“Neighborhood Nightmares”: Drug Dens, Finance, and the Political Economy of the Crack Crisis

Abstract

During the 1980s, legislation to deregulate mortgage and real estate markets unleashed new levels of predatory lending and speculation in the low-income Black and Latinx neighborhoods of Los Angeles. By decade’s end, deregulation resulted in an avalanche of foreclosed and abandoned homes, which became closely associated with gangs who dealt crack cocaine. In 1989, the city began to target these “crime magnets” for removal under “Operation Knockdown,” with considerable community support. But drilling down to the neighborhood level reveals this support was not the expression of middle-class Black conservatives or a “Black silent majority,” as historians have elsewhere inferred. For some neighbors, the concentration of “nightmare” properties in racialized communities was symptomatic of those communities’ exclusion and disempowerment by finance, real estate, and local government. Such community responses to “drug dens” in Los Angeles suggest the limitations of pursuing inclusion in a political economy increasingly organized around asset price inflation.