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Mapping (in)justiceGilda Haas

Online publication date: 13 February 2011

To cite this Article Haas, Gilda(2011) 'Mapping (in)justice', City, 15: 1, 87 — 95To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.539016URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.539016

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CITY, VOL. 15, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2011

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/11/010087-09 © 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.539016

Mapping (in)justice

Gilda HaasTaylor and FrancisCCIT_A_539016.sgm10.1080/13604813.2011.539016City: Analysis of Urban Trends1360-4813 (print)/1470-3629 (online)Original Article2011Taylor & Francis151000000February [email protected] of the most compelling ideas in EdSoja’s Seeking Spatial Justice is his useof (in)justice, a Tao of spatial justice

where forces of oppression and resistance existsimultaneously in geographies of praxis, co-creating each other’s objective conditions.

(In)justice is an apt frame for the story arcof my own economic justice work. Itprovides a large container for the big picture,the reciprocity of place and agency, unitingproblem and goal as one.

A few years ago, economists declared thatLA was the most unequal city in the USA asevidenced by the vast distance between therichest and poorest residents. As far as I’mconcerned, until LA turns up dead last in theinequality Olympics, the primary goal ofurban policy must be to bring people closertogether. Our yardstick for evaluating policysuccess or failure would thus be the degree towhich inequality has been measurablyreduced.

What is good for LA in this regard is alsogood for the nation. As national policy hasserved to shape the neoliberal city, the coun-try’s economic divide has grown to a chasmreminiscent of the height of the robber barons.

Reversing a process that began almost 40years ago and has grown deep roots into ournational psyche is steady work. It requires thecare and feeding of the collective potential ofgrassroots leaders, the people who channel(in)justice through the stories of their lives,where one moment they are inspiring theirneighbors to think and act together to chal-lenge power, and then in the next, they arepushing a broom in an office building orsewing pockets on a dress in a sweatshop orputting children to sleep in a shared bedroomcontaminated with lead, mold and vermin.

That sustenance consists of the spaces andtools that enable ordinary people to shape

the future, and in doing so, become(extra)ordinary.

Many of us call those spaces and toolspopular education.

Popular education is education for truedemocracy. Its purpose is to provide peoplewith the information, knowledge and criticalconversations that can inform collectivedecision-making, which is the essence ofdemocratic practice.

Popular education also serves to translateresearch, experience and history into a sharedpractice so that (in)justice, its historicalmoment and its strategic importance can beseen and addressed in action.

Popular education is the ‘pedagogy of theoppressed’ that can tease out commonalitiesbetween poor whites, immigrants and theprogeny of former slaves, explaining thegeographies of (in)justice that deny somecommunities credit, decent housing, essentialservices or even the right to name and remainin the neighborhoods where they have livedfor decades.

It is a theory-building endeavor which canbe used to produce a people’s own theory ofchange.

What follows is a gallery of images, toolsand stories that represent the pushbackagainst and within spatial (in)justice and thekind of critical conversations that are neededfor that to succeed.

I hope these small offerings contribute tothe utility of this important idea presented inSoja’s book.

Follow the money

In 1989, I organized Communities forAccountable Reinvestment, an LA-basedcoalition led primarily by women of color

O

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88 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 1

dedicated to eliminating redlining (the bankpractice of geographically denying loans tocommunities of color) and producing posi-tive community reinvestment. We mappedpatterns of lending discrimination in SouthCentral Los Angeles and used that evidenceto support Community Reinvestment Actchallenges against big bank mergers and wererewarded with a rare Federal Reserve publichearing in South Central Los Angeles (thescene of the crime). I presented the sameinformation to the Congressional BankingCommittee several times.

We employed the results of these tactics asleverage to negotiated agreements with bankpresidents for housing and small businessloans for the community. Later, we used thesame maps and data and constituency toorganize our own democratic financial

institution—the South Central People’sFederal Credit Union.

The flier depicted in Figure 1 was drafted in1990, in the heat of a campaign to bring Secu-rity Pacific Bank, a giant at the time, to thecommunity bargaining table. It tells a storythat places the long-term community struggleagainst redlining in the context of the govern-ment’s response to that era’s savings and loandebacle (which was pretty similar to thegovernment’s response to the recent mort-gage crisis—to bail out the banks, to discountthe assets of failed banks and offer them tomega-banks deemed ‘too big to fail’).Figure 1 ‘Redlining’ flier.Our goal was to provide community resi-dents a sense of standing and entitlement todemands for financial justice. Coalitionleaders used the flier to illuminate what thearcane world of banking policy had to do

Figure 1 ‘Redlining’ flier prepared for the Communities for Accountable Reinvestment coalition in 1990.


