Rahim Kuwra Indefensible Spaces

KPFA - Hard Knock Radio

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19d ago 59:58

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Host Davey D opens Hard Knock Radio by framing housing and policing as intertwined crises, then centers the conversation on Rahim Kurwa’s book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing. Kurwa begins with the story of Michelle Ross, a Section 8 voucher holder who moved from Los Angeles to Palmdale in 2008. Once there, she faced relentless harassment. City inspectors and sheriff’s deputies repeatedly raided her home, her address was posted on an I Hate Section 8 Facebook page, neighbors graffitied her house, and someone threw a bottle of urine at her children. Kurwa explains that Ross was one of thousands of tenants in Antelope Valley who were policed in this way.

To make sense of this, Kurwa lays out three threads. First, Antelope Valley functions as a “safety valve” for Los Angeles, absorbing defense industry jobs after World War II and later absorbing residents pushed out by rising housing costs. Second, shifts from public housing to vouchers pushed poor residents, especially Black families, into marginal suburban areas. Third, there is a long history of policing as a tool to maintain racial segregation and to regulate Black homes.

Kurwa and Davey pull the lens back to the deeper history of the region. Kurwa describes an early museum that twisted Indigenous history to erase Native presence and justify a white suburban origin story. He then highlights Black histories in the Valley, including Charles Graves, a formerly enslaved man who struck gold, founded an integrated school, and became postmaster. They trace the creation of Sun Village as an all Black town, built because Black families were shut out of Palmdale and Lancaster, and discuss its rise, decline, and recent revitalization around institutions like Jackie Robinson Park.

The conversation then returns to policing and housing policy. Kurwa connects historical “man in the house” rules and midnight welfare raids to contemporary voucher policing in Antelope Valley, where neighbors weaponize nuisance ordinances, Section 8 rules, and online platforms to surveil and evict tenants. He notes that local organizing and litigation led to a landmark Department of Justice case linking policing to Fair Housing Act violations, but enforcement has been weak and overpolicing continues.

They close by tying this local story to national patterns. Kurwa warns that crime free housing laws, school policing, gang databases, and immigration enforcement normalize everyday people acting as enforcers, turning homes and neighborhoods into contested, heavily surveilled spaces rather than places of safety and belonging.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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