Activity

Many of the tenants of Echo Park Lake were already connected to LA’s homeless services agency. They had done everything their caseworkers asked: collected documents, signed paperwork. They were told to survive outside and wait.46 But with no permanent housing available, they knew what was at the en…

THE GROUP’S FIRST action was a collective letter that announced the formation of their association and demanded a meeting with their landlord. The letter focused not just on the rent increases, but on the landlord’s attacks against the building’s communal life: “Our children used to be able to play…

But as we contest capitalist management of space, we contest and remake the capitalist state too. We insist that land use is not a mere technical or economic but a social and political problem, which means it is about how people get together to exercise power. This is a strategic orientation that p…

IF A TENANT is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then the tenant movement works to establish collective control. Our aim is not to eliminate tenancy by becoming owners ourselves—an impossible prospect whose promise is an engine for our competition and denigration. Our aim is to eliminat…

Political risks are more than strategic vision; they are acts of faith. “In biology, one learns about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly,” writes Mike Davis. A movement “does not evolve by incremental steps but requires…