Recent challengeinequality_publications items

From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How are climate change and debt – whether sovereign, municipal or household – related under racial capitalism? When faced with a warming planet caused by centuries of racial capitalism, how are people organizing the necessary ideas and social movements to fight back? What are the alternatives and solutions to racial capitalism-driven climate change proposed both by movements on the ground, and by those in (or near) halls of power around the world, from multilateral institutions to national governments to research universities? This paper offers an accessible introduction to many of the large-scale transformative ideas out there, from green central banking to degrowth, from climate reparations to de-dollarization. In addition, based on interviews with Argentina’s Debt for Climate, Britain’s Don’t Pay UK, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Chile’s Ni Una Menos, and the South Africa Green Revolutionary Council, this paper shares tactics and strategies used by social movements around...

Very Large Expenditure, Very Little Care: Los Angeles's "CARE+" Homeless Services Program in Council District 11

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The City of Los Angeles states that the “primary mission” of the Comprehensive Cleaning and Rapid Engagement (CARE+) program is to “deliver services to the individuals experiencing homelessness within their service areas.” While CARE+ costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year, not even including law enforcement, what does this budget translate into on the ground? Conducted by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights and Venice Justice Committee, Very Large Expenditure, Very Little Care: Los Angeles’ “CARE+” Homeless Services Program in Council District 11 reports findings from repeat observation of CARE+ operations in Venice, a related survey of unhoused persons about displacement and outreach, and a review of Councilmember Traci Park’s communications about CARE+ and homeless encampments. The report finds that CARE+ employs a large number of City staff and equipment to displace and dispossess unhoused people, with little to no outreach for shelter or...

"Keep Moving": West LA Vehicle Residents Survey

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Keep Moving”: The West LA Vehicle Residents Survey reports findings from a face-to-face survey of 99 vehicle residents residing in West Los Angeles. Conducted by Venice Justice Committee organizers over a one year period beginning in early 2024, the survey asked questions about pathways to vehicle residency and resident demographics, experiences with governing authorities and social services, vehicle condition and mobility, and shelter/housing program experiences and preferences, among other related topics. The report finds that the policies employed by city and county authorities to resolve visible instances of vehicular homelessness often harm vehicle residents and don’t deliver on their promises. The vehicle dwelling is a personal safety net in the absence of a sufficient social safety net. But vehicle residents are forced into adopting mobility due to various forms of criminalization, with social services outreach both inadequate and inconsistent. While governments...

Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This endeavor of collective scholarship emerges from a Freedom School held at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in Summer 2024. Organized as part of the project, Housing the Third Reconstruction, the convening brought together movement and university-based scholars actively engaged in insurgent research and critical theorization as a part of, or as accompaniment to, freedom movements. Intended as inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory land and housing, Freedom School 2024 took up the following issues and questions: 1) What is the present historical conjuncture of global racial capitalism and the attendant political economy and ideology of land and real-estate?; 2) How are movements undertaking land struggle, dismantling police-property relations, and enacting housing and spatial justice?; 3) How do we learn from “beautiful experiments” (Hartman 2019) of reconstruction, rematriation, reparation, and decolonization that are or...

TENTS AND TENANTS: After Echo Park Lake

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Echo Park Lake encampment was an uprising. A settlement of tents in an iconic public park in the gentrified heart of Los Angeles, it offered a poor people’s radical solution to the housing crisis. From challenging sweeps to constructing an infrastructure of life, the Echo Park Lake encampment built an alternative world. In doing so, it became a threat to the policed-propertied order of Los Angeles, eventually facing eviction through a police invasion. Even so, the dreams and practices of the Echo Park Lake encampment could not be easily squashed, and they live on in the struggles of housed and unhoused tenants today. TENTS AND TENANTS charts the eras of organizing that unfolded at Echo Park Lake, uncovering not only the machinations of state power but also how poor people made the city their home. A public exhibition organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and displayed at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive of the Los Angeles Poverty Department,...

The Tenant Power Toolkit in 2023

Fri, 24 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This report summarizes the first eighteen months of the Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), an online legal mutual aid tool that helps any California tenant facing a legal eviction to file a legal answer with the court. Through this intervention, the TPT seeks first to keep tenants housed, but as a threshold onto de-individualizing tenancy through research-supported organizing. The TPT’s backend database provides unprecedented tenant-reported, real-time eviction information by zip code, landlord, tenant race/ethnicity and more. In an otherwise opaque data landscape of evictions, this research-organizing partnership aims to enable tenants to fight their evictions, use the data produced in that process to support ongoing and new local tenant organizing, while also building translocal tenant power at the scale that can contend with the consolidation of rental housing ownership. This report leverages the toolkit’s unique data to provide insights into the racialized eviction and rent debt...

