the quality of a property's asset, lenders are far more likely to extend debt to
properties already in good physical condition. The properties with the greatest need
are liable to be locked out or to borrow at a reduced volume. Therefore, as drafted,
PETRA neither encourages nor provides mechanisms for the funding properties with
significant capital backlogs. Moreover, the FY11 Capital Fund budget request is 18%
lower FY10, the smallest since becoming a specific line-item in 1996. Recognizing that
$4 billion stimulus dollars went to capital improvement, a real commitment to

81
Senate Report 108-143. Departments of VA, HUD and Independent Agencies
Appropriations Bill
82
Instead of prioritizing properties with high levels of physical distress as initially
stated, funds were awarded based on the ability to leverage private capital. In practice, public
housing projects on the cusp of gentrification were funded because of access to private capital
eager to demolish public housing rather than the more distressed property.

204

addressing unmet capital improvements would not then shirk the appropriation for
public housing capital funds.

Conclusion
This testimony highlights major concerns we have with PETRA. However,
many more exist. We understand HUD’s mission to provide adequate housing for
the many in our country in desperate need of it. However, TRA and PETRA are not
the way forward. We believe that if this proposal is implemented, it will produce far
more hardship and suffering on poor and low income communities than it alleviates
while.

205

Conclusion

This dissertation’s mental and physical labor began as well as concludes in
media res. If history can begin anywhere but the beginning and the past isn’t really
ever history, part of the challenge of scholarship and stories alike is to clarify the
signal from the noise. Amidst the continuity and flux of ongoing restructurings
within the urban process, this dissertation has engaged in three broad zones of
scholarly practice. First, to provide a theoretical basis for emplotting the empirical
work in Skid Row, I examined the implications of how ‘neoliberalism’ is theorized
for the relationship between space and politics, particularly when considered
through a generalized concept of police power. I focused on Michel Foucault’s
recently translated work on the police, the state and neoliberal governmentalities
which for insights into the empirical and theoretical questions for the related politics
of space and the space of politics. Jacques Rancière’s work productively
supplements Foucault as a means to conceptualize emancipatory socio-spatial
politics.
Second, to provide historical urban policy context for contemporary Skid
Row, I traced the continuities and shifts in the political rationalities governing
downtown Los Angeles’s urban policy and space since 1940. I examined now Los
Angeles’s particular historical geographies as compared with concurrent shifts at

206

scales of the nation, state and globe. Finally, I looked specifically at how Skid Row
has been discursively and materially constructed as well as contested through such
socio-spatial governmentalities over time.
Third, through empirical research as an observant participant in Skid Row
with The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), I was able to address
firsthand the potentials for radical democratic practices to disrupt and alter the
contemporary urban policies of housing and policing. The material presented in this
dissertation demonstrates how individual and collective radical democratic practices
not only capture urban policy but can alter the coordinates or terrain of urban
governmental practice itself.
I conducted this research as an “observant participant” adopting an urban
ethnographic method using a term coined by Joao Vargas. In Vargas’s words
“observant participation refers to active participation in the organized group, such
that observation becomes an appendage of the main activity.” (Vargas 2008a, 175).
This approach proved to be effective. My active, ongoing participation at the Los
Angeles Community Action Network enabled involvement with those working to
affect change. Observations accrued along the way represent a qualitatively different
inflection than those accumulated through a service provisioning model or one of
abstract theory alone. Further, without participation, there would be no access. For

207

example, at LA CAN there is a general policy against academics “studying them”
without working with them. Against the sole authority of the academician,
knowledge produced through struggle seeks to displace the long-standing bias of
scholarly research. So as a member of the LA CAN staff, I was part of the community
with access through participation, shedding the remove of scholarly research.
Informal conversations and direct observation of ongoing actions through several
years of engagement brought me into the experience and enabled insights not
possible through other means. Formal interviews, cooperative development of
organizing materials, videos of police action, contributions to legal drafts, and
technical support to court proceedings all enabled a deeper understanding of the
divergent perspectives which characterize the contemporary urban struggle.
The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) is a critical
component of this story. As an independent organization since 1994, LA CAN’s
mission statement “to help people dealing with poverty create and discover
opportunities, while serving as a vehicle to ensure they have voice, power and
opinion in the decisions that are directly affecting them” provides the foundation for
their ongoing efforts to “organize and empower community residents to work
collectively to change the relationships of power that affect our community.” While
Skid Row is the home to a plethora of social service organizations, LA CAN is a

