HOUSING JUSTICE RESEARCH
In the face of market-led and state-organized housing precarity, we insist upon housing justice. Thinking from Los Angeles, and other key global nodes of insurgency, our research and scholarship reveals the actors, systems, and institutions that perpetuate housing exploitation. Working with tenant movements and unhoused communities, we aim to dismantle police-property relations and reconstruct housing as a reparative public good.
COMMUNITY ARCHIVE & EXHIBITION
Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake charts the eras of organizing that unfolded at Echo Park Lake, uncovering not only the machinations of state power but also how poor people made the city their home. This project includes a community archive, a public exhibition, and an online exhibition. The in-person exhibition and corresponding public programs were open to the public February 1 – March 30, 2025 at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, with the launch of the online exhibition in 2026. Organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, these exhibitions and public programs activate an archive of organizing histories that are intended to be the practice of a collective future. To access the After Echo Park Lake Collection at Skid Row History Museum & Archive, please contact: skidrowarchive@lapovertydept.
HOUSING THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION
Housing the Third Reconstruction is an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory housing and land in the U.S. through historical research and reflection on moments of radical transformation conceptualized as the three reconstructions. Led by Ananya Roy and Robin D.G. Kelley, with support by Terra Graziani and Annie Powers, it takes stock of the unprecedented crisis of displacement and dispossession that is currently at hand and builds a shared terrain of scholarship for university and movement scholars who are staging the third reconstruction, notably uprising against the propertied-policed order of racial capitalism. Supported by a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning grant, it also entails reconstructing the university, creating liberated zones of knowledge-making and world-making.
GLOBAL RESEARCH NETWORK
The Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Research Coordination Network was funded by the National Science Foundation from 2018 through 2023 and brought together university and movement-based scholars. They studied key geographies of housing precarity in order to examine established and emergent practices of housing justice. In doing so, it consolidated the study of housing justice under conditions of global racial capitalism as a field of inquiry.
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
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mlemorande2025-01-22 00:00:232026-05-08 10:59:48Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake Exhibition Catalog
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mlemorande2026-01-20 10:12:492026-01-20 10:15:32Very Large Expenditure, Very Little Care: Los Angeles’s “CARE+” Homeless Services Program in Council District 11
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mlemorande2025-06-25 06:00:062025-06-25 13:33:05“Keep Moving”: West LA Vehicle Residents Survey
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mlemorande2025-05-05 12:59:372025-05-27 12:06:12Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, PropertyFEATURED MEDIA
- 1,500 Unhoused LA Residents Died on the Streets During Pandemic, Report RevealsDECEMBER 1, 2021 – Article via The Guardian feat. Institute report “We Do Not Forget: Stolen Lives of LA’s Unhoused Residents During the COVID-19 Pandemic”
- LA Clears Another Park Encampment in Battle Over Worsening Housing CrisisOCTOBER 14, 2021 – Article via The Guardian feat. Institute director Ananya Roy
- It’s Homecoming Weekend In Louisville’s Russell NeighborhoodSEPTEMBER 18, 2021 – Article via The Guardian feat. Institute community partner Root Cause Research Center
- Want to Solve the Housing Crisis? Take Over Hotels.AUGUST 19, 2021 – Article via The New York Times feat. Institute director Ananya Roy
- America’s Housing Crisis Is a ChoiceAUGUST 10, 2021 – Opinion piece via The New York Times feat. Institute director Ananya Roy
- To Solve Homelessness, California Should Declare a Right to HousingJUNE 6, 2021 – Editorial via Los Angeles Times feat. Institute faculty researcher Gary Blasi
