Rebuilding Los Angeles: Labor-Community Coalition Organizing around Transit and Housing

Los Angeles has long been infamous as a sprawling megalopolis, where racialized inequalities are embedded in and perpetuated by land use. L.A. has also been the home of the prototypical growth machine, which helped create and deepen these inequalities through direct and indirect displacement and racialized uneven development. This history of uneven investment has left neighborhoods of color with rent gaps that increase vulnerabilities to gentrification and displacement. In more recent decades, with the rise of slow growth movements, scholars have argued that this prototypical growth machine has died or at least lost its consensus. However, I argue that the L.A. growth machine has more recently re-formulated itself around an agenda of transit-oriented development that aims to take advantage of racialized rent gaps in historically disinvested neighborhoods. Despite its popular image as dominated by freeways and single-family housing, L.A.’s public transit build out is the largest contemporary public infrastructure project in the country, rebuilding L.A. by reshaping transportation and land use. Community-based organizations and advocacy groups have responded to gentrification and displacement pressures around this influx of investment in transit and accompanying transit-oriented development, and have put forward an alternative vision of equitable development, distinct from the anti-development NIMBY vs. pro-development YIMBY binary of urban development logics. These equitable development organizations have strategically responded to slow growth radical flank effect threats to the traditional growth machine and bridged tensions between organized labor and community groups around urban development to form a labor-community coalition. This coalition leveraged its members’ unique resources to push for and win innovative equitable development policy. I address the broad conceptual question of how do urban development politics shift in response to multiple countermovements? How does this help us better understand how residents of color form cross-sector coalitions to bridge city trenches