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Indefensible Spaces examines the policing of housing through the story of Black community building in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County's northernmost outpost. Tracing its evolution from a segregated postwar suburb to a destination for those priced, policed, and evicted out of Los Angeles, Rahim Kurwa tells the story of how the Antelope Valley resisted Black migration through the policing of subsidized housing—and how Black tenants and organizers fought back. This book sheds light on how the nation's policing and housing crises intersect, offering powerful lessons for achieving housing justice across the country.

Rahim Kurwa is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice, and affiliated faculty in Sociology, at the University of Illinois Chicago.

"With analytical acumen and literary panache worthy of the late Mike Davis, Rahim Kurwa reveals how housing vouchers promising to liberate impoverished residents from prison-like projects actually fueled even greater anti-Black police repression. Fugitives from Los Angeles's urban ghettos fled north, to Antelope Valley, only to be subject to surveillance and arrest for being a 'nuisance' to white neighbors. But like fugitives from the antebellum South, they organized, resisted, and demanded their right to the suburb. Indefensible Spaces tells their story."—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Lucid, evocative, and a pleasure to read, Indefensible Spaces offers a rich account of a dialectic of Black placemaking and white resistance. Kurwa unveils novel mechanisms of segregation through his expansive study of the Antelope Valley, narrating the stories of the Valley's residents with great care.”—Daanika Gordon, author of Policing the Racial Divide: Urban Growth Politics and the Remaking of Segregation

"Indefensible Spaces traces the long history of residential apartheid in a neighborhood north of Los Angeles. Although the neighborhood seems demographically ‘integrated,’ whites maintain racial domination through ‘housing policing’ practices such as accusing poor minority families of violating city codes. This book is a sociological treat that should influence social policy as well as how we study neighborhoods for years to come.”—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

"Kurwa tells the story of California's Antelope Valley, where low-income tenants of color flocked as they were pushed out of the borders of Los Angeles, only to be surveilled and harassed in their new suburban homes. Through his deeply researched and compelling narrative, Kurwa exposes the ways in which white residents, government agencies, and public policy come together to drive low-income Black families to the margins, increasing vulnerability to policing and eviction and making their enduring struggle to find home ever more precarious."—Eva Rosen, author of The Voucher Promise: "Section 8" and the Fate of an American Neighborhood

"Indefensible Spaces compellingly traces key historical and contemporary mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States. Kurwa's multiple theoretical contributions—including participatory policing and policing as property—are illuminated through his careful, thorough empirical analysis of Antelope Valley. Indefensible Spaces will inspire scholarship on white supremacy, housing and housing vouchers, (sub)urban development, and policing for many years to come."—Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, coauthor of A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio

"Indefensible Spaces tells a rich, deeply analytical story of the forces that have made the policing of housing a central promoter of urban inequality in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the community power that has emerged to reclaim hope and home. Kurwa shows that even as law has evolved to increase tenant protection, multiple actors work to maintain racial hierarchy in access to housing. Yet this is ultimately a hopeful text. Despite the disadvantages they face, Antelope Valley tenants have come together and set a bold vision for housing justice. Sobering but inspiring."—Monica Bell, Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale University