AETNA STREET RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
The Aetna Street research collective brings together current and former residents of the Aetna Street encampment in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, with movement and university-based scholars to study and support the struggle for spatial justice by unhoused communities. Colloquially known as the “Skid Row of the valley,” Aetna Street is a key site of refuge and return in the face of state-organized displacement. Our work has involved ethnographic and historical research as well as a UCLA Urban Planning course which served as “a lab for liberatory projects.”
FEATURED PROJECT: COMMUNITY COLLABORATIVE COURSE
The Community Collaborative Course (2023), taught by Professor Ananya Roy with Carla Orendorff and Rasheed Shabazz, brought together UCLA Master of Urban and Regional Planning students with unhoused comrades and movement-organizers in “a lab for liberatory projects” to generate and mobilize community designs, legal strategies, people’s plans, and street media with and for the Aetna Street encampment.
PAST AND CURRENT MEMBERS OF THE COLLECTIVE
- Jennifer BlakeJennifer is a homeless advocate who is passionate about helping others achieve self growth. Born in Ventura, she now resides in Los Angeles where she enjoys helping the houseless find available resources. When Jenn isn’t building opportunity and awareness, you can find her drawing.
- Amanda DarouieAmanda is a community member living in so-called Echo Park. She organizes to build bridges between housed and unhoused neighbors in order to alleviate the precarity of living outside. Inspired to interrogate the systems that perpetuate scarcity and resist the power of money over life, she created Echo Park Mutual Aid to support those most affected by the volatility of gentrification.
- Chris GiamarinoChris earned his PhD in urban planning from UCLA. His dissertation catalogues and critiques hostile designs, explores how do-it-yourself (DIY) planning and design tactics by unhoused communities resist spatial exclusion, and advocates for just public space design guidelines. His recent collaborative research explores the spatial impacts of anti-vehicular dwelling ordinances on locations of vehicular homelessness and the characteristics and trends of unhoused people living in vehicles.
- La Donna HarrellLa Donna is an unhoused artist, organizer, and entrepreneur living in the San Fernando Valley. She most recently founded a self-sustained artist studio and talent agency to support other artists living on the streets.
- Michael JohnsonMichael is a (formerly) unhoused artist living in Lancaster, seeking to understand the root cause of homelessness in Los Angeles. As someone who has been unhoused since he was young, he offers his lived experience along with the struggle of dealing with the police daily while living outside. He wants to understand what we can do to help our common cause as unhoused people with real solutions that don’t just push us along and move us out. Justice demands results that uphold the humanity of the poor and the unhoused.
- Sam LutzkerSam is a PhD student in Sociology at UCLA who conducts ethnographic research with unhoused people about a variety of topics, including parking enforcement, carceral shelter programs, and criminalization of public space.
- Jessica MendezJessica, also known as Queen, is a lifelong resident of Echo Park. After a car accident rendered her unable to work, Queen moved into the tent community at Echo Park Lake where she stayed until the police raid and displacement. Queen organizes with unhoused and low-income tenants, as well as mixed-status family communities.
- Carla OrendorffCarla is an artist and community organizer committed to the struggle for housing justice and liberation, alongside the decriminalization of poverty in the city that raised her, Los Angeles. She believes in the power of neighborhoods and using collective memory to fight back against state violence and the erasure of communities in resistance.
- Annie PowersAnnie is an organizer and historian. Their dissertation examines the National Union of the Homeless, the first formation of unionized unhoused people in United States history. Annie organizes with poor housed and unhoused tenants as a member of Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenant Union.
- Ananya RoyAnanya is a Professor at UCLA where she is also Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Her scholarship is concerned with racial banishment and seeks to advance housing justice.
- Alayssia TownsellAlayssia is a recent UCLA graduate holding a Bachelor of Arts in Public Affairs. She is an activist and community organizer pursuing a career as a Civil Rights Attorney.
- William Sens, Jr.Will is an artist/community organizer living in Los Angeles, California. He has spent six cumulative years living on the streets, volunteering as an activist for Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, Street Watch LA, Echo Park Rising, Food Not Bombs, and Earth First.
- Pamela StephensPamela is a doctoral candidate in the department of Urban Planning at UCLA. Pamela’s scholarship explores the entanglements of urban planning practice and the production and elimination of Black space. Specifically, her dissertation project tracks the ways that redevelopment projects in post-rebellion Watts were instrumental in reshaping Black Los Angeles, both materially and politically.
- Sonja VerdugoSonja is an organizer with Ground Game LA working for labor and housing justice and equality for all. She brings her experience as someone who has lived on the streets and in temporary hotels to advocate fiercely for others, and fight for real systemic change that will improve the quality of life for unhoused people.
- Leonardo Vilchis-ZarateLeonardo is a tenant organizer and researcher. His research looks at the legacy of late 20th century neoliberalism, namely the demolition of public housing, and its relationship to the present crisis for housed and unhoused tenants. He is a PhD student in the Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies Program at UCLA and an organizer with Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.
