Metropolitics

A Crisis of Habitation in LA's Last Remaining Wetland

Deike Peters & Sam Lutzker — 2025-03-18T06:00:00Z

As housing crises become increasingly entangled with environmental crises, the question of just outcomes requires different ways of thinking. In their exploration of the politics of Los Angeles' Ballona Wetlands, Deike Peters and Sam Lutzker suggest the concept of multispecies justice may offer a pathway for negotiating these conflicts.
The Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve lies just south of famous Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Its 600 acres (240 ha) are all that remains of the once mighty

- From the Field / environmental justice, environment, ecology, urban ecology, housing crisis, housing, housing justice, habitat, wetlands, multispecies justice, United States, California, Los Angeles

Can the Market Solve Los Angeles' Housing and Homelessness Crisis?

Katherine Smock — 2025-02-27T06:00:00Z

Policymakers in Los Angeles hope that market-based solutions will solve the city's housing crisis. Data from the first years of the city's planning streamlining program show that inviting investment won't improve conditions for low-income renters.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle The city of Los Angeles, like many cities across the US, is in dire need of much more affordable housing to alleviate and prevent homelessness. Despite the promise of alternative methods of creating

- Debates / United States, California, Los Angeles, homelessness, housing, housing crisis, housing markets, tenants

“There Is No Excused Absence in Prison”

Tanisha Cannon & Dylan O'Donoghue — 2024-07-19T05:00:00Z

More than 150 years after the passage of the 13th Amendment, the fight to abolish forced labor in the United States continues. In this interview, Dylan O'Donoghue talks with Tanisha Cannon, organizer and managing director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, about her work campaigning for a California state constitutional amendment that would abolish slavery in prisons.
In fall 2023, Dylan O'Donoghue, a PhD candidate at Rutgers University–Camden, conducted an interview with Dr.

- Interviews / prison, labor, forced labor, prison labor, United States, California, slavery

We Are From Nairobi (#panthershit): Black Power Spatial Imaginaries in Silicon Valley

Kimberley S. Johnson — 2023-10-17T05:00:00Z

East Palo Alto's Black, Latiné and Pacific Islander residents deploy #panthershit—a Black Power spatial imaginary as a means of resisting the gentrification and displacement triggered by Silicon Valley's tech industry, thereby reclaiming a “right to their city” based on a recognition of the deep roots of past political activism and organizing that emerged during the city's Black Power era.
---- Series: Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces Using the hashtag

- From the Field / Black Power, Black politics, Silicon Valley, tech sector, Big Tech, California, Northern California, United States, East Palo Alto

The House is Ours: How Moms 4 Housing Challenged the Private-Property Paradigm

Lauren Everett — 2020-10-06T05:00:00Z

In the midst of a global housing affordability crisis that has been heightened by the Covid‑19 pandemic, it is time to reconsider how the right to profit from property ownership is privileged in policy, funding, and ideology in the United States. Oakland-based Moms 4 Housing's bold direct action presented a concrete challenge to the status quo.
On November 18, 2019, in west Oakland, California, Dominique Walker and Sameerah Karim started moving their families into the vacant three-bedroom

- Essays / housing, affordable housing, community land trusts, property ownership, property, homeownership, private property, real estate, speculation, California, United States, Oakland

Reinventing Segregation in Northern California: An Interview with Alex Schafran

Alex Schafran & Darian Razdar — 2019-05-14T05:00:00Z

Darian Razdar interviews Alex Schafran about his new book Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics. They discuss a new form of segregation called “resegregation” and the roots of this manifestation of unequal geography that impacts poor and racial-minority residents in Northern California's peripheral cities.
Over half a century since the Civil Rights Era, cities and urban regions in the United States remain divided and rife with inequality. Alex Schafran's new

- Interviews / segregation, resegregation, housing, race, social class, inequalities, California, Bay Area, Northern California

Bare Mountaintops and Thirsty Cities: On California and its Snowpack

Sayd Randle — 2019-01-29T09:57:02Z

Figuring how to represent the oncoming effects of climate change is a common challenge faced by whistleblowers and policymakers attempting to alert populations. Sayd Randle shows how the state of California is trying to mobilize the monitoring of snow in the Sierra Nevada as a harbinger of a durable state of drought in the coastal cities.
“You're at the Phillips snow course for the April 1, 2015, measurement,” Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Survey program, told the

- From the Field / environment, United States, water, public policy, climate change, California, drought, snow, snowpack

Invisible Lines in the Sand: Bather Arrests in Early 20th-Century Los Angeles

Elsa Devienne & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-07-13T05:00:00Z

Can beaches reveal the tensions that run through society at a given moment in time? Here, Elsa Devienne shows how Californian beaches in the early 20th century crystallized tensions resulting from the gradual rejection of Victorian values and exposed, via the way people presented their bodies, the changes under way with regard to moral order and American society.
In the late 1910s, Los Angeles was the scene of a series of arrests of bathers and beachgoers. The individuals arrested, caught

- From the Field / gender, United States, Los Angeles, public order, tourism, order in public, women, beach, California, leisure, social order, moral order, clothing, bathing suit, seaside resort, resort town, Santa Monica