Encampment geographies: Refuge,return,and refusal

Abstract

Thinking from Los Angeles, amid the expanding criminalization of homelessness, we advance a conceptual framework of encampment geographies. We argue that the homeless encampment must be understood in relation to state power, specifically the state as landlord. As residents of state spaces—sidewalks, shelters, interim housing—encampment dwellers are institutionalized. This includes interpellation in humanitarian exchange, notably through forms of mutual aid that emerge in the interstices of state violence. Drawing on ethnographic research and movement histories at Aetna Street, we present three encampment geographies: return, refuge, and refusal. We conceptualize the encampment as a site of enforced return and a space of refuge whose residents are akin to refugees. In doing so, we situate the homeless encampment in a global geography of camps, drawing on literatures that are attentive to expulsion, containment, and asylum. Yet encampment residents refuse enclosure, in particular, exploitation and its articulation in wage–rent relations. In keeping with Aetna's history as a node of Black life in Los Angeles, we study these geographies of struggle guided by Black feminist theory, notably the Practicing Refusal Collective. In doing so, we conceptualize the encampment as a form of living within and beyond racial capitalism.

Introduction

The Aetna encampment, colloquially known as the “Skid Row of the Valley,” has been a place of refuge and return in Van Nuys, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, since at least 2017. While the history of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles as a place of shelter since the late 19th century and then as a containment zone for the city's homeless since the 1970s is well known, Van Nuys too became a key site of homeless services for the Valley in the 1950s. Since the 1990s, downtown Van Nuys has been a hub for unhoused people, including those being cycled through the Van Nuys Jail and those living precariously in its predominantly lower-income neighborhoods.

An archipelago of shifting settlements, the Aetna Street encampment (Figure 1) first formed in 2017, with people inhabiting the courtyard of Van Nuys City Hall, across from the Superior Courthouse, adjacent to the Police Station and the Probation Department, and not far from the Van Nuys Jail. Encouraged by state functionaries to move to Aetna Street, people then settled along the bike paths and sidewalks bordering the LA Metro Orange line and an LA Department of Water and Power facility. As LA Metro police drove residents off the bike paths, the sidewalks of Aetna Street filled up with tents. Adjacent to it was a commercial district with car dealerships, an ice factory, recycling center, and 7–11 store. Like other encampments in Los Angeles, the Aetna encampment has been a jurisdictional space of enforcement zones, including LAMC 56.11 which restricts the personal belongings of those living on the streets and LAMC 41.18, an anticamping law whose police power was expanded in 2022. In September 2023, the Aetna encampment was evicted through the Mayor's Inside Safe operation, a program that removes visible homeless settlements and places residents in motels and shelters. The sidewalks were enclosed through fences, and anyone who dared to remain faced police violence. Those who refused Inside Safe's institutionalization migrated to the Compound, a freeway easement under the jurisdiction of the US Army Corp of Engineers, which has become the latest target of enforcement and sweeps. As we write this article, a trickle of tents is once again emerging in the interstices of the city's fences at Aetna, marking the return of those with nowhere else to go.

The Aetna encampment is a space shaped by state power and by poor people's refusal of, and rebellion against, such power. Building on the work of Herring, Sparks, and Speer, we study the homeless encampment as a form of territorialized poverty that is governed by the state and as a mode of living that reconfigures and exceeds such governance. Relegated to live in public, Aetna residents have transformed the street into home. Following Ritterbusch and El Cilencio (2020: 217, 210), we conceptualize Aetna as a “street-connected” community, with the street “as a site where state violence is enacted in tangible forms across scales” and where “revolution is situated” with a “daily struggle for justice.” In this article, we show how the state institutionalizes the street not only through the regulation of public spaces such as sidewalks but also through the modality of shelter programs. Through such relational geographies, we stretch conceptualizations of homeless encampments. State power manifests itself in such spaces through arrests, citations, and sanitation clean-ups, as well as rules of residence and expulsion. Such power is exercised by state entities ranging from police and sanitation as well as by the contracted nonprofits that operate homeless shelters and services. In short, for the homeless encampment, the state is landlord. Following Blomley (2020), we situate unhoused subjects within, and not outside, property relations. We argue that the homeless encampment is a distinctive property space, regulated by the state, one where residents are constantly made precarious, be it as trespassers on the street or as rule-bound participants in shelter programs that are presented as humanitarian alternatives to the street. In doing so, we situate the homeless encampments of Los Angeles in a global geography of refugee camps and the twinned logics of racial banishment and humanitarian protection. Following Ramakrishnan and Thieme (2022), we are interested in tracing how care and solidarity emerge within and against such state logics, involving what Lancione (2023) conceptualizes as radical forms of inhabitation. As Abourahme (2024: 165) teaches us, the countergeography to “mass encampment” is inhabitation. Drawing on ethnographic research and movement histories, we conceptualize the necessity and impossibility of inhabitation through the frames of refuge, return, and refusal. We call these encampment geographies because they remain tethered to the homeless encampment and its modalities of state power even when people have been forced into, or uprooted from, such spaces. Our use of the term refusal signals our reliance on Black studies and Indigenous studies scholarship to chart the forms of insurgency that attend fugitivity and exile in the U.S. postcolony.

When the state is your landlord

The history of Aetna Street is a constantly shifting relationship between state, street, and shelter. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and movement histories, we share three key moments that make visible this relationship and that allow us to understand the role of the state as landlord for the homeless encampment. Our chronology highlights moments of refuge, return, and refusal at Aetna Street, spatial formations that we present in this article as encampment geographies.

Figure 1.

Aetna street core encampment.

Moment 1: The street becomes a zone

On 26 August 2020, A Bridge Home shelter opened in the middle of the Aetna Street encampment. Located on land leased by the City of Los Angeles from LA Metro, with voter-approved funding for shelter beds by the County of Los Angeles, it was designed by Lehrer Architects (n.d.) who described it as “lightning-quick, inventive, and beautiful.” The gated facility was accompanied by a Special Enforcement and Cleaning Zone, one that authorized the city to deploy police and sanitation forces for encampment clearings, colloquially known as sweeps, even amid a global pandemic. When the shelter opened, encampment residents already knew what this was about. Longtime Aetna resident, Latoya Harris commented pithily on opening day: “It's not for us. It's here to remove us.” “It looks like a Martha Stewart prison,” Latoya added. Indeed, on that day, Aetna residents and organizers staged a “Services Not Sweeps” action, forming an 8-hour blockade of all access points to the street and refusing entry to the functionaries of the state, including the police (Figure 2).