HAAS: MAPPING (IN)JUSTICE 89

with neighborhoods like South Central LosAngeles where only a few bank branchesexisted in a 60 square mile area, and thosebranches rarely made loans to local residents.It helped them tell a story about financialpolicy’s winners and losers.

As you can see from the blank spaces onthe flier where the specific date and time andplace of the action should be, this flier wasnever completed. Although it was onlydistributed to a handful of people, it made itsway onto the pages of a magazine and a Bankof America management meeting. It evidentlyproduced conversations within SecurityPacific as well, because a meeting with thebank president was scheduled before we hadtime to complete plans for the demonstration.

As mentioned, we also used our data to tella proactive story that became the businessplan and charter application for the SouthCentral People’s Federal Credit Union. Atthat time, the US government had not char-tered a single community development creditunion for over a decade, and it appeared thatour application, submitted a year before,would meet the same fate. We had not yetheard from the regulators.

The eruption of the 1992 civil unrestchanged the terms of that conversation. Themedia called daily during those days,expressing a new clarity that redlining hadbeen one of the fuels of the fires. Creditunion regulators who had ignored us in thepast requested a meeting in my office to‘rethink’ our application, which was thenapproved in quick order.

As time passed, our credit union went theway of far larger institutions, like SecurityPacific and Washington Mutual, firstdevoured in a merger and then dissolved.This is not surprising, because the structuralrelationships that define the US financialsector, for the most part, remain the same asthey ever were.

As a result, our current financial crisis in2010 is a powerful déjà vu experience forpeople who live in communities like SouthCentral Los Angeles. This time, instead ofbeing denied loans, residents were provided

with untenable loans—the worst, mostexpensive forms of credit available. This hasled to the largest loss of black wealth in theUSA since there was such a thing as blackwealth.

Naming rights

In 1998, Strategic Actions for a Just Econ-omy (SAJE) and about two dozen ally orga-nizations joined forces to create theCoalition for a Responsible USC as acounter-weight to the dominant role that theUniversity of Southern California has playedin the development of South Central LosAngeles. The Hotel and Restaurant Employ-ees Union (HERE), a key founding member,had represented university food serviceworkers, many who lived in the neighbor-hood, for 30 years, but had not obtained acontract with the university for the past fiveyears. Winning a contract for the primarilyLatino workers became the coalition’s firstcampaign and was viewed as an opportunityto build labor–community relationshipsthrough shared work, while adding value to acurrent struggle.

We won that campaign, but midwaythrough, we all read about a ‘Figueroa Corri-dor’ planning initiative in the newspaper. Theaccount indicated that plans were far along,that there had been community participa-tion—though a quick survey revealed thatnone of our organizations had been invitedto the party. The goal of the plan was to inte-grate and improve the 30 block strip betweenthe university and downtown LA to thenorth, facing away its location in SouthCentral Los Angeles.

Here was yet another instance of those inpower claiming naming rights. In the privatesector, this is heavily monetized. Forexample, the Staples discount office supplysuperstore chain paid $116 million dollars fora 20-year contract to fix its name to what isnow known as the Staples Center stadium.Ten years into that contract, they decided tohedge their bets in an uncertain economy



recently and produced the ‘first ever lifetimenaming-rights extension for a major marketarena’ for an undisclosed amount.

In the public sector, the naming rightsdefault to the powerful. The university wasable to rename the historic black communityof West Adams as University Park. The CityCouncil a few years back deleted the word‘Central’ from South Central Los Angeles, asthough that could erase the still simmeringcauses of the Watts and 1992 rebellions. Thistime, an alliance of university, downtownand City Hall interests renamed our neigh-borhoods the Figueroa Corridor, givingpriority to a valuable commercial stretchover the 200,000 working-class residents whosurround it.

In light of all these events, the coalitiondecided to co-opt rather than combat thename. We expanded our boundaries, missionand membership and renamed ourselves theFigueroa Corridor Coalition for EconomicJustice. In a form of announcement, in 2000,

we published a fold-out map and brochure asa tool to help reframe development conversa-tions and to establish the area as contestedterrain (Figure 2).Figure 2 ‘Power, People & Possibilities in the Figueroa Corridor’.The map, entitled ‘Power, People andPossibilities in the Figueroa Corridor’,locates our coalition members, the holdingsof the area’s 10 largest property owners and‘hot properties’—the spatial (in)justice targetsupon which we had set our sites. We includedthe holdings of Frank McHugh, the city’slargest slumlord, who you will learn moreabout later in this paper, as well as what wethen referred to as ‘Staples World’, the sportsand entertainment district planned by theAnschutz Entertainment Group, who ownedthe adjacent Staples Center. This project, nowcalled LA Live was the source of the StaplesAgreement, a community benefits agreementfor which the coalition is best known aroundthe country.

