(From contributor Carter Moon. Check out Carter’s Substack here!)

Sidewalks are a highly contested space in Los Angeles. The entire time I’ve lived here, I’ve always been shocked by how bad they are when you walk around what are otherwise idyllic neighborhoods. In some of the wealthiest single-family home neighborhoods, you find yourself literally walking on the street because the homeowners have decided sidewalks are an impediment to their freedom to do as they please with their lot. If you follow the local news at all, you get used to regular headlines about the city being forced to pay out millions of dollars to people who’ve been injured by sidewalks that they knew were broken but failed to repair quickly enough. There are whole sections of the city that are functionally cut off for people who use wheelchairs or other mobility aids because the sidewalks are too badly maintained for everyone to be able to use them. Outside of my own apartment the sidewalk is severely sunken; I watch people trip over it weekly.

The sidewalks are also the frontlines of the war on unhoused people. A major justification that drives the inhumane and brutal crushing of unhoused people’s belongings under threat of arrest is because their tents block sidewalk access for everyone else. Of course, the “solution” the city inevitably implements to keep people from coming back to the same underpasses and other spaces where people tend to congregate is erecting giant chainlink fences that … completely block sidewalk access. Everything about this process is unbelievably expensive, from paying the sanitation crews and cops, to paying to put up the fences and the signs that dictate where people aren’t allowed to put their tents. It’s a hugely expensive, ineffective boondoggle under the guise of regulating public space.

I don’t think anyone should be abandoned to live and die on the sidewalk, but when people end up there they need regular access to case workers from the city and county who can help them navigate getting placed into housing. It’s a tough balance to strike, but to me, a person consistently living in one place on the sidewalk for a period of weeks is better than them being banished and shoved from corner to corner, never getting consistent access to the workers who can help them permanently get off the streets. We need more shelters and temporary places for people to go, but we can’t just sweep them away and expect their need for shelter to disappear. Every person in a tent represents a policy failure, a person who was left behind by the cruel realities of neoliberalism and the private real estate market, and it’s our collective responsibility to remedy that failure and make sure that every human being on the street has their human right to shelter restored.

I’ve been referring to this politics of how to better conceive of our sidewalks and public spaces as “sidewalk socialism.” It’s a term I borrow from the tradition of Midwestern socialists elected to local government who referred to themselves as “sewer socialists.” People may not be aware of this today, but as Miles Kamp-Lassen explained in In These Times: “Over the first half of the 20th century, hundreds of socialists were elected to public office across the Midwest—including in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio—under the common cause of redistributing wealth and power.” They also ran on very practical good governance, most notably on making the sewer systems work better for everyone so that their cities as a whole could be healthier, cleaner places. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, everybody poops and that poop has gotta go somewhere if you don’t want diseases to build up in your city.

And my theory of sidewalk socialism is more comprehensive than just the cement squares that people walk on. People tend to think of LA as a completely car-dominated city, but in reality, a million people use the public transit system here every day, and a lot of the individual neighborhoods are pretty accessible on foot—if you can navigate the sidewalks. Part of the experience of the sidewalks is our bus stops, which leave a lot to be desired. They often don’t provide shade or shelter when it’s raining, and oftentimes don’t even have full benches at them.

Even more infuriating is when you’re walking through a neighborhood and routinely nearly get run over by cars because there are no crosswalks at the intersection you’re trying to use. There was a recent dust-up in my neighborhood between some DIY crosswalk painters, volunteers who paint crosswalks with their own tools, and the city who tore their crosswalk out only to replace it themselves a few days later. This kind of casual disregard for pedestrians has serious consequences; traffic deaths literally outnumber homicides in LA, and traffic fatalities are the number one killer of our children.

Voters actually passed a historic ordinance last year insisting that all new street repaving has to include improvements to our bus, bike, and pedestrian infrastructure to make the streets safer for everyone. However, the implementation of this ordinance has so far been slow-moving. We need some much more focused political will at city hall to force these infrastructure projects through as quickly as possible, because the stakes are life and death. Getting people out of their cars and into buses, trains, and bikes is essential for reducing our climate emissions. The prioritization of public goods like buses and bike infrastructure over private car ownership is a core component to making a city that works for everyone and not just the wealthy.

Ultimately, this is why I emphasize the word socialism here. Socialism is a politics rooted in democratic management of social goods separated from private extraction of value that only benefits the ownership class. I firmly believe that private companies aren’t capable of maintaining sidewalks, running buses, or getting unhoused people into housing, because these are all things that don’t strictly turn a profit on their own accord, but are good for the wellbeing of the city as a whole. Sewers aren’t profitable either, but everyone can agree clean water and not having streets running with shit is a good thing. When people walk around in public spaces, they should feel free from someone trying to make money off of them. It’s fine to have shops and places where business is done, but we should always be pushing for an expanding realm of places where you don’t need a dollar in your pocket to be able to exist. This more holistic understanding of what public space should be for and who it should belong to is essential.

I hope the democratic socialists on the LA city council will start embracing this kind of framing more. They have, to their credit, attempted to downplay the use of sweeps and Eunisses Hernandez, in particular, has made a profound effort to bring more harm reduction services to MacArthur Park and generally tried to make her district more livable for everyone. However, headwinds from Sacramento mean I’m increasingly hearing about these councilmembers conducting more sweeps of unhoused people than they might have done a year ago. The pressure from the Trump administration to withhold federal resources if LA doesn’t get more cruel to our unhoused populations is real, but I think this is precisely the moment when we need to draw strong lines in the sand against fascism. The total negation of people’s constitutional and human rights because they’re simply living outside is a central part of fascist movements. Unapologetically rejecting this and advocating for a world where public life exists for all is a core part of refusing fascism.