208

unique venue for community organizing and leadership development in what has
been considered “an unorganizable area”. Their working philosophy: “I will work
with you, not for you” provides basis for LA CAN’s ‘resident driven’ organizing
around homelessness, health, housing, and civil rights and their growth from the
1999 original group of 25 residents to six full time staff and 100 core members.
Notably 95% of LA CAN’s general membership of around 500 are current or former
Skid Row residents.
LA CAN’s central role in the struggles of Skid Row makes it key to the
dissertation research and an ideal nest for observant participation as the foundation
for this research. It provided the venue to take the perspectives of neo-liberalism and
emancipatory socio-spatial politics and the historical precedent of urban policy, and
view them through the lens of the residents of Skid Row, with particular attention to
the struggles of policing and housing.
As addressed in Chapter 5. The LAPD: Uniformed Police with Police Power
Writ Large, Skid Row can be viewed a microcosm of socio-spatial justice and
injustice in the ongoing competition between residents and police. Skid Row, like
other parts of downtown Los Angeles was policed by both the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD and private security guards controlled by Business Improvement
Districts (BIDs), which acted as ‘ambassadors’ to tourists and upper-income

209

residents, but harassed and intimidated homeless individuals and residents through
illegal searches, detentions and ‘move-alongs’. The driving perspectives of the city of
Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the BID police are
chronicled and then are sharply contrasted with the alternative views of Skid Row
residents on the pernicious impact of the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI) on the nature
and impact of police actions. Records of arrests and citations, crime reporting, legal
actions, LA CAN community watch observations, resident testimony and surveys of
community attitudes all provide empirical evidence of the SCI impact lives and
experiences of the people of Skid Row and the struggle to have this expressed and
heard. This dissertation demonstrates how view from the ground contrasts strikingly
from the view from the top and document s the struggle of a politically-engaged
resident-driven counter to break through the indifference and disregard of the
prevailing control.
A similar argument is made in Chapter 6 The Housing Question which
provides a comparable evidence-based assessment of the struggle for affordable
housing in Skid Row, focusing on the grassroots mobilization in two cases against
and within urban housing policy since 1999. Forty years after the Kerner
Commission identified ‘inadequate housing’ as a “first level of intensity” grievance,
today, nearly one third of all persons within the United States live in physically

210

inadequate housing (Bratt et al. 2006). And yet, each case study of organized
campaign (including those that far exceeded expectations) has not yet begun to end
the house-less crisis; The first case is the CRA’s 2002 redevelopment plan which
explicitly called SRO conversion a priority. In particular, the CRA slated 3,400 SROs,
all within the “Historic Core” which includes Skid Row, for conversion into
condominiums. Through both direct and action, LA CAN and the Legal Aid
Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) successfully challenged the plan. The final court
settlement in Wiggins et al. v. CRA in April 2006, resulted in significant changes to
housing regulations and tenant rights as well as the establishment of the public
existence of the Skid Row community prior to redevelopment. The second case was
the creation of a Residential Hotel Preservation Ordinance. As is discussed in
Chapter 6, after the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance and the 2002 CRA
Redevelopment plan, the Los Angeles downtown’s historic core became a highly
speculative land grab. A temporary moratorium or Interim Control Ordinance (ICO)
on the conversion or demolition of SROs was passed in City Council 2006 in an effort
to halt the destruction of Skid Row’s housing of last resort. After two more years of
struggle and mobilization, the ICO was made permanent. These ordinances exempt
residential hotels from the Ellis Act, which allows property owners to evict tenants
under the pretense of going out of the rental business. By exempting Residential