The 5000 copies of the map produced atleast that many conversations. The map was

Figure 2 ‘Power, People & Possibilities in the Figueroa Corridor’. Map published by Strategic Actions for a JustEconomy in 2000.



used as a tool to tell one story on communitydoorsteps, another in City Hall offices andanother at the bargaining table with theAnschutz Entertainment Group. The storieswere different and driven by the position ofthe storyteller, but they were aligned throughshared principles.

By 2005, some of the ‘hot properties’ hadbeen transformed into victories and therewere other changes, some hopeful, somedisparaging. We were at a different momentin the story of (in)justice. The investmentthat produced the Staples Agreement in 2001,by now had fueled gentrification anddisplacement at a speed and ferocity that wecould not anticipate. We had begun to orga-nize a people’s redevelopment institution inthe form of a democratic community landtrust. It was time for the raw material ofpeople, power and possibilities to be refinedinto a theory of change. It was time for a newstory and a new map.

The new map is called ‘The FigueroaCorridor Strategy for Urban Land Reform’

(Figure 3). It includes the boundaries of theland trust field of membership, and it locatesour ‘displacement free zones’—areas wheredisplacement will be resisted with concen-trated organizing and legal defense. It listsour victories and our new targets. On theother side, it explains what urban land reformmeans at this particular moment to denizensof the People’s Figueroa Corridor.Figure 3 ‘The Figueroa Corridor Strategy for Urban Land Reform’.

Slum empire

In 2002, tenant organizers at SAJE werefaced with a dilemma. They had to decidewhether or not to take on an organizingcampaign around the horrific conditions ofthe Morrison Hotel in the Figueroa Corri-dor. There were quite a few arguments in the‘con’ column, including the fact that we hadno experience with residential hotels, whichat the time were regulated by a different setof rules and city agencies than the apartmentbuildings that we normally organized.

Figure 3 ‘The Figueroa Corridor Strategy for Urban Land Reform’. New map published by Strategic Actions for a Just Economy in 2005.



But at the end of the day, in a decision thatwould change SAJE forever, we went for it.Andrea Gibbons, who was heading thecampaign at the time, pursued her researchtasks with a vengeance. The result is illustratedin Figure 4, which builds connections betweenwhat once appeared to be singular holdings bylimited liability companies, individuals andother legal fictions. What emerged instead wasa family-owned criminal slum empire.Figure 4 Danpour real estate empire.Figure 4 includes the family’s business part-ners (in purple), property holding companies(in blue), the properties that they own (inyellow and orange), additional businesses(in green), past lawsuits and city actions (redsquares). The black swath represents themortgage company owned by the family thatfinanced their dealings.

Andrea’s slum empire map produced anew story of (in)justice and many newconversations at every level of our poweranalysis, which at the end of the day led tothe first criminal conviction of a slumlord bythe City since the 1980s.

This is a good luck story. The MorrisonHotel was featured on an album cover by theworld-renown Doors band (Morrison Hotel)in the 1980s. Our campaign press releaseswere picked up by Associated Press, andreworked into an international release with afirst line that declared ‘Doors Hotel is aslum’. In a flash, our campaign was coveredby scores of newspaper articles across thecountry and the world.Figure 5 Morrison Hotel album cover by the world-renown Doors.Previously, the hotel management (whosereign of terror included intimidating tenantswith a pit bull, turning off the electricity andthe elevator, and never making repairs asthe building crumbled around its residents)could nevertheless call the police against theorganizers, and receive sympathetic treat-ment, while the police threatened arrest of ourstaff, who had been invited into the tenants’homes. The unusually bright media lightaccelerated the production of a new commonsense about the hotel in the city—about whowere victims (tenants) and who were villains(slumlords) and about who was on the side of

Figure 4 Slum Empire Map. Source: Andrea Gibbons.



right (SAJE). This turn of perception kept thecampaign and people’s spirits alive throughthe soul-crushing mechanics of lawsuits,bureaucracies and politics where poor peoplerarely, if ever, fair well.

Andrea’s slum empire map became theprototype for another campaign againstLA’s most notorious slumlord, FrankMcHugh, who owned over 200 slum build-ings many of which, like the MorrisonHotel, were in the Figueroa Corridor. Wereached out to 60 of those buildings,collected evidence, mapped information andcollaborated with a health clinic, healthpromoters and other organizers. We createda white paper and presentation that posedslum housing as the number one health riskto children in Los Angeles. We re-shapedthe story once again.

This past April, the Los Angeles SuperiorCourt sentenced Frank McHugh to 48months probation, forbade him from manag-ing any residential property in the city, andordered him to deposit funds into a trustaccount for the complete rehabilitation andmaintenance of all his properties.