Following Chua and Bosworth (2023: 1302), the Aetna blockade can be understood as a “spatial form” that interrupts the circulation of police and carceral power. Unable to penetrate the Aetna Street encampment, police and sanitation forces headed to a cluster of tents a couple of blocks away. There were nearly 40 police officers who raided a single tent, arresting anyone who dared to intervene. A few days later, on September 3, 2020, organizers and residents planned an action titled Breakfast not Bulldozers. But this time, the state staged the impasse, with police forces cordoning off Aetna Street by 3 am. Trapped in this way, Aetna residents had to choose between getting food from the breakfast stations set up outside of the cordon or defending their tents and belongings. Those who had led the opening day blockade, such as Latoya, were systematically targeted and lost everything in the “clean-up” that day. As for shelter residents, the police served them a special breakfast to ensure that they felt no need to participate in the action. In interviews, organizers of the action said that they felt “pulverized.” From that point on, both sweeps and sweep defense at Aetna were routinized, taking place with cruel regularity. It became, as one organizer put it, “a fucking weekly date with LAPD and the city.” In the following months, state violence escalated, taking the form of expanded anticamping laws that fortified enforcement zones around shelters and criminalized poor people living on the streets in such zones.

When the state is your landlord, your home is a zone. When the street is your home, sitting, lying, sleeping become crimes.

Moment 2: Shelter is a Farce

It soon became clear that the encampment was going to provide refuge to shelter participants rather than the other way around. Latoya described it thus: “Now the city is building these fucking buildings in our encampments. And so now damn near everybody on this block has come from that shelter … The Bridge Home is supplying us with our newest set of people. It's fucking hilarious.” One of these people is Tyson Parker, a 39-year-old Black man who describes himself as a college-educated creative entrepreneur. There's “hood shit” going on inside that facility, he said in an interview with us, “and this is why I’m safer out here than inside of there.” Parker faced numerous threats of “non-compliance charges” by shelter staff which he experienced as disrespect. His critique of this institutionalization can be read as what Siener (2022: 369) interprets as the blues epistemology of homeless shelters—“insurgent, critical explanations of these institutional spaces.” Parker explained the “hood shit” thus:

“’What's your name?’ ‘It don't matter.’ ‘Go to your room.’ I said, ‘I don't have a room’ … And this is a young black dude, you feel me? If we was on the streets and a nigga talk to me like that I'd be are they fucking with me? Like, I got this ankle monitor on and that's why I put my knife right next to it … And this is who you hire? … His first day he told me to take off my hat. ‘For what? A hat bomb, my nigga?’ I said, ‘You know what I am Rastafarian. I don't even take off my hat in court bitch.’ … You're mad that I can read better than you … I have my bachelor's degree. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a AA. He said, ‘Make sure you guys get your snacks.’ ‘Bitch nigga you telling me about snacks. Cause you can't bring your own water in there. You can't bring your own food. What the fuck do I need a snack for? Nigga, I need an apartment.’”

When the state is your landlord, the rules of habitation are absurd.

On May 15, 2023, the Salvation Army, the nonprofit giant contracted to run the shelter, issued a notice to all shelter participants with a new set of rules including one that said that feeding and washing clothes for people not in the shelter is grounds for termination from the program. Aetna residents and organizers staged a protest, renaming the Salvation Army the Starvation Army (Figure 3) and crowdfunding a mini washing machine and hooking it up to a generator, where they washed the clothes of those on the street as well as in the shelter. In doing so, they came to develop an active imagination of how the shelter, sited on public land and financed by public dollars, could be repurposed as a “universal access center,” with services for those in need. As state violence escalated so expanded this “counterplanning,” a phrase we borrow from Federici and Jones (2020: 158) to consider the “uprising … that takes place every day in many microacts of refusal” on the streets.

Moment 3: Living amid expulsion

In September 2023, the city swept the Aetna Street encampment, displacing its residents to motels and threatening arrests for those daring to remain on the streets. Much of the area was enclosed and fenced, including public sidewalks and LA Metro parking lots. In the midst of it all remained the ABH shelter, emptied of residents through steady expulsions. Suddenly, one night, the shelter itself was dismantled, like a house of cards, and wheeled away. The shelter was gone but the enforcement zone remained. The Matthews family, long-time Aetna residents who were expelled from their motel placement because of their son's mental health episodes, returned a few months later after the displacement and pitched a tent in the parking lot of the disappeared shelter. Tabitha Matthews described the return thus: “They dump us here like we told them they were gonna. We predicted it.” She continued:

“The Mayor is using the money they get for stupid things like those dumb metal signs [special enforcement zone signs] … They’ve spent $3 million on them. What else could that money have been used for? You could have housed a bunch of people and opened up parking lots that are unused.”

The Matthews family had once lived in the ABH shelter and had been pushed out of it onto the streets. Tabitha reflected: “We learned a valuable lesson with these Bridge Homes. Never go into a program that refuses to give you a written list of rules before you enter the program. They say, ‘Oh you broke rules.’ What rules did we break? If the rules aren’t written down, they don’t exist.”

When the state is your landlord, the street is your home.

A few days after Tabitha and her family returned to settle into the parking lot of the former ABH shelter, she called the police on Terrell, another long-time Aetna resident. Terrell, a three-striker, was arrested and jailed.

When the state is your landlord, the cops are your neighbors.