(Des)ubicación: La Lucha por la Vivienda y la Comunidad Después de Echo Park Lake

Mon, 3 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Elaborado por el Colectivo de Investigación Después de Echo Park Lake, esta monografía analiza desplazamiento encabezado por el estado. Con un enfoque centrado en el desalojo violenta de la comunidad sin vivienda en Echo Park Lake, un parque publico en un barrio gentrificando de la ciudad cerca del centro, eso llama la atencion sobre cómo reclamos políticos de ubicaciónes de viviendas legitiman desubicación pero rara vez resulta en soluciones de la vivienda. A través de investigación etnográfica además de análisis de datos de la gestión de personas sin viviendas, eso expone la artimaña de la vivienda y llama la atención sobre un condición de dezplazabilidad definitiva por los pobres de la ciudad. Un hallazgo clave de la monografía es que en un tiempo de recursos de vivienda ampliados suscrito por fondos federales de emergencia y ayuda económica, tiene un inversión perversa de fondos públicos para la criminalización de pobreza y contención carcelaria de los personas sin...

(Dis)Placement: The Fight for Housing and Community After Echo Park Lake

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authored by the After Echo Park Lake research collective, this monograph analyzes processes of state-led displacement in Los Angeles. With a focus on the violent eviction of the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake, a public park in a gentrifying neighborhood of the city close to downtown, it draws attention to how political claims of housing placements legitimize such displacement but rarely result in housing outcomes. Through ethnographic research as well as analysis of homeless management data, it exposes this ruse of housing and draws attention to a condition of permanent displaceability for the city’s poor. A key finding of the monograph is that at a time of expanded housing resources underwritten by federal and state emergency and economic relief funds, there is a perverse investment of public funds in the criminalization of poverty and in the carceral containment of the unhoused. In sharp contrast to such carcerality are the infrastructures of community envisioned...

We Do Not Forget: Stolen Lives of LA’s Unhoused During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Wed, 8 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This report, undertaken by the After Echo Park Lake research collective, was homework assigned by unhoused comrades, especially those who are part of UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing. While the stark reality of unhoused deaths has long been a matter of concern, the COVID-19 pandemic brought surprising new challenges. As the report shows, in addition to deaths on the street, there were also deaths in hotels and motels, including in the emergency housing program, Project Roomkey. A large proportion of hotel/motel deaths are attributed by the coroner to drug and alcohol overdoses, a finding in keeping with general trends in unhoused deaths. As the report argues, it is crucially important to understand such deaths as evidence of the dislocation and trauma caused by housing insecurity and displacement as well as by carceral isolation in shelter and emergency housing programs. Drawing on the organizing by UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, the report...

Who Profits from Crisis? Housing Grabs in Time of Recovery

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In Los Angeles, and across the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has expanded and exposed social and economic inequalities. It has also become starkly apparent that such inequalities are structured through racialized risk, the disproportionate and systematic exposure of working-class communities of color to unemployment, unsafe jobs, eviction, homelessness, displacement, and wealth loss. In this research brief, we draw attention to how crisis serves as the opportunity for housing grabs, by which we mean the unregulated acquisition of residential property by powerful corporate actors. With a focus on Los Angeles, we show how the Great Recession set the stage for a significant expansion of the corporate control of residential property in working-class communities of color and argue that there will be a similar capitalization of distress in such communities over the next few years. Dispensing of the myth of “mom and pop landlords,” we provide the first robust analysis of the different...

Metodologías para la justicia de la vivienda: Guia de recursos

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Esta Guía de Recursos es el resultado de un Instituto de Verano sobre Metodologías para la Justicia en la Vivienda convocado por el Instituto sobre Desigualdad y Democracia de UCLA Luskin como parte de la Red de Justicia en la Vivienda en Ciudades Desiguales, que es apoyada por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias (BCS 1758774). Celebrado en Los Ángeles en agosto de 2019, el Instituto de Verano reunió a participantes de ciudades de todo el mundo. Al igual que el alcance y el propósito general de la Red de Justicia en las Ciudades Desiguales, creó un terreno compartido de para estudiosos del movimiento y académicos de universidades. Con una insatisfacción a los métodos canónicos que se utilizan en los estudios sobre la vivienda y guiado por los movimientos de justicia de la vivienda que son comunidades de investigación activa, el Instituto de verano se basó en la afirmación de que la metodología es política. La metodología se basa en argumentos sobre el mundo e implica relaciones...

For the Crisis Yet to Come: Temporary Settlements in the Era of Evictions

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For the Crisis Yet to Come: Temporary Settlements in the Era of Evictions is the final report in a three-part series on housing justice and evictions during COVID-19, prepared and published by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. In keeping with guidance from unhoused people, legal advocates, and community-based researchers, this report strongly advises governments to sanction existing self-organized communities of unhoused people and maintain sanitation stations on-site. Additionally, this report cautiously recommends that area governments establish sanctioned and serviced temporary settlements, where tents and tiny structures can offer private, socially distanced forms of shelter to unhoused people. These recommendations are made with deep reservations, and with clear stipulations: settlements such as these should only be implemented alongside other, better measures; their existence does not justify sweeps of existing self-organized encampments; residence...