211

Hotels, 19,000 units citywide and 9,000 units in downtown must permanently remain
SRO. The chapter documents the practices and strategies which slowed the SRO
conversion to maintain last resort housing for residents. The chapter chronicles the
experiences with three Skid Row Residential Hotels based on the actions of residents
and LA CAN through the implementation of the provisions of this Residential Hotel
Preservation Ordinance and legal actions to ensure these provisions were not
undermined in the interest of political and economic gain.
In the final analysis, then, this dissertation has sought to captures the complex
of processes and practices in the remarkably neglected downtown Los Angeles while
simultaneously engages in a theory building exercise that elaborates means of
thinking radical democracy spatially. Bringing together multiple theoretical and
empirical perspectives will enable the fullest account of the struggles not only of
downtown Los Angeles, but an intervention into the literatures on contesting state
enabled neoliberal urbanism and gentrification. Through an urban ethnography of
participatory observation, a practice based approach builds up from the concrete to
the theoretical. Working with one argument between both theoretical apparatus and
empirical arguments, I ultimately seek to perform conscientious scholarship that
avoids “yet another theoretical novelty that stands in for political analysis but is
actually only a luxurious evasion of politics” (Gilmore 2008, 35). In this manner, the

212

political work of theory through the poetics of academic inquiry might actively seek
to not only to interpret the world but to positively change it. Here, building up from
the abstract to the concrete, we continue in solidarity and support the perpetual and
collective process of enacting the city anew.

213

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Appendices

Los Angeles People’s Declaration on the Human Right to Housing
83

Whereas, the United States continues to bail-out banks and subsidize
corporations while many Americans struggle to survive;
Whereas, the United States commits excessive resources to military activities
at home and abroad, while failing to launch a comprehensive or effective war against
poverty;
Whereas, the City of Los Angeles is the second most populous city in the U.S,
with the third largest urban economy in the world;
Whereas, Los Angeles is the homeless capital of the nation, suffers from an
acute affordable housing crisis, and reflects a huge divide between living standards
for wealthy and poor residents;
Whereas, Los Angeles’ poor residents continue to bear the brunt of failed
housing policies that promote gentrification and lead to displacement and
homelessness, including the removal of public housing stock;

83
Created and developed in active conjunction with LA CAN’s active Housing and Civil
Rights committees as a specific action item for International Human Rights Day, December 10
th
.

231

Whereas, Los Angeles policy makers’ current solution to homelessness and
poverty is primarily criminalization, instead of preservation and expansion of decent,
safe, and affordable housing;
Whereas, these failed policies only exacerbate poverty and homelessness,
destroy communities, and manifest policy makers’ inability to ensure the right to
safe, decent and affordable housing for all Angelinos;
Whereas, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate
Housing recently visited the United States and Los Angeles and recommended, an
immediate moratorium on the demolition and disposition of public housing, ending
the criminalization of homelessness, and re-examining income thresholds so that
affordable housing is actually accessible;
Whereas, residents and workers of Los Angeles, standing in solidarity with
our allies across the world, proclaim that quality, affordable, healthy housing is a
human right.
We call upon ourselves and our government to include the following
principles in all policies and practices:
Preserve, improve and expand public housing as a public resource owned and
operated by the government;

232

Preserve all existing housing at affordable rents, including rent-stabilized,
subsidized, and other housing in order to prevent displacement;
Create “affordable housing” that is affordable to those most in need and end
the sole reliance on region-wide Area Median Income standards that don’t reflect the
reality of low-income neighborhoods;
End all criminalization of homelessness and poverty;
Create and enforce permanent protections for renters that prevent
displacement;
Ensure that all housing is safe and healthy;
Create and enforce mechanisms to improve the participation and influence of
affected tenants in any planning, decision-making, or policy-making processes; and
Ensure that housing is not a mechanism for profit but is rather a human right
and the foundation of communities.

233

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS OVERVIEW
84

What you should know if you are stopped by the police!