Indeed, ever since her arrival at Aetna Street, Tabitha felt kinship with cops, advocating to invite them to community events, movement spaces, and our research spaces. Such kinship was not shaken by her experiences of eviction and expulsion. Tabitha proudly recalls: “I claimed the sidewalk at Aetna Street. I told sanitation and the police that I claim this sidewalk for myself, my family, and my ancestors.” If Sparks (2024: 141) reminds us that the sanctioned encampment upholds “settler norms,” then we argue that so can unsanctioned encampments. Tabitha's settler worldview, loyal to police-property arrangements, requires kinship with cops.

Figure 2.

Blockade at Aetna Street, August 26, 2020. Credit: Anthony Orendorff.

Encampment geographies

There is now a substantial body of scholarship on the homeless encampment as a space of political agency. For example, with attention to “practices of self-management,” Sparks (2017: 86, 88) invites us to consider how encampments are “foreground[ing] the agency of the homeless in the production of new political spaces and subjectivities.” Farrington (2023: 215) argues that “self-organized encampments often exert their own creative forms of agency in response to local governments’ attempts to banish them.” In a similar vein, our previous research has documented and analyzed the homeless encampment as creating infrastructures of community in the face of racial banishment (After Echo Park Lake Research Collective, 2022).

Scholars such as Herring (2014) and Speer (2019) have drawn attention to a distinctive type of encampment, those sanctioned by the state. Sparks (2024: 143) argues that sanctioned encampments immediately conjure a “deviant other, the unsanctioned encampment,” one that is then managed through “removal and displacement.” In this article, we unsettle the distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned encampments. We argue that the unsanctioned encampment must also be understood as a state space, one that encompasses different forms of institutionalization and governance that span the streets and shelter programs. To this end, we present three theoretical moves, each of which situates mass homelessness in the United States in a global geography of racial capitalism.

First, we are concerned with the relationship between encampment and forced mobility. We draw on Burgum and Vasudevan (2023: 347) to consider the encampment as geography of “occupation, trespass, and squatting.” We are especially interested in Burgum and Vasudevan's (2023: 355) emphasis on trespass as disclosing and disrupting enclosure and other “colonial genealogies of property norms.” But we also situate trespass in relation to banishment and other forms of expulsion, conceptualizing the homeless encampment as a form of “carceral migration.” We borrow this analytic from Kurwa and Gurusami (2022: 359) who emphasize “forcible movement” and thus allow us to understand homeless encampments as an instantiation of what Tazzioli (2018: 2765) calls “containment through mobility,” or the “administrative, political and legal measures that use (forced) mobility as a technique of government.” Learning from Abourahme (2024: 1–2), we are concerned with how people come to be “encamped,” “living in the permanent temporariness of camptime, with varying degrees of extraterritorial dislocation and extralegal vulnerability.” It is important to note that we do not wish to set up either analogy or comparison between Palestine and the U.S. homeless encampment. Indeed, we approach this matter with great caution. Yet, we are convinced that historical geographies such as Palestine where settler colonialism is laid bare require us to rethink forms and meanings of displacement and settlement “here.”

Second, we seek to expand the theorization of state power and violence in relation to U.S. mass homelessness. We join Speer (2018) in situating the homeless encampment in a global geography of “detention and refugee camps … driven by a combination of care and protection, as well as custody and control.” Whether it be the welfare services and programs of the state or that of nonprofits and charities, humanitarianism is, as Darling (2009: 649) argues, “a biopolitical logic of `compassionate repression.’” Darling appropriately emphasizes that such compassion must be understood in relation to “sovereign abandonment.” But we are also left with an important provocation in the case of Aetna Street and other homeless encampments and migrant camps. How do we make sense of forms of organizing that mobilize mutual aid? While these are structured by the twinned logics of abandonment and humanitarianism, they also exceed them. We are inspired by the concept of “peripheral humanitarianism” put forward by Ramakrishnan and Thieme (2022). Studying “place-based assemblages of humanitarian care” that “formed in the shadows of institutional camps” in a working-class neighborhood of Paris, they draw attention to how “ephemeral and experimental” strategies were both “palliative” and “profound” in challenging “migrant exclusions” and other precarities (Ramakrishnan and Thieme, 2022: 736). In particular, Ramakrishnan and Thieme (2022: 766), following Stierl (2018), “keep in tension the potential for ‘disobedient’ practices to emerge with the very real threat of co-optation.” We find this to be crucially important in interpreting the homeless encampment.

Third, if we take seriously “spatial disobedience,” a term we borrow from Tazzioli (2018), then it is necessary to consider the forms and practices that this takes. We argue that Aetna Street must be understood as what Dozier (2022: 1) identifies as a “Black spatial vision,” one that is part of a history “of Black-led and supported encampment communities” in Los Angeles that intervene in “the carceral organisation of homelessness.” Drawing on Black feminist refusal, notably the Practicing Refusal Collective cofounded by Campt and Hartman, we specify this Black spatial vision through the modality of refusal. Refusal is, as Campt (2019: 83) puts it, “a rejection of the status quo as livable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation i.e., a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible.” We are especially interested in the geographies of refusal. One example is the blockade, which Chua and Bosworth (2023: 1310), following Simpson (2017) understand as “generative refusal,” both a refusal of “colonial structures” and the affirmation of an alternative mode of living. The spatial forms of refusal also include what Hartman calls “the wayward,” the ungovernability of space and subjects.

“The cardboard placards for the tumult and upheaval she incited might have said: Don’t mess with me. I am not afraid to smash things up. But hers was a struggle without formal declarations of policy, slogan, or credos. It required no party platform or ten-point program … [S]he well understood that the desire to move as she wanted was nothing short of treason … Her way of living was nothing short of anarchy … She was ungovernable” (Hartman, 2018: 465, 466, 469)

Rivera et al. (2022: 629) remind us that “refusal politics” is the “refusal of propertied personhood and the forms of racialized premature death that flow from it,” including the “refusal of non-profit institutional forms.” And indeed “the disavowal of … state-governed projects” (Sojoyner, 2017: 516) is amply evident at Aetna Street. This is, as Mei-Singh (2023: 373) argues, a form of “living with abandon” within and against organized abandonment, including “holding an ambivalent relationship with aspirations to thrive within capitalism.” Such ambivalence is starkly and poignantly evident in practices, narrations, and memories of settlement at Aetna Street, including fraught contestations over territory and community.

