Throughout the 2010s, in the Los Angeles County high desert suburbs of Antelope Valley, predominantly Black housing voucher tenants were under siege. This is not hyperbole. As Rahim Kurwa’s excellent new book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing details, the city governments of Palmdale and Lancaster, in partnership with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Housing Authority, launched a multipronged attack on housing voucher tenants, many of whom had fled to the Antelope Valley from Los Angeles in search of more affordable housing. While data sharing across these agencies facilitated the targeting of voucher tenants for inspections, city officials also actively encouraged private citizens to spy on and police voucher tenants, aiding in the city’s work of racialized removal. In this “synthesis between the mob and the state,” as Kurwa puts it, private complaints about voucher tenants in turn triggered and “justified” violent home raids, where city staffers, Housing Authority representatives, and sheriff’s deputies conducted inspections of voucher tenants’ homes that were both traumatizing and transparently aimed at finding a pretense for eviction.
In telling the story of the Antelope Valley’s racialized and gendered assault on voucher tenants, who were primarily Black women, Kurwa offers a clarifying analysis of how policing intertwines with and fuels housing inequality. Indeed, in deputizing private citizens to do the work of policing Black voucher tenants, Kurwa details how Palmdale and Lancaster achieved their goal of racial segregation while maintaining the appearance of race-neutrality, thereby evading technical violation of fair housing laws. Kurwa thus sharpens our understanding of the officially antiracist racial state’s political architecture, unspooling how it sustains and entrenches racial inequality amid shifting political and economic developments. In the process, he offers a generative theory of policing as a form of property, a little-known overview of the Antelope Valley’s history of racial integration and white resistance, a spatial analysis of the Antelope Valley as a “safety valve” for Los Angeles, and much more.
I spoke with Kurwa about how he came to his research, what it was like conducting his fieldwork, and the book’s core contributions—both to academic scholarship on policing and housing and to the broader movement for “abolitionist housing justice.”
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Charlotte Rosen (CR): Having spent some time in the nearby and similarly situated Central Valley, I’ve long thought that the political economy of California’s rural/suburban regions deserve far more scholarly attention. How did you find your way to researching the criminalization of voucher tenants in the Antelope Valley?
Rahim Kurwa (RK): Like so many students, lawyers, and organizers around Los Angeles, my work traces back to Gary Blasi, who has been the leading light of Los Angeles’s housing justice movement for decades. Gary had been hearing about increased evictions of Section 8 voucher tenants in the Antelope Valley. The valley is about 60 to 70 miles north of Los Angeles, over the Angeles National Forest and the last part of the LA County before you enter the Central Valley. And the voucher program is the largest rental assistance program in the country, a successor of sorts to traditional public housing. Gary asked me to produce some data to help evaluate whether these evictions were disproportionate to the valley’s population. As it became clear that there was a concerted local effort to evict these tenants, Gary began working towards litigation, collecting testimonies and evidence, and I tagged along to some of his listening sessions in the valley.
On one hand, like you said, there’s so much less scholarly attention to California’s rural and suburban areas. And on the other hand, the mainstream academic and policy literature on vouchers painted a very positive story of good vouchers replacing bad public housing. Because the voucher program tends to disperse people out of cities, the lack of attention to the periphery meant that it was easy to assume that the voucher program was going well – tenants were essentially out of sight and out of mind, meaning that to really understand what’s happening with the program, you had to look at both the big cities and the places surrounding them, because the two are mutually constitutive of each other. And when you look closer, the rosy picture turns out not to be so.
For my part, I was angered by the gap between the academic literature and what I was learning about tenant experiences. I believed that by documenting these experiences, I could help dispel some of the unquestioned faith that had been placed in vouchers, and neoliberal housing policy more generally.
CR: One of the grounding ideas that structures your book is this idea that Antelope Valley acts as a “safety valve” for Los Angeles, meaning that the region has historically served as a kind of “spatial fix” for the crises of production and people in Los Angeles. The periphery’s absorption of those the city renders surplus is, of course, a racialized process. Your research focuses on the most recent manifestation of this dynamic: as Los Angeles gentrified, globalized, and generally restructured its economy in the late 20th century, primarily Black and working-class communities were pushed to the Antelope Valley in search of more affordable housing. Once there, of course, they found a white populace eager to criminalize and terrorize them through the forms of participatory policing you outline in the book. I’m curious what the concept of the
“safety valve” allows us to understand about the nature of racial capitalism in the metropolitan US and beyond, and how your book generally seeks to sharpen our understanding of the relationship between space and political economy?
