Rahim Kurwa

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). My work is broadly focused on housing justice. My work on the policing of housing appears in Du Bois Review, Housing Policy Debate, City and Community, and Feminist Formations. My book, Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, traces the past century of Black history in Los Angeles' northernmost outpost, known as the Antelope Valley, showing how policing has come to govern housing and how tenants have fought back. I'm currently working on a project about tenant rights in the Chicago Housing Authority.

Contact me at rak [at] uic.edu | Access my CV | Zoom Link | Letter of Recommendation Request Form

Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing

Out now from University of California Press

Racist policing and unaffordable housing are central crises of the early 21st century. Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing tells the story of how the two intersect in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County’s northernmost outpost and a destination for those priced, policed, and evicted out of Los Angeles.

The book follows the valley’s segregated development after World War II, and the resulting emergence of Sun Village, an all-Black town whose civil rights organizing challenged the valley’s segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. It traces how the valley sought to defend itself as a white space, finally landing on policing as a mechanism of resisting racial integration after a new wave of Black families were pushed out of Los Angeles and into the valley at the end of the 20th century.

Indefensible Spaces offers a case study of the national crisis of the policing of housing, told through a history of Black organizing and resistance in one of Los Angeles’s most overlooked areas. The book shows how the policing of housing has rendered Black homes indefensible spaces, and how tenants and organizers across the valley have worked to overcome it, offering lessons for achieving housing justice across the country.

Visit UCPress.org to learn more about the book, purchase it in print, or download the free e-book.

Academic Writing

Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing published by University of California Press (2025)
- finalist, C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems
Rental Housing and the Continuum of Carcerality with Anna Reosti and Robin Bartram in Theoretical Criminology (2024).
Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows: A Du Boisian Analysis of Urban Policing with Theresa Rocha Beardall and Demar Lewis IV in City & Community (2024).
Policing, Property, and the Production of Racial Segregation in The Sociology of Housing (2023).
Carceral Migrations: Reframing Race, Space, and Punishment with Susila Gurusami in Social Service Review (2022).
From Broken Windows to Broken Homes: Homebreaking as Racialized and Gendered Poverty Governance with Susila Gurusami in Feminist Formations (2021).
Opposing and Policing Racial Integration: Evidence from the Housing Choice Voucher Program. in Du Bois Review (2020).
The New ‘Man in the House’ Rules: How the Regulation of Housing Vouchers turns Personal Bonds into Eviction Liabilities in Housing Policy Debate (2020).
Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor. in Surveillance & Society (2019).
Deconcentration without integration: Examining the social outcomes of housing choice voucher movement in Los Angeles County. in City & Community (2015).

Book Reviews

Ben Snyder, "Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment."
Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons."
Scott Cummings, "An Equal Place Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles."
Francois Bonnet, "The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare."

Public Writing

The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant housing policy reflects a long history of xenophobia in housing. The Conversation.
Policing Tenants in Rental Assistance Programs. Gender Policy Report. University of Minnesota.
We can’t let policing become a new form of citizenship. Chicago Tribune.
Segregatory Consequences of the Carceral State. Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Conference Open-Access Volume.
Policing’s Role in Racial Segregation: 50 Years After the Fair Housing Act. Los Angeles Social Science Forum
Nextdoor in Context. Blink

Recorded Interviews and Talks

Speaking out of Place Podcast
KPFA Hard Knock Radio
CSU San Bernardino Conversations on Race and Policing
How Policing Became Property and How People are Fighting Back - UIC Institute for the Humanities:
Thinking about Subsidized Housing in a Welfare Rights Framework - University of Wisconsin Madison Institute for Research on Poverty.
Radical Reimagining: The Carceral State and Abolitionist Responses - Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy 2021 Symposium

Digital Humanities Work

Sun Village Digital History Exhibit (in draft)

News Coverage

Study Examines “Man in the House” Rules in the Voucher Program. National Low Income Housing Coalition
Opinion: How white people used police to make L.A. one of the most segregated cities in America. Matthew Fleischer, Los Angeles Times
Think racial segregation is over? Here’s how the police still enforce it. Nikita Lalwani and Mitchell Johnston, Washington Post
California residents demand answers after deaths in the Antelope Valley. KCRW.
On Nextdoor, the Homeless Are the Enemy. Rick Paulas, OneZero.
Same city, different opportunities: Study maps life outcomes for children from Chicago neighborhoods. Cecilia Reyes and Joe Mahr, Chicago Tribune.

Research Cited in Policy Briefs

Google Sites

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