Collectivizing research

This article is written by two members of a larger research collective made up of university, encampment, and movement scholars. Our research about, and with, the Aetna Street encampment has involved the following methods. From Fall 2022 until May 2025, we have undertaken three to five lengthy interviews with each of 18 Aetna residents as they are churned through state spaces, a structure that we have come to call “displaceability by design” (Roy et al., 2025). Our questions have focused on encampment life, the navigation of housing and shelter systems, familial and community networks, and encounters with different aspects of state power, including policing, incarceration, and family separation, and poor people's organizing. Alongside these interviews, we have sought to watch the state, a practice learned from movements in Los Angeles, including Community Watch by the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), Street Watch LA, and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. This has included ethnographic presence on the streets as well as at the policed boundaries of other state spaces such as shelter programs. We have relied heavily on the deep involvement of Carla Orendorff, coauthor of this article, in Aetna Street Solidarity and the San Fernando Homeless Valley Union. This movement work can be understood as what Hagan (2021: 358) calls “a forensics of encampment,” a bearing witness that takes meticulous account of both state violence and inhabitation. Aetna residents have also insisted that we read, collect, and save their state records. Usually denied access to their own paperwork, they have made sure that we scan and file the documents that they have, be it citations or eviction notices or in the rare cases, a housing voucher. Following Sojoyner (2021: 660), we understand this as a “fugitive archival practice [that] is a direct contestation to state-sanctioned knowledge production” and its carceral archives.

We have also had unusual access to administrative data on homelessness. Starting in 2021, Ananya Roy, coauthor of this article, has held a Data Usage Agreement with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) that generates identified data on homeless individuals in LA County. Dating to 2014, this is a vast database that includes 2264 clients geotagged in the LAHSA data as currently or having formerly resided in the archipelago of settlements at, or in proximity to, Aetna Street. While we do not analyze this data in this article, we keep it in mind as a methodology for “watching the state” (Roy et al., 2025).

Our research procedures have followed the usual protocols of ethical research—informed consent, anonymization of research subjects, protection of vulnerable status and sensitive data. But in addition, we have sought to take into account the concerns and aspirations of the Aetna Street community that far exceed university protocols. Following Speer (2021: 627), we are acutely aware of the “epistemic displacement” of subaltern subjects through the appropriation of their narratives and histories. Our work has been guided by a Community Advisory Board which has included long-time Aetna residents such as Latoya Harris and Jackie Baker. In 2023, Ananya and Carla, the two authors of this article, cotaught a year-long graduate-level Community Collaborative course at UCLA Urban Planning focused on Aetna Street. Several Aetna residents who are prominent in this article, including Latoya Harris, Jackie Baker, Thomas Patterson, and Tabitha Matthews, were participants in the course and envisioned it as a “lab for liberatory projects.” Finally, as Aetna has been shaped by deep relationality so has our research. Latoya Harris and Carla went to the same high school in the San Fernando Valley, something they discovered while organizing together at Aetna.

While our research resembles community-engaged scholarship, it is better understood as collectivization. For us, this entails the following. First, we have sought to create a shared terrain of scholarship across the domains of university, movement, and encampment. In doing so, we have militated against a division of labor where university scholars theorize the experience of those living and organizing under conditions of precarity. The key analytical frameworks of this article, such as return, refuge/e, and refusal, emanate from the self-understanding of encampment and movement scholars and in conversation and collaboration with university scholars. Our work resembles and draws inspiration from “radical-born Latin American participatory frameworks” of research (Correa-Salazar et al., 2022: 2494), those that explicitly align with liberation movements.

Second, the collectivization of research has been not only a space of comradeship but also one of contention. We have welcomed debate, often arguing for months over methodologies, conceptual terms, and more. Within the Community Advisory Board, there has been fierce disagreement about encampment histories and open conflict about who gets to tell these histories. These boiled over into our class, often stalling assignments and projects. But as Correa-Salazar et al. (2022: 2495) eloquently state: “We have learned to live in a way that keeps us close, but not to avoid conflict.” This article then is developed through collective, and sometimes contentious, analysis. But it is not written on behalf of the Aetna Street encampment or even the Aetna Street research collective. For this reason, other than the authors, Aetna residents and organizers remain anonymized in it, even when they are members of the research collective. The exception is those who have died, such as Anthony Goodwin, and whose deaths have been the subject of public and media coverage and whose stories we have shared with the permission of family members.

Third, it is crucial to understand such contention and conflict in relation to state violence, to the state as landlord. Members of our research collective have been repeatedly subjected to police harassment and arrest, including for the act of bearing witness to displacement and disappearance. For example, Carla, coauthor of this article, has been repeatedly targeted by the police at Aetna Street. And despite our efforts and intentions, the research has not always been a counterpoint to such state violence. We were unable to prevent the enclosure of Aetna Street and the displacement of its residents, even when our scholars, such as Carla, steadfastly stared down the barrel of police guns (Figure 4).

What follows is three encampment geographies—return, refuge/e, refusal—developed through the contentious and fugitive practices of collectivized research. These are conceptual frameworks put forward by Aetna residents and organizers as a poor people's history of Los Angeles. Acutely aware that the state as landlord generates accounts and portraits of encampments, such a history refuses such narratives and demands return and refuge.

Return

Latoya first met Carla at a memorial she had organized for a friend who had died of complications from sickle cell anemia. He was barely 21 years old and Latoya had nicknamed him Youngster. A Black woman, who in her own words has been “institutionalized” for much of her life—in foster care, in prison, in the army, in carceral shelters—Latoya was a central figure at Aetna Street. She had first come to Aetna after meeting Flaca, “her homegirl,” at one of the shelters:

“She's like, ‘wanna come over and chill at my tent?’ She had a fuckin chandelier in her tent. A washer and dryer. A whole set up … So, I was like—‘they just let you guys do this?’ She was like, ‘yeah fool.’ She had full power, everything that you needed, for free. And I was just looking up at the chandelier, and thinking, ‘I can build.’ So from that day on, I just set up next to her.”

