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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 and Archive of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, it is intended to be the practice of a collective future.

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 by unhoused organizers, including that which was built and sustained at Echo Park Lake.

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 viviendas. En marcado contraste con eso carceralidad están infraestructuras comunitarias imaginadas por los organizadores sin viviendas, incluye eso construyó y sostuvo en Echo Park Lake.

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 amplifies the demand for unconditional and humane permanent housing.

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 types of corporate landlords active in Los Angeles and the varied strategies of profit-making that they deploy in wealth accumulation.

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 immediate access to housing without conditions and with the guarantees of habitability and tenant rights. In addition, we argue for the conversion of such hotels and motels into social housing. In Los Angeles, publicly subsidized hotel development has mediated an extractive relationship between capital and community. It is time to redirect public resources and public purpose tools such as eminent domain for housing, especially in Black and Brown communities where public investment has primarily taken the form of policing and where the devastation of impending evictions will be most acutely felt.