1. Ask the police: “Am I under arrest?” If not, then ask “Am I free to leave?” If yes,
you can walk away.

2. If you’re not under arrest, but you’re not free to go, then you are being detained.
Ask the officer, “Why am I being detained?” You can be detained up to 72 hours in
custody. At the end of the 72 hours, the District Attorney’s office must either file a
charge(s) against you or let you go.
.
3. If you’re being detained on the streets, the officers have a right to “spot check”
you for weapons, meaning they can” pat” you down in common areas like under
your arm pits, around the waist band, and around the ankles. This does not give
cops the right to stick their hands into your pockets or through your personal
property. Tell the police clearly, without physical resistance, that you do not consent
to a search. We recommend that people never consent to a voluntary search. Police
must have probable cause to search you or a search warrant; they cannot just stop
you and search you or your belongings. Ask for a watch commander or supervisor if
officers insist on illegal search or detention.

4. If the cops stop you, you’re required by law to show I.D. to prove you are who
you say you are. This means showing a federal, state, parole, or student I.D. card. If
you refuse to show your I.D. or you don’t have one, you could be taken to the station
and a want and warrant check will be conducted throughout the United States,
which takes up to 4 to 8 hours. Guess where you'll be sitting while the check is

84
Developed as part of LA CAN; Coauthored by Nicholas Dahmann

234

run?....you guessed it - in jail.

5. If the police come to your home and ask to enter, you do NOT have to allow them
to unless they show you a warrant signed by a judge.

6. Never make any sudden moves when the police stop you and keep your hands
where they are clearly visible, especially if you’re a black male and/or a low-income
downtown resident.

7. Don’t get into arguments, debates, or make any statements to Police without
getting legal advice. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court.
Remember, you have a 5th amendment right to remain silent. We recommend that
you always exercise that right until you can speak with a lawyer. This is true for any
suspected crime or “investigation” but especially if you're being charged with a
felony. This is how a lot of people make their biggest mistakes. They start talking,
thinking if they try to work with the police they will go easy on them or let them off.
The police are not there to help you in this situation. If you do make a statement, it
will limit what your lawyer can do to help you later. Again, we recommend that you
never let the police interview you without you having a lawyer present.

8. Never touch an officer. If you are arrested don’t resist, even though you may be
innocent. You could, and probably will, get an extra charge added on for assaulting
an officer and/or resisting arrest.
9. If you’re arrested, by law you have a right to make 1-3 calls within a reasonable
time after your arrest. A reasonable time means not intentionally delaying or
refusing you.

10. If you have any problems while in the police station, ask to speak with the watch
commander. He/she is directly in charge of custody.

11. Always get the name and badge number of all officers involved in any
interactions you have with Police. Special Order 13 says that officers must give you

235

their LAPD business card upon request, with their name and badge # on it and write
the reasons why they stopped you on the backside. Be sure the time and correct date
is on the card.

12. Get witnesses. Always write down the name, date, time and a brief witness
statement of all witnesses, document exactly what they can witness to, and include
their contact information.

13. If you’re injured as a result of coming into police contact, get the names and
contact information of every witness. Then immediately go see a doctor and get a
doctor’s written statement of exactly what kind of injuries you have. Always, always
take photos of your injuries.

14. If the cops stop you and write you a citation (ticket) for whatever offense, you
should sign the ticket. If you refuse to sign it you will be arrested. By signing the
ticket you’re only agreeing to come to court at a later date. If you receive a citation
for a misdemeanor, you should exercise your right to a public defender. Any ticket
for an infraction can be defended and likely dismissed in LA CAN’s Citation Defense
Program. Bring your ticket to LA CAN on Wednesday evenings at 6:00 pm.

15. If you feel you’ve been disrespected or your rights were violated by an officer,
you can file a police misconduct complaint against the officer. You can pick them up
and file them at any police station. However, LA CAN recommends that complaints
be filed directly to the Office of the Inspector General and we can assist people in
filing them.

16. You can also make a public comment against any officer during public comment
at the Police Commission meeting at Parker Center, every Tuesday morning.