Aetna became home for Latoya, the place to which she returned over and over again amid the churn of housing and shelter placements. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she enrolled in and was subsequently expelled from, Project Roomkey, an emergency housing program, for breaking program rules. “It's fuckin sad there,” Latoya said, “You’re locked up. It's just so demeaning.”

Figure 3.

“Starvation Army.” June 14, 2023. Credit: Carla Orendorff.

The death of Youngster, a young Black man, hit her hard:

“I’m just like, the youngest one that was out there died … I was the one that called the ambulance, when he um—when he went to the hospital for the last time … I know he hadn’t done anything … I mean, he’d never even left California … So, it was just sad.”

At Aetna, death has always haunted return.

It was Carla's first day doing mutual aid work at Aetna Street and Latoya invited her to join them for the barbecue meal she had prepared for Youngster's memorial. Over the years, Latoya and Carla were to organize many memorials at Aetna Street. One of these was for Anthony Goodwin, a Black veteran who was unable to access housing because of race and income discrimination despite having a voucher. Tony lived on the sidewalk in one of the alleys bordering Aetna Street and was targeted by the cops for his food pantry. Carla remembers him as a “helper and a healer … he loved to put on some Anita Baker and cook for everyone … His spot was an invitation for those who had nowhere else to go.” Like Latoya, Tony enrolled in, and was expelled from, Project Roomkey, an emergency housing program, in his case for missing its 7 pm curfew. He returned to Aetna Street and passed away there a few days later. In one of our interviews, we asked Latoya, “How do you manage your grief?” In a quiet voice, she replied, “I do it with, you know, holding the memorial for my friends.”

We argue that an important part of Aetna Street as a place of return is that the encampment has been a bustling node of Black life and belonging in Los Angeles. Our research shows that over 60% of Aetna residents are Black, a much higher proportion than the city where about 8% of the population is Black. Its key Black residents, such as the Harris sisters, Thomas Patterson, Anthony Goodwin, and Raymond Houston, are connected to one another across generations and families through ties that stretch into the surrounding neighborhoods. They have conceptualized and presented life at Aetna as shaped by Black culture, music, and beauty—“Black excellence” as Gina Harris likes to put it.

Raymond Houston tells us that he arrived at Aetna Street in 2017 after he lost his job. His brother was already living here and passed away in the vicinity. His niece, Rosie, moved into the encampment, a couple of years later with her husband and family of cats. Thomas Patterson, Tony's cousin, also found his way to Aetna Street in 2017 after being evicted from the Section 8 housing he shared with his girlfriend. He settled in the Canopy, which was a collection of tents in the courtyard of the Van Nuys City Hall and across from the police station. From the very start, Thomas took it upon himself to maintain safety, watching out for those he described as “predators.” When the encampment was pushed out of the courtyard and reinstalled at Aetna Street, Thomas once again imposed order: “We really didn't have police harassment because I tried to enforce cleanings. Because that's what I was told by the police. Less trash, less of eyesore, less complaints.” Thomas explained that he “tried to keep theft down,” ensuring that residents were not stealing from each other. In our interviews with him, we asked him how and why he came to control Aetna Street. Thomas responded:

“See my thing is that because Aetna is in the middle of a Mexican gang neighborhood … And this is not racial. You know, everybody get along … It's just to prevent certain things … I’m Black and say if somebody Black is doing something wrong, and it could be prevented, I’m ready to deal with it.”

Incarcerated several times, Thomas returned to Aetna each time upon release and usually on probation. But lest we romanticize such return, it is necessary to heed Thomas's reluctance to return: “It's difficult to live on the streets … I don’t think you can ever adjust.”

Thinking from Aetna Street, we put forward return as an encampment geography. In doing so, we conceptualize return as (en)forced, and even necropolitical. Aetna Street was at once home and deathbed for Tony. In particular, we are concerned with the relationship between return and state violence, be it eviction and expulsion or policing. When we asked Thomas about why Aetna Street is called the Skid Row of the Valley, he gave us compelling insight into precisely this relationship. Tony, he reminded us, had come from Skid Row to Aetna, traversing that 30-mile distance, as had many others. So had several of the cops who police the area. Our research shows that like Skid Row, Aetna Street served as a containment zone. It was as Thomas put it, “a designated spot for the homeless,” with the police directing people to Aetna as they pushed them out of other areas. Thinking from Palestine, Abourahme (2025) separates return from nostalgia: “We return because we must.”

Tyson Parker describes his (en)forced return to Aetna from shelter programs thus:

“They made it unlivable. They made it unconducive to human habitation. Like they made sure that I would leave. I've kept records and I've sent emails and pictures and all this shit. But none of those count though, like, who are you telling?”

We also place return in tension with the desire for elsewhere. Parker thinks of Aetna Street as his community, noting that it is here that he has received help and support. Yet, Parker yearned to be elsewhere: “At this point, anywhere where I could just be left alone, it don't matter if it was in hell … Like, I just want to close the door and just have a peace of mind so I can actually gather my thoughts, and make a formidable plan.” Latoya made formidable plans for Aetna Street, from occupying the vacant parking lots owned by LA Metro to taking over the ABH shelter. But she too longed for elsewhere:

“I want to get off Aetna. Like, I want to take a squatting place and take that shit over … I wanna do it with trans and queer people out there who want to trap together … I would do it with my street, but them niggas ain’t worth it. Motherfuckers are screaming for help and shit … I’m so sick and tired of them not knowing how to function in society.”

Refug/e

“What does home mean to you?” is a question with which we often concluded our interviews with Aetna residents. Parker did not hesitate in responding. “Safety,” he said:

“My Hispanic family that took me, that was a home you know. I realized I never had a key and the doors were always open. I didn't even realize that till I got back to Oakland. Motherfuckers like ‘did you lock the door?’ At my Hispanic family house, the garage was always open, the front door, back.”

At Aetna Steet, Parker did not feel safe but “comfortable enough to be here.”