Hotel California: Housing the Crisis

Thu, 9 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles is on the cusp of a surge in evictions and homelessness, with thousands of households impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic likely to lose their housing. They will join the many thousands of Angelenos who are already unhoused in what is likely to be one of the largest mass displacements to unfold in the region. Black and Brown communities will bear the brunt of the crisis. Where will the currently unhoused and the newly unhoused go? Given the political failure to enact the tenant protections that would keep people in their homes, what are the plans for housing provision that must be put into place, without further ado, in order to meet this crisis? This report, the second publication in our Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19 series, answers these pressing questions by laying out a comprehensive framework for the conversion of hospitality properties into housing through the large-scale public acquisition of tourist hotels and motels. We insist on...

Teach.Organize.Resist.

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In November 2016, in the wake of a presidential election in the United States that ratified various forms of exclusion, including white nationalism, the Institute expanded its mission to build power to challenge state-sponsored violence against targeted bodies and communities. In particular we became concerned with the role of the university on the front-lines of resistance against Trumpism.

With this in mind, the Institute issued a call, Teach.Organize.Resist. on the occasion of the presidential inauguration. January 18th, or #J18, became a day of education and protest at various universities and colleges in the United States and beyond.

Through lectures, assemblies, musical performance, and artistic practice, #J18 was a collective insistence that places of teaching and learning not bear silent witnesses to oppression and hate. We share this curation of #J18 activities to commemorate the project of Teach.Organize.Resist. The collection includes...

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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

UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles

Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles was a hotspot of growing homelessness and severe housing insecurity for renter households. A stark manifestation of race and class inequality, this crisis is now set to get much worse. This UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy report, UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles, authored by Gary Blasi, Professor Emeritus at UCLA Law, projects a surge in evictions and homelessness that will follow the lifting of COVID-19 emergency orders. As argued in the report, and as repeatedly noted by community organizations and legal and policy advocates, such devastation could have been avoided through robust tenant protections, rent relief, and eviction moratoria at local, state, and federal levels of government. The first publication in our Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19 series, the report foregrounds the urgency of organizing and pressing public officials at all levels...

Methodologies for Housing Justice Resource Guide

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This Resource Guide is the outcome of a Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice convened by the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin as part of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774). Held in Los Angeles in August 2019, the Summer Institute brought together participants from cities around the world. As is the case with the overall scope and purpose of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network, it created a shared terrain of scholarship for movement-based and university-based scholars. Dissatisfied with the canonical methods that are in use in housing studies and guided by housing justice movements that are active research communities, the Summer Institute was premised on the assertion that methodology is political. Methodology is rooted in arguments about the world and involves relations of power and knowledge. The method itself – be it countermapping or people’s diaries...

Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2017, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin in partnership with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago convened a symposium on the theme, “Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories.” A part of the national Race and Capitalism project led by Michael Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, the symposium sought to highlight how the study of racial capitalism in the United States must be situated in the long history of global systems of colonialism, imperialism, and development. With this in mind, the program was organized around four key themes: diasporas of racial capitalism; the land question; imperialism and its limits; race, capitalism, and settler-colonialism. Bringing together scholars from many different institutions, the symposium was also a space for shared work across different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities....

Black, Brown, and Powerful: Freedom Dreams in Unequal Cities

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In April 2018, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy convened scholars, activists, policy advocates, community residents, and nonprofit workers to share and discuss research and action pertaining to processes of inequality in Los Angeles. We sought to shed light on the entangled structures of oppression, including urban displacement, housing precarity, racialized policing, criminal justice debt, forced labor, and the mass supervision and control of youth. Through keynote talks, group dialogue, and workshops, we analyzed how in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, black and brown communities face multiple forms of banishment and exploitation ranging from the criminalization of poverty to institutionalized theft.

The question of racial banishment has been an important one for the Institute since its inauguration two years ago. This year though, amidst the troubled times of Trumpism, we wanted to shift our focus from banishment to freedom. In the reports that follow, you will...

The Power of Debt: Identity and Collective Action in the Age of Finance

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Debt Collective is organized around the possibility for radical action within and against finance capitalism. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis it was often hard to understand how finance intersected with the everyday lives of ordinary—and especially, poor—people. But in the years since, it has become increasingly clear that mass indebtedness—from the mortgage crisis to student debt, criminal “justice” fines and fees to municipal austerity—is a direct effect of the conflict between debt payments generating value as securitized investments (mortgage backed securities, municipal bond offerings) vs. their role in providing shelter, food, and the ability to merely get by. In the age of finance, debt has become an immersive, systemic problem; but it is one that, in its ubiquity, may hold the seeds of its own solutions. As oil tycoon JP Getty famously quipped: “If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” Student...