Blues Geographies and the Security Turn: Interpreting the Housing Crisis in Los Angeles

This article examines the political and cultural struggles over housing and human rights in Los Angeles. It analyzes the racial and spatial dynamics of the housing crisis and subsequent global economic crash, and underscores the significance of the politics of scale. It argues that struggles for the human right to housing in Skid Row, in Los Angeles, represent a continuity of campaigns to contest racial capitalism’s organization of space. As grassroots activists and artists have shown, the resolution of crisis by racialization, neoliberalization, and securitization is not inevitable. They have produced alternative definitions of events, which could produce alternative outcomes.