Metropolitics

The Fight for Community Ownership in Los Angeles Chinatown via the LA Chinatown CLT

Amy Zhou — 2025-07-08T05:00:00Z

Community land trusts are one strategy to stem displacement due to real-estate speculation in Chinatowns across North America. Yet, as Amy Zhou demonstrates through her work with the LA Chinatown Community Land Trust, these efforts must address multiple challenges to realize the potential of community ownership.
Over the past few years, the community land trust (CLT) movement has held a significant amount of attention across North America, and particularly in a number of Chinatowns, including

- From the Field / community land trusts, Chinatown, displacement, real estate, property ownership, United States, community organizing, Los Angeles

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

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

Paving the Silk Road: Rethinking Ethnic Solidarity in Los Angeles' Korean Garment District

Angie Y. Chung & Sookhee Oh — 2018-06-19T05:00:00Z

In this piece on Koreans in Los Angeles' garment industry, sociologists Angie Chung and Sookhee Oh discuss the external factors that influence ethnic solidarity. In doing so, they treat as fluid and changing a category often taken for granted as stable and fixed.
In April 2017, the news broke that Forever 21, a fast-growing clothing retailer, was under federal investigation for using factory sweatshops to manufacture its trendy clothing lines. The company is owned by one of the most

- From the Field / Los Angeles, Koreatown, social networks, ethnic solidarity, Los Angeles Fashion District, clothing manufacture, textile industry, apparel industry

The Actually Existing Markets of Shrinking Cities

Joshua Akers — 2017-04-18T05:00:00Z

In a bid to halt urban decline, Michigan's state government sought to create incentives for the creation of urban homesteads by accelerating the tax-foreclosure process. But what happens when city and county administrations don't play ball—and what are their motivations for doing so? Joshua Akers examines the adverse effects of a market-centric public policy.
---- Series: Shrinking Cities In the late 1990s, the state of Michigan bet on markets and urban pioneers to reinvigorate its struggling

- From the Field / housing, Chicago, housing policy, Los Angeles, real estate, public policy, foreclosure, Detroit, evictions, Michigan, shrinking cities, urban decline, urban homesteading, housing markets, Flint, homestead

Immigrant Growth Machines: Metropolitan Reinvention in Los Angeles

Melody Chiong & Jan Lin — 2016-02-09T06:00:00Z

Building on Logan and Molotch's highly influential concept of the urban “growth machine,” Jan Lin and Melody Chiong propose the idea of the “immigrant growth machine” to describe the variegated forms of investment and development in Los Angeles. Fueled by transnational capital flows and tourism, these new conglomerations reveal the role of immigration and foreign investment in the growth of today's metropolis.
Korean and Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs, investors and political leaders are

- Essays / urban development, Los Angeles, growth machine, diaspora, Chinese diaspora, Korean Diaspora, Chinatown, Koreatown, smart growth

Clitoral Mass: A Women-of-Color Ride Through Los Angeles

Jennifer Candipan — 2015-06-02T05:00:00Z

Every year in the summer, a group of women, women of color, and women-identified riders cycle through the city of Los Angeles to reclaim space and visibility in a city that too often ignores them and their needs. Jennifer Candipan, a participant and researcher, describes and analyzes the reasons and effects of the 2014 Clitoral Mass ride.
On a mid-August Saturday, nearly 300 bicyclists descended upon Downtown Los Angeles's Grand Park to kick off Clitoral Mass 2014, an annual 33‑mile,

- From the Field / public space, gender, United States, Los Angeles, bicycles, Lefebvre, minorities, right to the city, cycling