I built this house with my own two hands. It is a common expression–one that connotes not only the fact of construction, but a pride of ownership, an ownership that is earned through physical sweat and exertion.

            In 1975, Christopher Alexander helped organize a different kind of community in Mexicali—one that asked resident participants to not only help physically build their housing, but to take part in the process of imagining construction as well. Through the act of co-creation, whether in conceptualizing use or in the construction of floors, walls, and ceilings, Alexander hoped participants would become liberated from the imposed order of modern industrial housing.

                In linking self-construction with repair and beauty, Alexander fit within a larger ideological movement arguing for the importance of a community building for itself. Housing experts, policymakers, and technical experts such as Charles Abrams and John F.C. Turner subscribed to a parallel principle in the Cold War era, seeing self-help housing as an admirable joining of affective with material investment. While the actual act of building was only one subsection of a larger ideology of democracy and freedom, it was still very much an indispensable one.

                In Southern California today, self-construction is everywhere. But unlike Alexander’s experimental housing projects in Mexicali, and unlike many of the United Nations’ Cold War programs across the Global South, these self-help Californian communities are not praised for building shelter on their own, nor do their efforts at building count as a sign of personal or collective investment. Quite the contrary: self-built structures are destined for clearance, and politicians make and break careers vowing to end a housing crisis rendered acutely intolerable to home renters and owners by the proliferation of self-built housing.

                Why does self-built informal housing not earn the same praise as self-built formal housing? Why do Southern Californian mayors like Todd Gloria or Karen Bass speak nary a word about the self-help labor of Tecolote Canyon dwellers who built an entire neighborhood in a recreational and open space, or of the undoubtedly strenuous exertions of street dwellers in Los Angeles’ Skid Row when they are forced to rebuild their tents and cardboard structures after an early morning police sweep?

                For starters, self-building is supposed to foster greater control by the user. Even highly individualized suburban DIY projects that run contrary to the community ethos of Alexander’s Mexicali experiment still allow the house owner to pursue their own uses (even if that use is more about raising property value than about how they want to live in the space itself). “Unsheltered” Southern Californians, on the other hand, choose to build on sidewalks, in canyons, parks, and parking lots—nebulous spaces that are legally owned by others, and whose conversion to residential uses takes away landowners’ ability to use the same space. Common terms reflect these assessments, as the celebratory language of “DIY” and “participatory design” stands in sharp contrast to the invisibility of human effort in terms like “homelessness” and “unsheltered.” In Southern California, self-help is first and foremost about ownership, not about participatory community building. Labor, effort, and creative thought all matter, but only if one has legal title.

            Tents and lean-tos, parked cars and shanties, do not play nicely with property markets and existing formal housing investments. Perhaps they never have: middle-and upper-class urban dwellers have consistently disparaged the existence of (and their physical proximity to) people living in this kind of housing across the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historically, Southern California’s informal housing grew in waves, mostly as a response to shifting economic conditions at the national and international scale: at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, large-scale agriculture and urbanization fed the formation of informal truck farming communities along the creek beds of towns like Riverside. Homelessness increased during the Great Depression and surged again with the post-World War II housing shortage. In each of these periods, slums, skid rows, flophouses, Hoovervilles, and single-residence occupancy units all marked the places people went when they were economically or socially excluded from formal housing. The deinstitutionalization of mental illness in the 1960s forced even more Southern Californians to become self-housers, as did the changing regulatory landscape for those struggling with substance abuse in the 1980s and ’90s.

                Clearly, then, there were waves where informality grew more rapidly than in other periods. What stayed consistent, however, was the effort people put into controlling their own physical environments and building livable communities. In other words, home-making was a constant across historical periods.

                This is still true in the present decade. Micronarratives can help make more sense of the nuanced ways Southern Californians try to preserve their autonomy and restore plentitude. Consider the space of a single vehicle: when 20,000 Los Angeles County residents chose to sleep in their cars in 2020, they undoubtedly learned which neighbors walked around the block at what times, which were more likely to call the police when they saw covered car windows, and which parts of industrial areas were darker and quieter. They had to learn where they could go to wash up or use a restroom. Those Southern California automobile dwellers who wanted to avoid the police altogether had to avoid many of the cities in Orange County that criminalized car dwelling starting in the 2010s, or in San Diego—a city that passed and enforced an overnight parking ban from 2019 until February 2024, or in San Gabriel, Pasadena, Glendora, Arcadia, Sierra Madre, and other Los Angeles County cities that still have overnight parking bans.

                By simply choosing to live in cars in greater numbers, Southern Californians have forced politicians and formal housing dwellers to come to terms with them, resulting in some cases in official, if segregated, sanction and protection. Since 2017, Hollywood, Downtown LA, San Fernando Valley, West LA, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Goleta, Carpinteria, and Lompoc all have permitted areas for people to park and access some basic resources such as portable restrooms.

                But it is not only this sort of top-down policy that helps us to see the effects of individual action and effort. People who choose to live in cars are often fugitives, moving from location to location and avoiding the public eye, but they are also successfully private households, living in car interiors that escape public scrutiny and that offer some measure of security. The inside of a family sedan is under the control of the family, and the outside world has no right to see it.

                In Southern California, class divides highlight the limits of any discussion of community-driven, community-constructed housing. The creativity and labor of residents matter less than the amount of money people have to live in a way that matches their needs. The evolving landscape of informal housing in the region highlights the way people try to build homes for themselves, but it is an extreme form of self-help, a grotesque version of the idea of participatory design for those without the means to live with greater freedom and security. Safe parking programs are an acknowledgment of the importance of safety and privacy, but they do not address the fundamental inequity of some people living in cars parked alongside other people’s furnished homes.