RK: Harvey’s notion of the spatial fix refers to the way that capital can resolve a crisis of overproduction using space as a solution. But what happens when one region serves as the site of a spatial fix over and over again, when the spatial fix almost comes to define a place? I think that’s what happened in the Antelope Valley, and why I’ve come to think of it as LA’s safety valve. You can see these spatial fixes recurring throughout the 20th century, from its role in absorbing Cold War military aerospace production, to absorbing people pushed out of the urban core at the end of the 20th century, to today, as the valley’s vast desert becomes the place that solves the region’s need but lack of space for things like distribution centers for Amazon and solar farms for clean energy.
I think a few things come along with this safety valve relationship between LA and the AV. First, the valley has become causal to Los Angeles, because by absorbing the consequences of the core’s deeply unequal economy, it allows those unsustainable practices to persist. For example, businesses can keep under-paying LA workers if a place like the valley exists to house them cheaply.
Second, the valley has come to see its economic future as hinging on its attractiveness to Los Angeles rather than any more organic or independent economic strategy. This imperative justifies all kinds of internal repression. The region justified its efforts to expel or subordinate its Black tenants to maintain the appearance of a prosperous white suburb, so that wealthy Angelenos would move there. It’s a total misinterpretation of the valley’s past wealth, which was derived entirely from federal military spending, not from its racial exclusivity. But it also forestalls a really honest evaluation of what the valley’s economy could or should be.
And third, there’s no guarantee that these spatial fixes actually do anything for the vast majority of people in the valley. Many of the new economies relocating to the valley, like solar and logistics, either employ very few people locally, or do so in extremely exploitative ways (this isn’t particularly unique, Walter Johnson points out that Ferguson, Missouri was home to a Fortune 500 company, Emerson Electric, for decades, but derived little economic benefit from it). All the internal repression designed to make the valley look attractive to capital has not amounted to much.
The last thing I’d add here is in response to your question about racial capitalism. When you look at Los Angeles’s development in the early 20th century, it isn’t explainable as either entirely racial or entirely capitalist. What you have instead is a pattern of development explained by the mutually constitutive nature of racism and capitalism. The widespread use of racially restrictive covenants prevented Black access to housing through much of the region, and that in turn helped empower economic exploitation of Black tenants confined to the South Central corridor. Under these conditions, movement to the valley starts to look attractive, and this helps explain the emergence of the all-Black town of Sun Village in the Antelope Valley during the early post-war era.
CR: An invaluable insight from this book is the way you trace the late-twentieth century “synthesis between the mob and the state” or the merger between private, non-state forms of white supremacist organizing and state institutions like the police. In the Antelope Valley, you detail how white supremacist and Christian nationalist organizations that cropped up in reaction to the civil rights movement eventually buckled under the new legal regime of official anti-racism. But rather than experiencing total defeat, the region’s civilian arm of white power simply fused with technically deracinated but practically racist functioning of police and local government agencies. Through their active participation in policing their Black neighbors, Antelope Valley’s white residents reasserted the region’s racial apartheid in a way that was technically licit and above board, but that achieved the white supremacist vision of racial segregation and Black criminalization. As you succinctly write: “policing restored the right to discriminate that was so diminished by the Fair Housing Act.” This is an enormously generative intervention, further clarifying how white residents and local governments utilized the facially race-neutral category of “crime” to evade civil rights laws and naturalize racial hierarchies. Can you share how your specific study of Antelope Valley’s voucher tenant policing programs provided the scaffolding for intervention? And what does this analytic open up not only for the history of housing, but for understanding the operation and evolution of the U.S. racial state more broadly?