Refuge at Aetna Street though was always disturbed by the cops. “Guti-terrorist,” is what Gina Harris, Latoya's sister, started calling Senior Lead Officer, Gutierrez. After all, as she noted, they terrorized Aetna residents, notably by seizing and destroying belongings during sweeps. This was the same Senior Lead Officer that Tabitha saw as a friend and was keen to invite to speak in our class. Billed as encampment cleanups by the city, the sweeps required Aetna residents to take down their tents and move all their belongings or risk losing everything. “How would you feel,” Gina asked, “if somebody just came into your apartment or your house and say, ‘Hey, you got 15 minutes move all of this stuff’?” Gina noted that Gutierrez especially targeted Raymond Houston, a 38-year-old Black veteran who was one of the first residents of Aetna Street. Ray was at the center of a web of kin and extra-kin relations. His brother lived on Aetna until he passed away, and then his niece and her family came to live in the encampment. His family and Thomas Patterson's had known each other for many years in the Van Nuys neighborhood. At Aetna Street, while others pitched tents, Ray had built a cabin on wheels, one that could be easily moved during a sweep. Gutierrez was furious about this, Gina noted.

Ray knew well that the sanitation sweeps were all about policing the encampment. He called it “hunting the homeless,” pointing out the mounted police that often accompanied sweeps. “It's not security for sanitation,” he noted, “it's an enforcement against the people. And when you see that over and over again, you become resistant.” Ray's use of the term hunting is evocative of what Palmas (2021: 496) has called “institutional hunting,” where “migrants are hunted by the authorities and the police on a daily basis.” While Palmas is writing about the “Calais jungle,” a “refugee makeshift settlement” in Calais, France, that became notorious as a place of both survival and suffering, the theme of “hunting” resonates in the homeless encampments of Los Angeles.

Designing and building became Ray's repertoire of resistance, creating what Speer (2019: 575) describes as an “alternative aesthetic practice grounded in reuse, survival and collective appropriation of urban space.” Ray, for example, repurposed and redesigned the fire hydrant on Aetna Street as a sustainable water source for the block. It was important for him that one could fit the hydrant with a hose without wasting any water. On hot summer days, he would improvise a pool for Aetna residents and fill up their water bottles and jugs. For Ray, the street was a spatial practice: “The connection between the street and the street is actually the people, the migration of people.” In the face of institutional hunting, such practices created refuge.

Thinking from a global geography of camps, we place refuge in relation to the precarious status of refugee, an ontological category that can only be understood in relation to state power, including the forced return wrought by displacement. We further argue that humanitarian exchange is an important component of refuge, especially for those designated as refugees by state power, be it the asylum-seeker or the unhoused. Aetna residents talked of a humanitarian understanding between them and their neighbors, from church volunteers to the salespeople at the Honda car dealership. Thomas Patterson described an incident where when his girlfriend, Jackie Baker, stayed back from work to protect her belongings during a sweep, workers at the neighboring LADWP facility intervened with, and berated, LA Sanitation and LAPD. As Thomas put it, “they had no reason to be against us because we wasn't damaging. We were just living there.” Aetna residents also shared accounts of the many volunteers who would come by with food and other resources on a regular basis. Gina effusively described them thus:

“Tim comes on Saturdays with burritos and coffee and that's my rock. He totally has a crush on me. The Sunday people, they have like all the food and clothing water and stuff. Tuesday food people, Wednesday we got this one lady baby passing out stuff like you know regular. Mike comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays bringing full sandwiches and like on Thursdays he goes to Trader Joe's and picks up like sweets and shit. There's Jessie with lemonade and trash bags and hand sanitizers every day. Tuesday is community night with Carla. Eric and Allie with the risk prevention. That's our regulars.”

Gina's mediation of this humanitarianism is noteworthy: “I tell people you should go to talk to everybody, be nice. I hate when people be mean to the volunteers.” But she was also keenly aware of the function of the encampment in humanitarian exchange: “This was a plush location for the volunteers.” In turn, Gina liked to be served by the volunteers: “Like we didn't have to get up. We're gonna bring the food to you. ‘Maître d’ yes, can I get a soda?’”

It wasn’t just volunteerism. At Aetna Street, mutual aid became a key modality of organizing, turning the encampment into a site of what Chua (2020: S-129) has called “abolitionist world-making.” Latoya's invitation to Carla to stay for a meal at Youngster's memorial was capacious and purposeful. In the coming months and years, Carla was to become one of the main organizers at Aetna Street, co-organizing with Latoya, Gina, Jackie, Ray, Parker, and other Aetna residents. That invitation shifted humanitarian exchange, where volunteers would distribute supplies from their car windows, to mutual aid and even abolitionist struggle. “Get out of your car,” Latoya had said. Carla took that seriously as did several other organizers who came to form the San Fernando chapter of Street Watch Los Angeles, a movement organization challenging the criminalization of homelessness. They organized protests and blockades, weekly community nights, and were present each week to witness, document, and intervene in sweeps. A few times a year, they organized an elaborate street festival called Aetnapalooza. It was, as Carla put it, “an invitation from a houseless community that had overnight been made criminal.”

During our class at UCLA, Renato Abramowicz Santos, a comrade from Brazil active in housing justice work in Sao Paulo, commented that he did not understand the American focus on mutual aid. We were reading Spade's (2020: 131) essay, “Solidarity Not Charity,” and debating the argument that “mutual aid is an often devalued iteration of radical collective care.” But is such care political, Renato asked? He focused on this line in the essay: that the “expanding use of mutual aid strategies will be the most effective way to … build the infrastructure we need for coming disasters.” Renato said to the class, which was made up of Aetna residents and organizers as well as UCLA graduate students: “I get it now. You are all living a constant disaster. The U.S. is a nonstop disaster.”

