How a housing advocacy coalition adds health: A culture of claims- making Kushan Dasgupta, Paul Lichterman * Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, 851 Downey Way, HSH 314, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA article info Article history: Received 4 August 2015 Received in revised form 14 April 2016 Accepted 18 April 2016 Available online 20 April 2016 Keywords: United States Culture Advocacy Ethnography Claims Discursive field abstract Organizations that pursue health advocacy often tackle other issues too. How do these multi-issue or- ganizations articulate and combine health with other issues? We examine how a Los Angeles coalition focused primarily on housing took up health in its 2008e2011 campaign against a residential devel- opment. Participant observation and archival data reveal that cultural context influenced how the coa- lition made claims about health, in two ways. First, advocates shared two major symbolic categories, which oriented the great bulk of their appeals regarding health. Second, advocates crafted rhetorical appeals that reflected their shared sense of social identity and obligation as spokespersons for a distinctive kind of community. These two kinds of cultural context influenced advocates' claims in public, formal settings as well more internal communication. These distinct, cultural influences on claims- making create challenges for socioeconomically diverse coalitions collaborating on health problems. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This paper investigates how an advocacy coalition in Los Angeles incorporated health into its work. Pseudonymously named ISLA (Inquilinos del Sur de Los Angeles/Tenants of South Los Angeles) and initiated in 2008, the coalition advocated for housing oppor- tunities in working-class, plurality Latino neighborhoods. We focus on one ISLA campaign that challenged plans for developing an upscale apartment complex, the Manchester, which involved par- tial demolition of a hospital in an ISLA neighborhood. ISLA-member organizations had monitored the slow-moving Manchester devel- opment for over two years, and were busy with a larger anti- gentrification campaign when the Manchester's threat to the hos- pital “came out of nowhere, and we had to fight it,” as a staff-person put it. Hurriedly, ISLA organized local residents, planned with allies, and attended public hearings, just as a wrecking ball leveled part of the hospital. A conference on the right to health ended with a rally at the Manchester site, described by an ISLA leader as “the epicenter” of an “attempt to trump health rights with arrogant housing rights.” Soon after, ISLA won a revised plan for the Man- chester, providing reduced-rent apartments and a new, low-cost medical clinic inside the Manchester development. While the health implications of a hospital demolition may seem obvious, parties might pitch “health” and “housing” differ- ently: Some Manchester neighbors, low-income parents with long commutes, said the loss of local hospital services hit hard. Yet some Spanish-speaking construction workers at public hearings on the Manchester wore t-shirts saying “Yes to jobs, private investment, affordable housing.” One ISLA leader said she felt the wrecking ball in her stomach. Others decried luxury developments. This study analyzes how ISLA constructed health claims and combined them with its primary, continual focus on housing. ISLA is a case in a larger, multi-method study, begun in 2007, of how two inter-organizational coalitions construct housing and ur- ban development as public problems. ISLA and the other coalition represent different ways of articulating issues and building con- stituencies. Below we describe case settings and methods relevant to this paper. The Manchester campaign enabled us to analyze how local social activists would add health to their issue docket, in light of recent discussions about the place of health in multi-issue advocacy. Most residents at campaign meetings and events were low-to-moderate income Latinos. Organizational leaders and staff were college-educated and ethnically diverse. The most active ISLA organizations in the Manchester campaign were a tenant advocacy group, a community development corporation that also trained health educators for ISLA's neighborhoods, a labor development nonprofit, a nonprofit community land trust, and a local church. 1. Health issues in hybrid advocacy organizations ISLA's attention to multiple issues, housing and health, makes * Corresponding author. E-mail address: lichterm@usc.edu (P. Lichterman). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Social Science & Medicine journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.022 0277-9536/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Social Science & Medicine 165 (2016) 255e262