Explaining the neoliberal city

At around the same time that SAJE was delib-erating what urban land reform might mean inthe Figueroa Corridor, I was invited byManuel Pastor and Martha Matsuoka to partic-ipate in a panel about community benefitsagreements at a convening in Miami that washosted by the Miami Workers Center. Soonafter we arrived in Miami, we went out to lunchwith the Center’s Director, Gihan Perera.Gihan and I speed-dated our way through themeal, identifying common interests and someexciting possibilities. A few weeks later, I wasintroduced to his good friend and ally, Jon Liss,the Director of Tenants and Workers Unitedin Virginia. For the next year and a half, thethree of us set about the work of creating aframe that could connect not only our respec-tive work, but the brilliant endeavors of otherurban organizations as well, which together,

had yet to have any serious impact on thenational scale of (in)justice. Our goal was toproduce a call that could inspire a meaningfulconvening. A critical mass.

Gihan and Jon are great organizers andrare intellectuals who inspire and requiretheory-making at the base. At the time of ourfirst meeting, Gihan had already been writinga paper about the Miami global/local contextcalled ‘RENT: Regional Equity for Neigh-borhoods and Tenants’. We agreed to beginour collaboration by writing a nationalversion of what Gihan had begun. This effortproduced many useful conversations, itera-tions of ideas and a lot of eloquent pages. Atthe same time, we needed something thatcould be digested by others at a glance. Imade it my task to turn its salient points intoa one-page drawing (Figure 5).Figure 6 ‘What’s Behind the New Gentrification?’We used this to guide conversations withprospective allies and funders and within ourown organizations. Our shared writing adven-ture was not a waste of time. It was a commonexperience that helped us name a shared proac-tive vision.

We started with RENT and spent amoment on Urban Land Reform. We settledon the Right to the City, an idea whichresonated with each of us in a powerful anduseful way, and had the same effect on ourallies who shared our values and experienceof (in)justice, colored by their own localcontexts and histories.

The one-page flier was elaborated into aPowerPoint presentation that was presentedat the 2007 convening in Los Angeles thatproduced the national Right to the City Alli-ance. At the end of the meetings, a new groupof volunteer leaders committed to refiningand expanding the presentation into a Rightto the City 101 workshop that debuted atthe first US Social Forum in Atlanta to astanding-room-only crowd.

A mobile planning lab

One of the entries in the Just Spaces exhibitwas a visual response by Camp Baltimore to



Figure 6 Drawings of a converted bread truck and pop-up trailer by the Camp Baltimore team of artist-activist-planners. Source: Scott Berzofsky, Chris Gladora, Dane Nester and Nicholas Wisnieski.

Figure 5 ‘What’s Behind the New Gentrification?’ Source: Gilda Haas.



the question: What would a mobile planninglab for SAJE look like? Figure 6 presentstheir drawings of a converted bread truckand pop-up trailer by their team of artist-activist-planners.Figure 7 Drawings of a converted bread truck and pop-up trailer by the Camp Baltimore team of artist-activist-planners.I was most taken with the pop-up trailerversion on the left, outfitted to take SAJE’sPeople’s Planning School out to neighbor-hood streets. The image was so whimsicallycompelling and so in tune with our vision ofwhat it takes to produce spatial justice. I wasinspired.

Camp Baltimore people came to visit andagreed to revise the drawings to accommo-date some practical considerations and tomake implementation more simple, and thus,more likely.

I raised the funds and bought SAJE a pop-up trailer (Figure 7). The resourceful AvaBromberg signed on to manage the projectalong with other volunteers. It has appearedin parking lots after a city planning hearing,to debrief and educate. It has popped up at ahealth fair to promote the land trust. Nowthat (in)justice has wheels, there are manymore opportunities for conversations ahead.

Figure 8 SAJE pop-up trailer.The artifacts presented above may be onlythe ephemera of organizing campaigns, butthey were created to give people more powerover the story of spatial (in)justice. This iscritical to the assurance that another world isindeed possible, because as Salman Rushdiesays so well:

‘Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.’

Gilda Haas is an organizer, educator, andurban planner who lives in Los Angeles. Shewas the founding Director of StrategicActions for a Just Economy (SAJE), a co-founder of the Right to the City Alliance, andhas helped many communities createeconomic campaigns and programs over thepast 30 years. Gilda teaches community andeconomic development in UCLA’s UrbanPlanning Department where she also foundedtheir Community Scholars Program. Heralter-ego, Dr. Pop, may be found at http://drpop.org. Email: [email protected]

Figure 7 SAJE pop-up trailer. Photo by Ava Bromberg.


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