Mutual aid was crucial to the sustenance of life. But it is the sweeps that radicalized everyone. Once again, it is Latoya who had thrown down the challenge of sweep defense, saying to Carla: “You guys saw this notice and you haven't done anything about it.” At a convening we held with Street Watch organizers, Katie and Valier reflected on how they arrived at Aetna Street to do food justice work but soon found themselves involved in sweep defense. Organizers helped residents move their belongings and confronted and recorded the police. Damien, a long-time Aetna resident, reminisced: “I really appreciate the Street Watch team. I remember when I first met them, as soon the police showed up, they were like ‘fuck the police!’ Really that's how y'all get down?” As state violence escalated, so did the sweep defense. It became a key modality for ensuring refuge. For example, in August 2023, “three years after the first blockade at Aetna, Street Watch staged another one, bringing in UCLA medical students in a White Coat Brigade,” mobilizing organizers from across the city, renting a U Haul to move and store belongings, and calling and pressuring city council members and service providers to call off the sweep. “They held the street all day” Carla noted, refusing entry to the sanitation trucks. But in the sweep that came the following week, the city bulldozed tents and other belongings as punishment for the refusal.

At our research convening, Street Watch organizers described the sweeps as “intense” and ‘traumatizing” and “unrelenting.” Carla noted: “I think about every time that I’ve been present for an Aetna sweep, someone gets arrested and someone goes to hospital and usually most people lose everything they have.” Angel, who was equally unrelenting in his filming of sanitation and police, shared: “Like I had a personal routine where like the night before, like I would just try to like calm myself and then when I would go I used to drink coffee and right before the sweep, like TMI, but I feel like I had to shit myself … It's even hard for me because I try to be a tough guy, but like I was getting like an anxiety attack. And I was like, fuck, like, I know what's about to happen.” Caleb added: “Yeah, how dare I be traumatized? When I'm a privileged housed person. If you think about it like a soldier, like he can't fucking go out if he's just gonna fall apart in the fucking battlefield.” There was no glory to be had in the sweep defenses. Caleb and Jim stated that they struggled with the question, “If we help people before sanitation gets there, organizing to move their belongings, do we just work for sanitation basically? Are we just doing the city's job?” Melanie added: “Yeah, as if we were like a glorified moving company.”

Such reflections indicate the constant presence of state violence as a structuring force in encampments, one that turned residents into refugees and made refuge elusive and precarious. Sweep defense and mutual aid, while vital counterpoints to such violence, can too often be folded into such power, serving to buttress banishment by doing the state's work.

Refusal

In September 2023, just a month after the White Coat Brigade blockade, the Aetna Street community was displaced through an Inside Safe operation, the city's new “encampment resolution” program (Figure 5). The majority of those who accepted shelter continue to wait in a motel for housing placements. Those like Latoya who received a housing placement remain suspended in a state of uncertainty about the duration of the placement. It turns out that the state as landlord is not bound by the rules and regulations of tenancy. Those like Gina and Ray who refused to leave the streets continue to be subjected to police harassment and even arrests.

Much of Aetna Street has been fenced, and the ABH shelter dismantled. But the special enforcement zone remains, allowing law enforcement and sanitation to continue sweeps. Gina Harris commented that she is “staying just outside of hell,” in other words, “just outside the zone.” To do so she moves every week or so, and sometimes every day, navigating different jurisdictions and property regimes—the church, the car dealership, the busway, the bike path, the LA Metro parking lots. Gina calls it the “Homeless Olympics,” explaining that “the relay is ‘how fast can you pack your shit and move?’” She refuses to be trapped by the cops, she explains. “It requires superhuman strength; the homeless are expected to be superhuman,” Gina concludes.

Thinking from Aetna Street, and its modes of living within, outside, and beyond the zone, we conceptualize refusal as an encampment geography. It is a term presented to us by Latoya at the start of our research:

“Aetna used to be tent to tent. I am now the person who has been here the longest. We are in a ceasefire. Every other place has been broken up, especially those next to a shelter. We are still going strong. And Aetna looks like this because people refuse to leave. You all should call it the refusal. A community in resistance.”

Refusal is something more than/ other than rebellion. Aetna Street is, as Campt (2019: 80) would argue “the practice of refusal,” one that “functions … through relationality and adjacency.” It is in Hartman's (2018) words, a “revolution in a minor key,” a living otherwise that refuses “racial enclosure.”

Aetna Street can be understood as a refusal of private property regimes. Residents were acutely aware not only that the state was their landlord but also that they were surrounded by plots of vacant public land—for example, LA Metro's parking lots—each fenced, locked and policed. Highly critical of the ABH shelter and its use of public land and public dollars, Aetna residents sought to reimagine it as a universal access center for the city's poor and unhoused. “It's about the land, and it's about the police,” Gina said to us many times. Yet, Aetna residents were reluctant to think of themselves as “landless.” Carla explained: “Landless has come up, but it's not how people identify themselves because people have a sense of ‘I will return to Aetna. Like, you know, when the fences come down.’” When Latoya would bring up the question of land, stating, “we need land, we don’t have land,” other Aetna residents would counter, “We have this street.” As evident in Tabitha's statements, the encampment was also a settlement. The recursive return to it solidified the desire for settlement.

We have debated these ideas extensively in our research collective as have residents and organizers in the spaces of Aetna Street Solidarity. In doing so, we have come to rethink the encampment as not so much a refusal of private property regimes as a refusal of rent. Carla noted, “Like the one thing that people kind of categorically reject is paying rent. That's like one thing that everyone's like, I'm never gonna do that, like ever.” The refusal of rent is specifically a refusal of exploitation. Carla explains:

“Latoya says all the time, ‘I'm just not going to be able to work like everybody else. And like no one's able to work at a fast food place and pay the rent.’ It's not because it's unattainable, but because people have figured out and adapted and survived through this. And they feel a right to claim a place like Aetna because of things that they have endured over time.”

Aetna residents have taught us that when the state is your landlord, you have already paid your dues, including rent.

Figure 4.

Research at gunpoint, September 15, 2023. Credit: Anthony Orendorff.

