Reclaiming Los Angeles
In cities across America, housing has played a key role in maintaining and deepening inequality. Nowhere is this more so than in Los Angeles, with its homelessness crisis, soaring rents, and luxury condos. Nithya Raman’s grassroots campaign for city council is pushing back against the developers, boosters, and lobbyists that keep it this way.
Downtown Los Angeles from Signal Hill near Long Beach, CA. (Aydin Palabiyikoglu / Flickr)
On January 11, Victor Valencia was shot and killed by Los Angeles police. Unhoused, living under a freeway, and struggling with mental health issues, he was holding up a piece of a bicycle when cops opened fire. It took several days for the major papers in LA to report on Valencia’s death, and even then, only after the pressure of community activists.
Most of the coverage was brief and, according to Nithya Raman, a longtime housing and homelessness activist and advocate in Los Angeles, “remarkably un-curious.” Most articles had very little follow-up about Valencia’s situation, or whether he was armed or not (he wasn’t).
Raman continues: “To so many of us who have been working on housing and homelessness issues in Los Angeles, his death felt really emblematic of a kind of acceptance of the situation as is. That our unhoused population is primarily people of color, and that we have so many people who are unhoused, who neither have housing or even a shelter bed. And that we as a city have come to accept this.”
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