UC Press Blog

By Rahim Kurwa, author of Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing

Today, there's a broad understanding that American cities are operating in unsustainable ways. Housing is unaffordable, many jobs are underpaid or unstable, and eviction, policing, and a threadbare safety net remain key factors driving working class people out of many major cities. How does this untenable model persist? 

In Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, I argue that Los Angeles has managed this unsustainable dynamic by offloading its crises to peripheral regions—such as Los Angeles’ northernmost region, the Antelope Valley. 

The book traces how the valley has become Los Angeles’ safety valve, achieving its own growth by serving as a solution to one or another of the metropolitan core’s crises. This relationship, however, has also shaped its own internal conflicts and repression.

Its first moment as a spatial fix came after World War II, when the War Department concluded that continued concentration of military industry in Los Angeles proper was an unjustifiable risk. Los Angeles planners desperately searched for other sites that would allow them to keep these investments rather than lose them to other sunbelt cities eager for military investment. The valley proved just the solution and soon became a post-war hub for aerospace development and testing. 

The valley rapidly developed into the classic mid-century middle-class enclave, full of well-paying jobs that funded good schools and a close-knit, highly racially segregated, community. But as the war economy shifted to other geographies and technologies, it gradually fell from its suburban idyll. By the early 1990s, its biggest city, Palmdale, was known as the foreclosure capital of the United States. 

In this moment of economic freefall, the valley again served as a spatial fix for Los Angeles. Rather than absorbing excess military industrial capacity, it now absorbed the people pushed out of Los Angeles as the urban core de-industrialized and its working class increasingly found itself bereft of jobs, housing and the means of a decent life. These patterns accelerated through the early 2000s, as real estate developers raced to pave the valley and sell middle class Angelenos subprime mortgages to move in. 

 As unique as the Antelope Valley is, its story echoes in places across the country, like Antioch, California and Ferguson, Missouri, whose fates are defined by the large metros they orbit. 

As Mike Davis noted in City of Quartz, the valley’s aerospace gentry saw these developments as a threat, and worked to “raise the gangplanks” to prevent demographic change. Miscasting this change as the cause of its economic downfall rather than a potential solution to it, the valley fought to stop Black residents from moving up from Los Angeles, and to repress those already within its geography. 

Among these residents were tenants in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the nation’s largest rental assistance program, and one premised on a tenant’s ability to find housing by moving to places where it was most available, like the valley. 

To evict these tenants, the valley developed modes of policing that maximized the capacity and opportunity to surveil and police tenants. Crime free and nuisance housing ordinances empowered residents to file complaints about their neighbors. A fraud hotline could be weaponized to trigger inspections by the local housing authority that might lead to terminations of housing assistance, and city inspectors were mobilized to conduct surprise inspections that terrorized people in their homes. The result was a massive wave of evictions that cost countless people their homes and terrorized many more. 

In the valley, a social movement grew to fight back, successfully challenging the policing of housing as a violation of the Fair Housing Act. Their work extended a long history of Black organizing in the valley and has laid a foundation for new campaigns for justice in Antelope valley today. Indefensible Spaces shows how these movements challenge the safety valve dynamic at the core of the valley’s relationship to Los Angeles, promising to change the political economy of both places. As unique as the Antelope Valley is, its story echoes in places across the country, like Antioch, California and Ferguson, Missouri, whose fates are defined by the large metros they orbit. In this way, the valley offers lessons for people struggling for more just cities across the country.