Equally complex is the question of refusal within state spaces. A common complaint of political elites and powerholders is that the homeless population is shelter-resistant. Our research contradicts this narrative. Through our analysis of the LAHSA data as well as our ethnographic interviews, we find that Aetna residents have repeatedly enrolled in services and shelter placements, despite knowing that they are at best a churn or shuffle, one that often returns them to the streets (Roy et al., 2025). During the course of our research, Aetna residents over and over again enrolled in programs that they knew would not lead to housing. They did so not because they had faith in the state but because they were keen to be inside. Betrayed over and over again by programs such as Inside Safe, they waited, both patiently and impatiently, in bed-bug infested motels and jail-like shelters. Here is Parker:

“I haven't turned down any housing. You go to a place and you get bedbugs or something, it'll make you not want to go to another place, right? … But then I'm back at a shelter. Why? Because I'm not on the street. Why? So I'm not in jail. And I have to keep on putting up with the same disrespectful people, these early 20s people telling me it's time to go to bed. Like bed nigga, what the fuck you mean? I'm supposed to sleep here? Like in a tiny home with this dude I don't even know? But I don’t turn any of it down.”

We have come to read these services and shelter enrollments not as consent but rather as refusal. As our research unsettles the distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned encampments, so it unsettles the distinction between encampment and shelter. Aetna Street teaches us about the relationalities between the rebellious encampment and the conciliatory shelter. The practice of refusal is threaded through such spaces. Even when acquiescing to shelter placements, Aetna residents practice refusal, notably, as Sojoyner (2017: 516) would put it, through a “disavowal of … liberal, difference-making state projects.” Drawing on Simpson (2016: 330), Sojoyner argues that what is being refused is “consent to these conditions, to the interpretation that this was fair, and the ongoing sense that this is all over with.” Here is Latoya Harris describing one of her placements at the Airtel Motel as part of the Project Roomkey program:

“The Death-tel. It was fucking sad there. You can’t visit from room to room. They make it so it's miserable. You’re locked up in there from like 10 til fucking 7. And you can’t do anything. You can’t even go to 7-11 and bring back a fuckin slurpee, when it was summertime, because it was like an open thing. And I’m just like, ‘well, take a sip!’ It's just so demeaning.”

Our research notes overflow with accounts of program rules, from curfews and body searches to lists of prohibited items and prohibited visitors. At every interview, Aetna residents placed in shelters have brought the program paperwork they have surreptitiously saved and collected, those that provide glimpses of absurd and fickle rules, that demonstrate unfair program expulsions, that name the vendors and service providers who hold the lucrative contracts of the homeless industrial complex. They have demanded that we scan and copy these documents, read them, preserve them, analyze them, write about them, and take them seriously. Institutionalized as program participants and denied the status of tenants, they have become rebellious tenants challenging the state as landlord. Above all, they have refused to be forgotten. As Carla puts it, “that the state takes away one's stuff is also the very proof that one exists.” Our research has been a form of anticarceral archiving (Sojoyner, 2021) that honors such refusal.

We present refusal then as a complex formation, one that demands public goods from the state and refuses the demeaning conditionalities that have long attended welfare programs. Such refusal also undercuts any romanticization of street living while recognizing that the street may ultimately be the only home for those unhoused by racial capitalism. Here is Latoya Harris:

“I just really don't believe like anyone's just out there like, I love this sidewalk. It's because anything that they give us it's monitored. Forever. Why it can’t just be housing? No rules. Just housing. Give me a chance to pay the bill under a fucking reasonable amount.”

Conclusion: “I’m out of space”

After the fencing of Aetna Street as part of the City's Inside Safe operation in 2023, Ray returned to the Compound, that sliver of land owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers by the 405 Freeway. He had lived at the Compound before and reminisced of those times:

“I had a graveyard in a sense. It was a small patch of grassy areas, like 10 feet by 10 feet, and I would put like popsicle sticks for the persons that passed. That was the memorial I had for people who had passed. It filled up quick. I was like, okay, see, I'm out of space.”

As the tents of Aetna had to be defended through sweep blockades, so did the memorials that Ray built. Reflecting on the arc of struggle at Aetna Street, Carla notes: “We went from defending people getting evicted from their homes to defending people living in their tents to defending the memorials we created to remember those who died on the streets.” In an essay titled “How Will We Grieve Together?,” Siddiqi (2025) argues that the “grave transforms the refugee's relationship with an emergency territory to a relationship directly with the land … The land persists with or without the refugee camp.”

Our research conceptualizes the homeless encampment as part of global structures of forced mobility and settlement. By honing in on three encampment geographies—return, refuge(e), and refusal—we have sought to demonstrate state power and the rebellions against it. Such rebellions, we argue, transform the territory of the state into inhabitation, a relationship with the land that exceeds and disrupts settlement. Writing about Palestine as the “the world's longest-running case of continuous encampment,” Abourahme (2024: 169, 181) argues that the countergeography to colonial settlement is inhabitation, “the life-making practice of the dispossessed everywhere,” a form of “dwelling[ing] together” crafted by migrants and refugees beyond property relations and juridical protections. Palestine is not a metaphor for such inhabitation; it is the harbinger. In a world structured by expulsion and extermination, how do those cast out as refugees live together and grieve together?

Figure 5.

The enclosure of Aetna Street, September 28, 2023. Credit: Anthony Orendorff.

By rebellions, we do not mean visible forms of revolution. Rather, following Lancione and Simone (2021: 970, 971), we are interested in “how one inhabits dispossession”:

“It is a tensioned endurance that ‘moves along’ by contesting the ground of its given capacities and in fragmented circulations that are never just of one's own or of ‘their’ own control.”

Each of our three encampment geographies makes visible such tensioned endurance. Notably, they do so in relation to the state as landlord, thereby reinscribing the relationship between homelessness as a form of personhood and state-owned and regulated property (streets, sidewalks, shelters, prisons). Constituted through recursive processes of return, the encampment is a counterpoint to permanent displaceability. It is here that the dispossessed undertake refuge, defending inhabited space and conjuring forms of counterplanning that seek to transform state facilities and vacant lots into public goods. We read such practices as refusal, notably the refusal of land as property. By exposing wage–rent relations, Aetna residents refuse exploitation, thereby untethering land from its propertization via subordinated labor. Inserted into the homeless industrial complex, they recognize and contest their circulation as commodities in the rentier economy of poverty governance.