17. Private security. BID security guards (Purple, Red, Yellow Shirts) are NOT
police officers. They CANNOT: 1) Ask for or demand your I.D.; 2) Search you or
your property OR detain you, unless they have placed you under citizen’s arrest (any
citizen can do this IF they directly observe you committing a felony); 3) Remove you

236

from public property (they CAN remove you from private property); 4) Photograph
you as a means of identifying you. Security guards are not police – they have the
exact same power as you do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LA CAN, 530 S.MAIN STREET, (213) 228-0024
Legal Clinics, Wednesdays at 6:00 pm
Downtown resident organizing meetings, 1
st
and 3
rd
Fridays at 6:00 pm

237

An External View
Exhibit A: UN Report Based Policy Recommendations for Los Angeles City
Council Implementation
85

1. Preserve, improve and expand public housing as a public resource owned
and operated by the government.
a. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Adequate
Housing recommends that, given the crisis of affordable housing, an
immediate moratorium is required on the demolition and disposition of public
housing until such time as one-for-one replacement housing is secured, and
the right to return is guaranteed to all residents. Housing should be made
available for displaced residents before any unit is demolished. (87)

b. Based on this recommendation and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Oppose the plans for the Housing Authority of the City of Los
Angeles to dispose of public housing in 2010. We urge all
policymakers to STOP the October 2010 applications to dispose of
three large public housing projects: Estrada Courts, 414 units; Pueblo
Del Rio, 660 units; and San Fernando Gardens, 448 units. This
represents a loss of almost 25% of Los Angeles's public housing, our
only permanently affordable housing stock. (FISCAL IMPACT:
There is no impact to the General Fund)
• Oppose the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s
(HUD) proposed Transformation of Rental Assistance, which would
transfer public housing into the Project–Based Section 8 program: a
time-limited, largely privately-owned housing program. (FISCAL
IMPACT: There is no impact to the General Fund)
• Create federal and local policies and programs that increase funding
for the effective operation and improvement of all public housing,
without removing public ownership or any tenant protections.

85
Citations note the paragraph number in Special Rapporteur's 2010 report to the UN
Human Rights Council . Access here:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/13session/A.HRC.13.20.Add.4_AEV.pdf

238

• Expand the federal public housing program to restore units lost over
the past two decades and restore public housing as a sufficient
contribution to realizing the human right to housing in Los Angeles
and the country.

2. Preserve all existing housing at affordable rents, including rent-stabilized,
subsidized, and other housing in order to prevent displacement;
a. The UN Special Rapporteur's report emphasizes the need for
maintaining affordability in the face of governmental cuts to low-income
housing assistance policies and programs (21). With many community facing
the displacement pressures of gentrification, the Rapporteur recommends
legislation to safeguard affordable housing in these areas (42). She also
acknowledges the Government’s efforts to maintain a safe environment within
subsidized housing developments but suggests that zero tolerance policies are
not an answer for achieving this aim and calls for the Government to commit
resources to determine the real effects of such policies on families, particularly
minority families, and reform these policies (101).

b. Based on this recommendation and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Amend the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance to remove the annual
minimum rent increase, which unreasonably allows for rent increases
that are not justified by the CPI, and prohibit the extra increase for
utilities that unjustly burdens the poorest Angelinos. (FISCAL
IMPACT: There is no impact to the General Fund)
• Abolish federal and local punitive rules for Section 8 recipients that
lead to displacement and prevent homeless individuals from being
housed. (FISCAL IMPACT: There is no impact to the General Fund)
• Pass a City Council resolution and actively work to change State
legislation to amend California’s Costa Hawkins Act to allow units at
least 20 years old to be included under the Rent Stabilization
Ordinance. (FISCAL IMPACT: There is
no impact to the General Fund)
• Enact a preservation ordinance with a no-net-loss policy that protects
existing housing from demolition, conversion, expiring use and
condominium conversion with addition mechanisms to ensures one-

239

for-one replacement for any lost units since 1995 based o7n
affordability.
• Coordinate the Sheriff and Police Departments to cease the enforcement
of lock outs, evictions and other practices like the 28-day shuffle that
force instability and homelessness.