RK: Thank you, that’s really generous of you to say, and I agree that the synthesis of state and mob is important to recognize not just in the valley and in the case of housing, but all around the country and across a variety of forms of social life. For example, Texas’s SB 6 anti-abortion bill and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill both contained provisions that allowed private citizens to file suits enforcing anti-abortion law or censorship of school texts. And over the past year and a half, federal agencies have ramped up their efforts to get citizens to report on their neighbors for possible deportation.
But to dig into the Antelope Valley example, the use of policing to evict Black voucher tenants was the product of a series of experiments in reinventing segregation around the constraints of fair housing law. Lancaster tried to split the Antelope Valley from the county in order to make a new housing authority that would be able to stop accepting tenants from LA. It tried requiring property owners to obtain rental housing business licenses and then putting a moratorium on new licenses. It tried to force Section 8 tenants to attend presentations where they would be scared away from the valley. It even tried passing a new law that would allow the city to revoke a family’s Section 8 voucher if a child was truant from school (not unlike Attorney General Kamala Harris’s truancy punishment scheme during the same time period). None of this worked.
As these tactics floundered, Lancaster officials found that policing offered the most capacious way to achieve segregationist goals without legal constraint. Alongside its sister city Palmdale, it created a policing partnership whereby cities in the valley passed crime-free and nuisance housing ordinances that opened up new penalties on renters and property owners. The cities hired investigators and paired them with Sheriff’s deputies provided by the county and lists of names of voucher tenants provided by the housing authority. And it paired this policing capacity with a delegated system of surveillance and complaint. The public was encouraged by city leaders and a rabidly anti-Section 8 media to watch their neighbors and file complaints through a fraud hotline. When they called in complaints, the city dispatched its investigators and sheriff’s deputies to look for ways to evict the tenant in question or terminate their benefits.
For the city, the partnership was advantageous because it moved the origin of racial discrimination down from public officials to the public itself. Everyone knew that people were racially profiling their Black neighbors, but the city could claim to be racially neutral since it equally enforced every complaint made by the public. Had the city simply evicted hundreds of Black tenants en masse from the valley, it would have been easier to see how explicitly racist and unconstitutional that would have been. But by routing this through the public and shrouding the issue in rhetorics of fraud or crime, they were able to get away with it for several years. On the other hand, for private homeowners and renters, the partnership gave them a sense of control and power over their neighborhoods. Even when they couldn’t evict their neighbors, they could wield the power of policing over them.
One thing this highlights about the racial state is how important everyday people are to maintaining it. Despite its contemporary novelty, the program actually reflects a longstanding dynamic in American racial governance. K-Sue Park has argued that the racial state has always operated through delegated violence, dating back to the earliest periods of theft of native land. Doing this at scale required the participation of citizens, and in so doing, has transformed citizenship into something which is bound up with racial violence to maintain unequal property relationships.
CR: I was also very struck by your argument that policing is a form of property. You develop this analysis based on the ways that Antelope Valley residents used their ability to sic the police on voucher tenants as a means of asserting their status and controlling the character of their neighborhood–acts which you interpret as markers of property ownership. What does the notion of policing as property open up for us, both intellectually (meaning, perhaps, within the academic literature) and politically (meaning for social movements)?
RK: In the valley and more broadly around the country, we often see people profess liberal or at least non-racist commitments but simultaneously participate in forms of surveillance and policing in their neighborhoods that are obviously quite racist. I think the social and psychological rewards attached to participation in policing can help explain the contradiction and illuminate the reasons for people’s deep attachments to participation in policing. That type of analysis takes us to W.E.B. Du Bois and Cheryl Harris.
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois wrote of the incentives that peeled white southerners away from interracial solidarity as Reconstruction came apart in the aftermath of the Civil War. He noted that whites benefited from a series of social advantages that provided not strictly material benefits but rather a social and psychological wage associated with their racial status.
Harris comes back to this idea and builds on it by thinking of whiteness not in terms of wages, but rather as property. She notes that legal theorists assess that something might be your property if it gives you status, if you can use it, if you can exclude others from using it, or if you can give it away or sell it. Beginning with the story of how her grandmother “stole” whiteness by passing as white to obtain a retail job, Harris showed how whiteness fit each of these property markers. And from this Harris says that we have ended up in a dynamic in which property rights are allocated or interpreted along racial lines.
