Navigating the “Subversive Safety Net” in Venice Beach

The patina of “peace and love” belies the fact that Venice remains a highly policed public space, where “the rules of the game continued to change” for those on the margins, Orrico writes. Even when then-California Governor Jerry Brown ended the criminalization of sidewalk vending in 2018, the municipal government continued to “control access” to a space that had been more or less open to all for decades prior. In the 2010s, the Los Angeles Police Department administered a lottery system for boardwalk vendors, assigning 205 “designated spaces” through the luck of the draw—one plastic ID card per person. With their livelihoods threatened, vendors turned this into a numbers game, allying with and sometimes outright employing other vendors and even unhoused people to create a statistical advantage. In 2015, the state was forced by a class-action lawsuit to adopt a first-come, first-served approach instead. From then on, spacing on the boardwalk became more routinized, determined by the vendors themselves. People bonded with those on their “block,” and being a “regular” was a plus. With the relative stability this system offered grew deeper forms of collective care, but vendors also closed ranks, denying space and care to others. “Safety nets are rarely equitable,” Orrico concludes, “and this subversive safety net was no different.” Those unhoused workers who vendors employed were just as often discarded.

Making Precarity Work conceives of the subversive safety net as both an opportunity and a warning: The tools we use to protect ourselves might also entrench the same inequities that kill us. Orrico contends that the structure of the Venice Beach community is “a critique of the kind of society that pressures people to produce ‘work’ to meet their needs,” but she identifies something positive in how vendors conceive of themselves. Anyone familiar with Uber’s sales pitch may find uncomfortable similarities between the “entrepreneurialism” expressed by some vendors and those who enjoy “making their own hours” on the road, but there’s a kernel of truth to both. One’s sense of autonomy tends to exist beyond the bounds of the workplace, and here, there isn’t one person vendors can point to and call “boss.” In contrast to sociologist Forrest Stuart’s well-known study on L.A.’s Skid Row—whereupon one’s arrival signified hitting “rock bottom” among the unhoused folks who lived there—Orrico gives us Khaled, a Black vendor, also unhoused, reclining in his chair on Venice Beach, who all but shrugs when asked about policing and new city regulations. “They just don’t want to see a Black man at the beach with his feet up,” he said.

In fact, part of what made Venice Beach home for so many people was their ability to communicate about—and often outsmart—the police. Where the boardwalk’s “Free Speech Zone” stipulated that only certain kinds of products (such as peace signs and other, frankly dated forms of “public expression”) were “protected” by the First Amendment, vendors sometimes skirted the rules to make ends meet, and tipped each other off when the police were coming. (One unhoused vendor made national headlines when he began to sell cardboard “bum signs,” offering tourists the chance to snap pictures posing as unhoused themselves.) More than that, vendors watched each other’s kids, ate meals as a community, entrusted their belongings (including cash) to others, and shared vehicles with friends so they had a safe place to sleep. The subversive safety net was, in a sense, often at odds with the law, but it was also vital to avoid destitution, fines, even imprisonment. The greatest risk to vendors came when new cops were assigned to the beat; what one officer had overlooked might suddenly become an arrestable offense.

In her 2019 book-length survey of the world’s housing regimes, former United Nations rapporteur Raquel Rolnik points out that the “dominant narrative” surrounding informal spaces like Venice Beach as “resulting from the absence of the state” is, for the most part, misleading. After all, policing is expensive, and even with all those tax dollars siphoned from welfare programs into police budgets, holding territory today is less the objective, writes Johns Hopkins historian Stuart Schrader, than is “the protocol of the lightning raid”—fast, small, hit-and-run operations that reduce cost, and risk, for municipal departments, “leaving the populace to manage itself and coordinate its survival via the cold cash-app nexus.” Where informality might seem like the reduction of state capacity, Rolnik writes, these spaces are in fact “strongly constituted and permanently mediated by the state.” Grating against Orrico’s view that Venice Beach has not undergone a process of “formalization”—e.g., a more rigorous permitting or “review” process for artists, personal identification, and so on—Rolnik shows that “indetermination” is beneficial to local governments and real estate interests, as they wait for the “right time” to swoop in.