3. Create “affordable housing” that is affordable to those most in need and
end the sole reliance on region-wide Area Median Income standards that
don’t reflect the reality of low-income neighborhoods
a. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Adequate
Housing recommends that: In some cases the geographic area used to define
the area median income should be re-examined, so that income threshold
criteria actually lead to access to affordable housing (89); and empty
foreclosed properties should be made available using incentives for the sale of
the property to non-profit organizations or community land trusts, in order to
increase the stock of affordable housing (93).

b. Based on this recommendation and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Enact a policy in Los Angeles that utilizes neighborhood-specific area
median incomes that is caped at the city-wide AMI when developing
affordable housing and rent levels. (FISCAL IMPACT: There is no
impact to the General Fund)
• Enact planning mechanisms to fulfill the obligations in the Housing
Element to build enough affordable housing to meet the need.
• Rehabilitate all vacant housing immediately and open it to residents
in need of housing.

4. End all criminalization of homelessness and poverty
a. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges that homeless people need
access to affordable housing; the lack of it is the main cause of homelessness.
Many cities that do not provide enough affordable housing and shelters are
resorting to the criminal justice system to punish people living on the streets.
Some of the measures adopted include prohibition of sleeping, camping,
eating, sitting, and/or begging in public spaces and include criminal penalties
for violation of these laws (56). She recommends develop constructive
alternatives to the criminalization of homelessness in full consultation with

240

members of civil society. When shelter is not available in the locality, homeless
persons should be allowed to shelter themselves in public areas (95).

b. Based on this recommendation and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Immediate cessation of all local “Safer Cities Initiatives”, especially
the longest-standing and most resource intensive program in
downtown Los Angeles.
(Not only BUDGET NEUTRAL but would eliminate cost)
/
• Implement Special Order 40 to stop LAPD’s assistance in the
deportation/criminalization of undocumented families and workers.
• Pass a City Council resolution initiating the Los Angeles Police
Commission to reinstate racial profiling as a category of complaint
and eliminate the racial and economic biases found in LAPD
practices. (FISCAL IMPACT: There is no impact to the General
Fund)

5. Create and enforce permanent protections for renters that prevent
displacement
a. The Special Rapporteur recommends that: Empty foreclosed
properties should be made available using incentives for the sale of the
property to non-profit organizations or community land trusts, in order to
increase the stock of affordable housing (93); and tenant protection legislation
should be further strengthened for renters of foreclosed properties (92).

b. Based on these recommendations and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Divest from banks that illegally displace tenants
(FISCAL IMPACT: There is no impact to the General Fund)
• Prosecute banks that violate local, state and federal ordinances
regarding tenant protections.

6. Ensure that all housing is safe and healthy
a. The link between housing and health was stressed to the Special
Rapporteur throughout her visit. Poor housing conditions expose residents –

241

especially children – to a health hazards that reduce life chances and
expectancy. Many residents with whom the Special Rapporteur spoke
reported asthma, attributed to mold from the poor by landlords of housing
units (37).

b. Based on these recommendations and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Prosecute landlords who expose tenants to unhealthy, unsafe
conditions that impact their physical and mental health.
• Create a program and funding for community inspectors’ team that
trains residents on the inspection process and also monitors the City’s
inspectors for quality control similar to the current REAP contractor
program, but for the SCEP program.
• Define and enforce a high standard for quality repairs, so as to end
superficial repairs that have led to detrimental health and safety
impacts on tenants.
• Modify LARSO to include bedbugs and structural problems that cause
mold and other asthma triggers as LAHD code enforcement violations.
This moves to ensures that enforcement of habitability standards are
under the purview of one regulatory agency moving beyond the
County’s inadequate Department of Public Health for enforcement.
• Expand the Primary Renovation Ordinance to all rental housing, and
ensure that the program has adequate resources to monitor renovations

7. Create and enforce mechanisms to improve the participation and influence
of affected tenants in any plannin7g, decision-making, or policy-making
processes
a. The Special Rapporteur recommends that: residents of public
housing should have direct, active and effective participation in the planning
and decision-making process affecting their access to housing. Residents should be
seen as essential partners working alongside the Government in transforming public
housing (105); and the Government should create mechanisms to improve the
participation of affected tenants in planning and decision-making processes.
Residents’ councils should be directly elected by residents and not appointed by
housing agencies (106).

