Since the late 1990s, Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row has undergone private and state‐sanctioned policing practices within the fifty‐block neighborhood. These policing practices are fueled by increased commercial and real‐estate development to dispossess and contain the mostly Black homeless and housed residents. Grassroots organizations and residents have responded to gentrification‐induced policing by claiming a homeless right to property, transforming neighborhood politics. This article examines these neighborhood politics as a process of contested development. Contested development reveals the push‐and‐pull contradictions that occur when spatial difference is challenged and reproduced. Through the sphere of urban property, the contested development of property in Skid Row restores or resists the generation of spatial difference. In so doing, the claims of homeless residents and grassroots organizations to a right to property engender transformative police reforms while at the same time igniting revanchist policing methods.

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By “thinking conjuncturally”, this article urges urban geographers to rethink the site of encampments as a space for cultural intervention in urban planning and development. Drawing on content analysis of archival records, this article provides a case study of Black‐led and supported encampment communities in the 1980s and 1990s in Los Angeles. These encampment communities emerged in a critical moment when Los Angeles became the homeless capital of the nation while the demographics of the homeless became predominantly Black. The article shows the emergence of encampment communities as both a result of rising homelessness and as a necessity for creating life‐fulfilling alternatives. As such, these include sonic critiques, cooperative planning, forming a commons, and a poetic ethnography against the carceral organisation of homelessness. The article shows that to understand homelessness and crisis, geographers must take seriously the site of the encampment as an emerging cultural intervention.

I honor Black struggle for life and living in Los Angeles's panoptic landscape by detailing how it has led me to the work of Mike Davis and visions for abolition.