You can say the same about policing. Neighbors gained social status through the power to police others, they used that policing quite instrumentally to evict neighbors and excluded Black tenants from using it, and they delegated their power to others, like neighborhood watch leaders. People I talked to felt good because they were engaged in policing, it assuaged their sense of precarity, and it even remade sociality to some degree as neighbors connected with each other through the shared work of surveillance and policing. Policing had become a way to reassert a status hierarchy that had been threatened over the past decades of social change.
And over time, the valley’s public policy decisions oriented themselves entirely not just through policing and the logics of security, but according to the interests of that segment of people who engaged in the policing of their communities.
And so, bringing it back to Harris and Du Bois, policing is about more than just the superficial elements of crime rates and policy choices. Policing has a series of non-material returns attached to it, that offer rewards to those who participate in surveilling and policing their neighbors. When we think of who can participate in that policing and who can only be subject to it, or whose homes are platforms from which to engage in surveillance and policing and whose homes are permeated by surveillance and subject to policing, we can see that policing is acting like a gradient of personhood in our society.
How this might inform political struggle is maybe two-fold. First, we have to remain aware of the power of this kind of delegated policing to deconstruct a polity by corroding its shared interests. And fighting that expansion of policing includes advancing an alternative vision of society that resurfaces those shared interests and puts them above the corrosive vision of society presented by carceral projects. That is what many activists in the valley aspired to, even though their movement couldn’t get all the way there.
CR: The levels of state- and state-sanctioned cruelty that Antelope Valley’s predominantly Black women voucher tenants faced is staggering. Government agents show up with armed law enforcement to inspect and raid their homes, searching for any violation they can use to evict them; Housing Authority staffers drive city-marked patrol cars to threateningly surveil their homes, sometimes for weeks on end; neighbors call in false reports of disturbances or complaints to encourage the state to deem voucher tenants nuisances requiring eviction–the disturbing details are endless. Your inclusion of extensive quotes from the tenants you interviewed really gives a devastating texture to the ways this regime of surveillance and criminalization harmed voucher tenants’ bodies and minds. The state and their neighbor’s campaigns literally plagued them with stress, robbed them of sleep, and barred them from experiencing fundamental features of human existence – the ability to have a lover stay over, to open one’s home to someone experiencing financial distress or coming home from prison, and to simply enjoy the quiet contentment of privacy and safety that having a roof over one’s head is supposed to provide. For the predominantly Black women voucher tenants, as you evocatively write, their entire lives were “turned into eviction liabilities.” Can you share more about what it was like to interview these women, and how your work is in conversation with a vast literature on the gendered and racialized criminalization of Black women?
RK: A large majority of Section 8 tenants in the Antelope Valley are Black and the majority of Section 8 households are headed by women. So, when I tabled outside the Housing Authority office in Palmdale, most people I encountered were Black women. My original plan was to sign up people for interviews that I would conduct by phone so that people could speak from the privacy of their homes. That happened often enough, but sometimes people just needed to talk right then and there. Even though they might have their kids with them or might be on their way back to work or in the middle of a busy day. People very much felt that their experiences were flying under the radar, that they were being smeared by the local press.
What I often heard from people was a community-level experience. The tenants I spoke to for the most part hadn’t been evicted (or else they wouldn’t be at the Housing Authority in the first place). But when I spoke to them, they would tell me about the repression they were experiencing, their fears for their homes and families, and their strategies for remaining housed. And they’d often share a past instance in which the city or housing authority almost evicted them, or the story of someone they knew who had been evicted.
The thing at the center of all this was the home raid, where city investigators, Sheriff’s deputies, and housing authority staff would conduct mass searches of a tenant’s home, looking for any pretense to evict someone. The home raid didn’t have to happen to everyone in order to affect everyone. And that means that the raid is not a singular event but a way to govern people. And you can see this technique, the home raid, echoing back throughout much of U.S. history. Before the voucher program, these were known as “midnight raids” in public housing. Before public housing, they were known as the “jump raids” in New York City tenements. In other words, the home raid has been a fulcrum of urban governance, and one that has disproportionately been used to target Black women, from Eleanor Bumpers to Breonna Taylor to Sonya Massey.