242

b. Based on these recommendations and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Implement participatory planning polices that go beyond focus groups
that entail transparency and real decision-making authority for
community residents.
• Enact policies that give community residents voice and control over
land use decisions in their neighborhood. This entails public input
processes that reflect those directly impacted in the community beyond
neighborhood councils.
• Amend the policies for Public Notices to expand their distribution and
visibility as current practices deny access to decisions that directly
impact communities.
• Oppose the local disposition plans and TRA to preserve public housing
as a public entity. Ensure that any future decision making around
public housing includes resident participation.

8. Ensure that housing is not a mechanism for profit but is rather a human
right and the foundation of communities.
a. The Special Rapporteur documented that housing is not simply
about bricks and mortar, nor is it simply a financial asset. Housing includes a sense
of community, trust and bonds built between neighbors over time; the schools which
educate the children; and the businesses which support the local economy and
provide needed goods and services. Government policy has resulted in tearing apart
this important sense of community, removing a source of stability for subsidized
housing residents, and engendering a sense of mistrust of Government regard for
their interests (81).
b. Based on these recommendations and our own experiences, we
recommend:
• Enact anti-speculation regulations that limit the use of housing as a
commodity such as predatory buying or flipping as well as landlords
who divest and dump affordable buildings for profit.
• Prosecute landlords who illegally raise rents, harass, evict or otherwise
gouge tenants.
• Enact regulations that ensures “absentee landlords” can be easily
found and held accountable for their obligations.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Home to the largest extant Skid Row in the U.S., Los Angeles's downtown is also the last major American city to experience widespread gentrification of its core. Against prevailing accounts and assumptions held by academics, elected officials and urban policy experts, the Skid Row’s housed and house-less residents in downtown Los Angeles are not merely capable of self-determination but represent the cutting edge of contemporary urban political mobilization. Through variegated individual and collective practices, Skid Row residents are in a protracted struggle for basic survival and actively engaged in the ongoing material and discursive battle of the future of Los Angeles. ❧ From this perspective and practice of community organizing in Skid Row, this dissertation explores socio-spatial practices of resistance against the violences of contemporary settler colonialism and domestic counterinsurgency. The old, though extant, concept of police underpins my presentation of articulated community revolt against otherwise distinct practices of housing policy and the uniformed police. These issues are explored through the twined or dialectical general processes naturalized as ‘policing’ and ‘housing’ as they articulate in varied moments within the ongoing struggles against displacement by state-led gentrification. ❧ These analyses of urban development policy and its always contested articulation seek to provide new perspectives on possibilities for radical democratic practices within the restructuring of urban space. Ultimately, emphasis is placed on practices of resistance as they articulate anew traditions of international Black Radicalism and forge alternative urban futures through abolition democracy.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Dahmann, Nicholas M. (author)

Core Title Los Angeles I do mind dying: recent reflections with Jacques Rancière on urban revolution in Skid Row, 1965-2010

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Geography

Publication Date 04/27/2017

Defense Date 12/16/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Black radical tradition,community organizing,counterinsurgency,gentrification,Jacques,Los Angeles,Los Angeles Police Department,OAI-PMH Harvest,police power,Rancière,settler colonialism,Skid Row

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McKenzie, Roderick (committee chair), Agnew, John (committee member), Lamy, Steven (committee member)

Creator Email ndahmann@gmail.com,nicholas@nicholasdahmann.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-369803

Unique identifier UC11257698

Identifier etd-DahmannNic-5276.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-369803 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-DahmannNic-5276.pdf

Dmrecord 369803

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Dahmann, Nicholas M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA