This endeavor of collective scholarship emerges from a Freedom School held at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in Summer 2024. Organized as part of the project, Housing the Third Reconstruction, the convening brought together movement and university-based scholars actively engaged in insurgent research and critical theorization as a part of, or as accompaniment to, freedom movements. Intended as inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory land and housing, Freedom School 2024 took up the following issues and questions: 1) What is the present historical conjuncture of global racial capitalism and the attendant political economy and ideology of land and real-estate?; 2) How are movements undertaking land struggle, dismantling police-property relations, and enacting housing and spatial justice?; 3) How do we learn from “beautiful experiments” (Hartman 2019) of reconstruction, rematriation, reparation, and decolonization that are or have been underway? In the wake of mass protest movements that reveal possible futures while failing to materialize their aspirations, how can collective liberatory work learn from its recent and distant pasts in order to realize the world we imagine?; and 4) What are the ontologies of radical relationality, including kinship, presence, solidarity, and community, that are being created to counter social death and state-organized abandonment?

The Echo Park Lake encampment was an uprising. A settlement of tents in an iconic public park in the gentrified heart of Los Angeles, it offered a poor people’s radical solution to the housing crisis. From challenging sweeps to constructing an infrastructure of life, the Echo Park Lake encampment built an alternative world. In doing so, it became a threat to the policed-propertied order of Los Angeles, eventually facing eviction through a police invasion. Even so, the dreams and practices of the Echo Park Lake encampment could not be easily squashed, and they live on in the struggles of housed and unhoused tenants today. TENTS AND TENANTS 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. A public exhibition organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and displayed at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, it is intended to be the practice of a collective future. 

Authored by the After Echo Park Lake research collective, this monograph analyzes processes of state-led displacement in Los Angeles. With a focus on the violent eviction of the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake, a public park in a gentrifying neighborhood of the city close to downtown, it draws attention to how political claims of housing placements legitimize such displacement but rarely result in housing outcomes. Through ethnographic research as well as analysis of homeless management data, it exposes this ruse of housing and draws attention to a condition of permanent displaceability for the city’s poor. A key finding of the monograph is that at a time of expanded housing resources underwritten by federal and state emergency and economic relief funds, there is a perverse investment of public funds in the criminalization of poverty and in the carceral containment of the unhoused. In sharp contrast to such carcerality are the infrastructures of community envisioned by unhoused organizers, including that which was built and sustained at Echo Park Lake.

Elaborado por el Colectivo de Investigación Después de Echo Park Lake, esta monografía analiza desplazamiento encabezado por el estado. Con un enfoque centrado en el desalojo violenta de la comunidad sin vivienda en Echo Park Lake, un parque publico en un barrio gentrificando de la ciudad cerca del centro, eso llama la atencion sobre cómo reclamos políticos de ubicaciónes de viviendas legitiman desubicación pero rara vez resulta en soluciones de la vivienda. A través de investigación etnográfica además de análisis de datos de la gestión de personas sin viviendas, eso expone la artimaña de la vivienda y llama la atención sobre un condición de dezplazabilidad definitiva por los pobres de la ciudad. Un hallazgo clave de la monografía es que en un tiempo de recursos de vivienda ampliados suscrito por fondos federales de emergencia y ayuda económica, tiene un inversión perversa de fondos públicos para la criminalización de pobreza y contención carcelaria de los personas sin viviendas. En marcado contraste con eso carceralidad están infraestructuras comunitarias imaginadas por los organizadores sin viviendas, incluye eso construyó y sostuvo en Echo Park Lake.