In that way, what happened in the valley can be situated amongst that vast literature on the gendered and racialized criminalization of Black women that you mentioned. I’ll briefly give three examples. First, I Saw Death Coming, in which Kidada Williams documents the night riders, who terrorized Black homes during Jim Crow. Second, the jump raids of early 1900s New York are documented by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Third, the case of Eleanor Bumpers is the subject of LaShawn Harris’s recent book, Tell Her Story. In each of these texts, you see the repetition of state or state-sanctioned violence targeted at the home and at Black families and Black women in particular.
CR: Your research required you to speak with a number of white Antelope Valley residents and homeowners dedicated to deploying the power of the state to police their voucher-holding neighbors. They are often flagrantly racist and, well, scary. One individual in Lancaster, whom you call Jim, basically made it his full-time job to prowl his neighborhood, identify homes rented to Section 8, and discern pathways for reporting them to the city, who, in partnership with the Housing Authority and Sheriff’s department, provided robust enforcement mechanisms for policing voucher tenants. What was it like finding and interviewing these people, and generally trying to do research in an area where the KKK and neo-Nazis are known fixtures? Did things ever get tense or feel unsafe?
RK: On weekends in the summer, I’d go door to door in neighborhoods with high rates of voucher tenancy to interview homeowners (and private market renters) about the voucher program. Sometimes people were hostile, but usually it was in the process of declining the interview, so no harm no foul. Other times, people would agree to talk but they’d have their guard up. They would turn the tables on me, asking, where are you from? Are you a Muslim? and so on. And there were a few times that I felt like I had lost control of my circumstances. Being in Jim’s house was one of those. Another resident told me he had been watching me canvass the block (this was before Ring cameras were ubiquitous). And once, after I interviewed a woman, her partner chased me down in his car. I was spooked until he said he wanted to do the interview as well.
But for the most part, the people who did the interview were perfectly pleasant even as they described their quite extreme and hostile views and ideas. I think that extremely anti-voucher views were basically a form of common sense there at the time, so people would say horrible things about voucher tenants with all the sense of controversy as if they were telling me the weather. And of course, some folks saw through the governing anti-Section 8 narrative and it was a pleasure to hear how they articulated their analyses.
CR: As you detail at length, voucher tenants and community allies did successfully organize against Palmdale and Lancaster’s voucher policing programs. But their gains, though historic and meaningful, were ultimately limited, in part due to what you term the “counter-revolution of bureaucracy” (a brilliant turn of phrase I will be citing) and – notably – the complicity of academics. Can you share a bit about The Community Action League’s struggle, how the state responded, and what the ultimately vexed outcome can teach us about continued efforts to defeat the everyday racial fascism that rules local communities not just in Antelope Valley, but across the nation?
RK: Thanks for asking about this, I really want people to know about this struggle. I think the first thing to say about it is that there is such a thicket of laws that enable the policing of housing in cities all across the country. Crime free housing ordinances and nuisance housing ordinances are probably the most common, the way they are enforced is entirely racialized, and there have been at least half a dozen cases around the country in the past decade where a little bit of digging by local activists unearths totally illegal enforcement practices by cities that tenants have challenged in courts and often won.
In the Antelope Valley, this baseline of crime free and nuisance ordinances was paired with an explicit program of targeting voucher tenants. In order to generate a mass surveillance and eviction program, the cities folded other government agencies and the public into this work.
Tenants affected by this began speaking out, and their protests and organizing reached housing lawyers in LA and together they put together a sort of inside outside strategy of public protest and litigation. Their strategy is one that I think is worth explaining.
The policing program in the Antelope Valley worked through creating a partnership between cities, county agencies, the public, and so on. But all these ties also meant that each connection was also a vulnerability. And the movement was very successful in breaking those ties. The Housing Authority’s lawyers realized it was not legal to hand over tenant names as target lists to cities. The County government caved to public protest and stopped funding Sheriff’s deputies to participate in home raids. The litigation resulted in one city settling quickly, leaving the other to fight on its own. The movement essentially dismantled this policing apparatus one connection at a time. That has been the lasting success of the movement.
