“What is happening here in Jordan Downs is going to happen to each one of the [other] developments,” declared Claudia Moore, a leader of the citywide movement of public housing tenants, speaking at a press conference on February 24, 1989. Earlier that month, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) had announced a plan to sell off Jordan Downs, a seven-hundred-unit complex located in the heart of the South Los Angeles Watts neighborhood, to the highest bidder.

Los Angeles’s war on public housing had officially begun.

Although the tenants had been kept in the dark, the news broke with immediate support from the city’s elites. Tom Bradley, the city’s first black mayor, who governed from 1973 to 1993, thought the idea was “innovative and creative.” Private developers contacted by the Los Angeles Times applauded the plan, but stressed that any private owner would need to be given wide latitude to regulate and evict the project’s poor, majority-black population. The Housing Authority was more than happy to oblige: “We need to tighten up the procedure whereby drug dealers and people who don’t pay rent can be evicted,” its executive director told the paper.