Photo – Vic Hinterlang
WINNING THE RIGHT TO HOUSING
By SacCat
Although it is an undercount, officially 17,000 residents lived outside or in vehicles in Los Angeles in 2019. The city spent $31 million on “encampment clean-ups” that year, and $5 million for police oversight of these operations. In recent years, even more has been spent, reaching over $50 million in 2024.
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/la-homeless-encampment-cleanup-program-ucla-study/811816/
The destruction and trashing of the belongings of unhoused people involves vast expenditure across the state. Since 2021-22, California’s legislature has provided a billion dollars to “clean up” encampments, even though unhoused people – those who must live outside or in vehicles because of unattainable housing costs and over-full shelters – have no access to storage facilities or garbage disposal.
On February 12, 2026, six unhoused plaintiffs, along with the group Ktown for All, won an important case in federal court against the city of Los Angeles. In Garcia v. City of Los Angeles, the court ruled that the city had falsified hundreds or even thousands of records. These records were used to justify destroying the belongings of unhoused people under L.A. Ordinance 57.11, which allows the removal of “bulky items.” The U.S. Constitution protects people’s property from being taken or destroyed by the government—even if they are unhoused.
Witnesses in the courtroom report a dramatic moment before the judge entered her ruling. Judge Dale S. Fischer reportedly stood up, tore off her long black robe, and said, “I’m ready to go. Show me where you store the property you took from homeless people in your encampment cleanups.”
GARCIA CASE A BLOW AGAINST FASCISM
The court’s ruling reflects the city’s deception of the people of Los Angeles in its brutal class war on unhoused residents, the big lie that the city seeks to “help” people who are living outside. Billionaire developers run L.A., although voters are now challenging their rule by electing new City Council members and supporting initiatives for affordable housing.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/thrive-la-raman-tenant-caruso.
It is well documented that CARE+ is designed and implemented to wreck encampments and push people out of the places where they live – routinely spurring forced moves every couple of days. CARE+ attacks the very survival of our people. Like a flashing red light, this program signals that we have entered a period of deepening fascism. Under fascism, democracy ends.
https://invisiblepeople.tv/how-las-care-program-pushes-people-around-instead-of-helping-them/
Billionaires run everything. To their class, human life is no longer valuable and can be simply dispensed with. What matters to them is their grip on private wealth and property – including the market for housing, with its rising rents and profits. And they are relying on the police to keep it this way.
This billionaire outlook drives the destruction of unhoused encampments. Wage labor is in the process of being eliminated as robots take over the workplace at every level. This is why people are being abandoned and attacked by the billionaire class.
The diminishing need for wage labor is an extremely revolutionary economic change. The relationship between workers and capitalists is the basis of the whole society. Work is not just a profit source for the billionaires. Wage labor has an additional function. Through wage labor, the wealth of the society is circulated to the working class. Without wage labor, the working class faces destitution, unable to “afford” the necessities of life. Like housing.
Vulnerable people have been made outcasts and forced out onto the streets – disabled, aged out, young, all kinds of people – but disproportionately people of color, who have long borne the brunt of systemic impoverishment and displacement. From the billionaire class perspective, it is unnecessary to maintain families and ensure their stability, protect neighborhoods from financial speculation, protect people from deportation, eviction and relentlessly rising costs.
Most unhoused people were not born homeless. Today, the capitalist system is failing us as work disappears. People are awakening to this fact. They are coming to realize that housing must be a human right, not a market commodity, if we are to live.
WINNING THE RIGHT TO HOUSING
Ktown for All signed on as a plaintiff in the Garcia case as a volunteer-led grassroots organization serving Koreatown’s homeless community members through direct aid and political advocacy. The group is allied with organizations and coalitions such as Keep LA Housed, a coalition of tenants who are organizing for a tenants’ Bill of Rights, and the Community Self Defense Coalition (CSDC), a coalition of 50 organizations who joined to provide support and advocacy to ensure the safety and rights of all immigrants, regardless of their status.
Ktown for All and its broad alliances are signs of the developing coordination of organizations and coalitions that are rising to protect vulnerable city residents from attack, whether they are unhoused, rent-burdened tenants on the edge of eviction, or immigrants being hunted and seized by ICE.
In a report on the first year of CSDC activity Yusra Murad, communications organizer for Minneapolis-based Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (also known as United Renters for Justice) sums up lessons being learned. She voices the revolutionary demands of this time, as fascist assaults impact many different populations within the working class. She speaks to the need for working class power and the human right to housing.
https://knock-la.com/one-year-of-community-self-defense-coalition/
“How we keep everyone housed is about power – who has it and who doesn’t – and what it would take to shift the power imbalances that threaten every single one of us,” says Murad. “Whether [it] comes through eviction, deportation, gentrification, or a climate crisis, our purpose is to protect people from displacement.”
Published on April, 9, 2026.
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