The kind of stuff that was being unearthed in the valley was bad enough to reach the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. They started their own investigation, finding that the LA Sheriff’s Department had been engaged in widespread violations of civil rights in the Antelope Valley. It reached a wide-ranging settlement agreement with the agency that mandated hundreds of reforms to policies around stops, searches, use of force, and more.
But these reforms have largely been stalled, as the department has dragged its feet for a decade, and the federal government has abandoned its commitment to civil rights and stopped using the tool of DOJ settlements to prompt reform. Year in and year out, the settlement monitor would report basically no progress, and there was no realistic mechanism to make anything happen. And I should mention, in the crucial early years of the settlement, some academics contracted to evaluate it basically covered up this lack of progress. As a result, the department has continued to abet deputy gangs within its ranks, and its officers have continued to racially profile, assault, and kill residents of the valley.
Looking big picture, I think there are three paths to evaluate. First, there’s the federal path, which is effectively dead for now. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is now actively hostile to civil rights. Not only would a future administration need to revive it starting in 2029, but it would need to be made into a stronger mechanism of accountability than it has ever been previously. Second, there’s litigation by local fair housing and tenant groups. This has been pretty effective and could continue to work, but there’s always the chance that a case is appealed to a conservative Supreme Court that strikes down any restraints on how cities police tenants. That leaves a third path of mass politics. In a place like Los Angeles, the mechanisms of dispersal we discussed earlier really work to neutralize consciousness and protest. People in the AV are policed by an agency whose headquarters are right now ninety minutes away by car and two and a half hours away by transit. What’s happening to them isn’t covered by the LA Times. There are all kinds of ways that a region within which people share so many interests nevertheless becomes fractured. So it’s urgent to overcome those challenges in order to build the kind of connections that span the core and periphery and allow for a broad and sustained public challenge to how LA is governed.
CR: In your conclusion, you build on Hilary Malson’s call for “abolitionist housing justice” and also suggest the need in the Antelope Valley specifically to “contest” the safety valve. Can you say more about what these visions could mean, in practice, and what opportunities and challenges currently mark the political landscape?
RK: Today, we have people for whom their home is sort of a foundation from which they can surveil and regulate others. These powers emerge from laws like the Castle doctrine (which legalize violence in defense of the home) to apps like Nextdoor and Citizen, to Ring Cameras and now to apartment managers installing Flock cameras whose footage is available to police. These products are used to regulate not just tenants, neighbors, and visitors, but also workers, like delivery drivers and gardeners, and strangers just passing by.
On the other hand, people’s homes are losing the privacy and security they were assumed to have. Examples of this are everywhere. In Detroit and New York, public housing tenants are subject to surveillance footage of their buildings streamed real time into police headquarters. In new “temporary” shelter programs in cities like Los Angeles, tenants report prison-like conditions and a lack of basic privacy protections. Cases across the country are showing how neighbors abuse local crime free and nuisance housing ordinances to attempt to evict tenants based on their race, class, and gender. And of course, with the Supreme Court’s recent Grants Pass decision, we have the expansion of sweeps and incarceration of unhoused people. This gradient – whose home is policed and whose home is a platform for policing – is a gradient of personhood in this society.
That means that if we’re thinking of abolition we have to be thinking about housing, and if we’re thinking about housing justice we have to be thinking about policing. And that’s how I understand Hilary’s framework of abolitionist housing justice. Dignified, meaningful housing, worthy of the name home, is something we should strive to guarantee. And that is home that is neither a foundation from which to police nor a place subject to policing. The valley is one place where people strived towards that.
As much as their direct work against the policing of voucher tenants was successful, they had hoped to catalyze a broader change in the valley. As a ragtag group of volunteers, that proved impossible, it was hard to build cross racial and cross issue coalitions and people couldn’t sustain the organizing work for years on end. But they rightly identified that there’s no comprehensive and enduring change for voucher tenants or anyone else in the valley that doesn’t address the broader structural forces that have engineered injustice across the LA region.
AUTHOR BIOS
Charlotte E. Rosen is a historian, writer, and editor based in Chicago. You can find her work in The Nation, n+1, The Baffler, Public Books, and Defector.
Rahim Kurwa is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Faculty Affiliate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His work is broadly focused on housing justice.