Housing Crisis in Los Angeles
“Homeless People Have No Home in the Society”

During a drive through the city of Los Angeles, urban planner Ananya Roy and philosopher Rainer Forst talk about the social contradictions in the US-American society. The corona pandemic has not only increased the number of homeless people in the city, but also the risk of forced evictions. These mainly affect people from the Black and Hispanic communities. Where is social justice?

The video series On the Road to Change brings people in Los Angeles, Berlin, Athens and New Delhi into conversation about what democracies can learn from the pandemic.

In the first episode, urban planner Ananya Roy and philosopher Rainer Forst take a drive through Los Angeles. From the Thomas Mann House they head to the campus of the University of California in Los Angeles. They stop at the most expensive private house in the world in Bel Air, and continue their trip via Beverly Hills to Skid Row, the neighborhood with the largest population of homeless people in the United States. There, activist Pete White of the Los Angeles Community Action Network talks about the threat of eviction as a result of the pandemic and ways out of his city’s housing crisis. 

 

Interviewees

Rainer Forst is professor of political theory and philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt and director of the research centre Normative Orders. His work is widely discussed internationally. In 2012, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. In 2021 he was a fellow of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles.

Ananya Roy is professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography at the University of California Los Angeles. Her most recent book is titled Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Ananya leads the National Science Foundation supported global research network “housing justice in unequal cities”, as well as the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Sanctuary Spaces “reworlding humanism”. 

Pete White is the founder and co-executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a grassroots organisation working to ensure the human right to housing, health and security are upheld in Los Angeles. A lifetime resident of South Central Los Angeles, Pete White has been a community organiser in Los Angeles communities since 1992. He serves on a variety of boards and advisory committees related to homelessness and grassroots funding.