Yaroslavsky on the Response to the Lachman Fire

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Reports have emerged that firefighters at the site of the January Lachman fire were told to leave the scene of the flames while there was still visible smoldering. Five days later, the highly destructive Palisades fire swept through southern California, killing twelve people and destroying thousands of buildings and homes.

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass ordered an investigation into the handling of the Lachman fire to ensure that the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) can enact necessary reforms and improvements. 

Director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs Zev Yaroslavsky spoke with the Guardian about the resulting Palisades fire, describing it as a “Pearl Harbor moment,” and highlighted the importance of transparency to restore the public’s faith in the LAFD.

“Many questions remain and Bass and the LAFD need to provide answers as communities continue to rebuild,” said Yaroslavsky. “I think the morale has been shaken to the core in Altadena and the Palisades.”

Failure to Vote on a Key Los Angeles Appointment

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, weighed in on the L.A. City Council’s failure to vote on the appointment of a Los Angeles Police Commission member.

Erroll Southers previously served as president of the civilian panel that watches over the Los Angeles Police Department. While he has been the subject of criticism, he was nominated for a new term as a commission member.

The City Council typically has 45 days to approve a new member of any city commission. Since it did not act, Southers is expected to continue in the position by default for a full five-year term because he was already serving on an interim basis, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Failing to vote on a member of one of the city’s most high-profile commissions is almost unheard of, said Yaroslavsky, a former councilman and L.A. County supervisor.

“They have responsibility to confirm or not confirm,” he said of the council. “I never understood why you would campaign for office, as hard as you campaign to get there, and not vote on something that’s as important to the public.”

Zev Yaroslavsky, UCLA’s Jewish community unite against Trump’s $1B demand

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Over 350 Jewish faculty and community members at UCLA have come together to oppose the Trump administration’s demand that the university pay a $1 billion fine over allegations of campus antisemitism. The “Jews in Defense of UC” letter also decries the government’s freezing of $584 million in research grant funding.

Zev Yaroslavsky, former L.A. County supervisor and director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, was an early signatory of the letter. In the article, he said, “the federal actions are not going to address the issue of antisemitism on campus,” but that they will “blow a hole through” the school’s finances.

“It’s the existence of the institution — that’s what’s at stake here,” said Yaroslavsky.

“Cutting off hundreds of millions of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world,” the letter said. “It will not benefit Jewish Bruins nor Jews beyond campus who make extensive use of its first-rate medical facilities, ground-breaking scientific innovations, and cutting-edge cultural institutions.”

Zev Yaroslavsky is a former faculty member at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and currently serves as director of the Los Angeles Initiative. A longtime former member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, he continues to contribute to the school’s research and public engagement through his work with the Quality of Life Index, which is highlighted each year at the annual Luskin Summit.

Yaroslavsky on LAHSA Funding Fight

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Former longtime L.A. leader Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, commented in a CBS News/KCAL broadcast about plans by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to create a new homelessness department, stripping funds from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). “LAHSA was created as a result of a lawsuit between the city and county some 30 years ago or more,” said Yaroslavsky, who was on the city council at that time. “The county is the human service provider, mental health, health, drug rehabilitation, things of that sort,” he said. “The city has to provide the housing or shelter for these individuals to get them off the street and to get them back to where they can function in society. One without the other is a prescription for failure, with a capital F.” On April 1, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a new county homelessness department.

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Yaroslavsky on Expanding the L.A. County Board of Supervisors

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And then there were nine. With the passage of Measure G, L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors will grow by four new members. Former longtime supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky commented in the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of the historic shift in the county government’s makeup. Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, expects that the new seats will attract an army of candidates, and the new position of chief executive position will be “the most powerful elected local government official in the state of California.” The chief executive post could prove alluring to sitting supervisors, he added, which would grant one “lucky politician” what he described as “the biggest bully pulpit in Southern California.” Yaroslavsky, who served on the board for two decades, added that, at nearly 76 years old, he’s not interested. “There might have been a time, but not now.”

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Understanding Key L.A. Ballot Measures Three UCLA Luskin experts weigh in on city and county measures aimed at fixing entrenched problems

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By Elizabeth Kivowitz

With recent indictment charges against New York City’s mayor and the media focused on the presidential election, it’s easy to forget Los Angeles City Hall was rocked by scandal two years ago when a secret recording of City Council members discussing redistricting exposed racism and corruption at City Hall. The city and county also continue to have the largest numbers of unhoused people in the nation.

To try to address some of these challenges, Angelenos are being asked to vote on a number of ballot measures and charter amendments.

UCLA convened a panel of experts on local ballot measures in Los Angeles County (video) to shed some light on these efforts to create greater transparency, better governance and improved quality of life in the nation’s second largest city — specifically Measures A and G and Charter Amendments DD, LL and ER.

Some excerpts:

Gary Segura, professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, co-chaired the L.A. Governance Reform Project, a coalition of scholars and researchers who developed proposals for bringing better governance to L.A.’s halls of power. Segura spoke about Charter Amendment DD, LL and ER, which would create independent redistricting commissions for seats on the City Council (DD) and L.A. Unified School District Board (LL) and strengthen the city’s ethics commission (ER). Segura says:

“I think there was a sense that ethics and governance in Los Angeles had reached a point where there were more embarrassments than the city could reasonably continue to endure. … So after the recording was released, there was a sense, in a variety of corners in the county, in the city and in civil society, that something had to be done.”

“The independent redistricting commission [for the City Council] that we will vote on doesn’t take effect until after the 2030 census. … So those somewhat illegitimate seats are going to continue until 2032. That’ll be the first time to change it. Both L.A. city and county are 48% Latino. The city has 33% Latino representation, and the county is even lower. So that’s the background here. And the city, I think, didn’t act in good faith, so much so that the attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, is investigating to see if he can bring a case against the city to force them to redistrict sooner than the 2032 election.”

“You’ll hear talk of charter reform, and this is a classic example. Whenever a public body doesn’t wish to put specific reforms on the ballot, you create a charter reform commission because it kicks the entire thing down the road and offloads responsibility.”

Zev Yaroslavsky, executive director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for 20 years and on the Los Angeles City Council for nearly 20 years before that. He offered insight on Measure G, a governance measure that would expand the number of county supervisors from five to nine and create an elected executive. He cited decades of failure of the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, the county’s largest, before it was temporarily shut down in 2007 by the federal government, as well as accountability and decision-making during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, as proof that the county needs an elected executive:

“There was no risk to us politically, no existential risk that if the hospital shut down that we would somehow lose our election, because there was no one person who was politically accountable to the people of L.A. County. No mayor would have allowed that to go on for 30 years with incompetence. No business would run that way. No state would run that way. Our country doesn’t run that way.”

“You had five supervisors who had five different shades of opinion about what to do in response to the pandemic. None of them have a medical degree or a public health degree. As I’ve said many times … you can negotiate with the Board of Supervisors. You can’t negotiate with the COVID-19 virus that has a mind of its own, and we got away with a lot, but we had a lot of people die. We would have a lot more people die if [Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director] Barbara Ferrer didn’t have a backbone and was willing to use her credibility with the board. But that’s not the way it should work. She should be accountable to the mayor of the county, to the chief executive, and not negotiate about it. Let the science dictate what needs to be done.”

Michael Lens, UCLA Luskin professor of urban planning and public policy, acknowledged that voters are concerned that prior measures have not solved homelessness.

“While the existing 1/4 cent sales tax, Measure H, has funneled billions of dollars into homelessness services and housing, we can’t be sure that Measure A, a 1/2 cent sales tax, in perpetuity, will solve it either. But we do know that there is an extreme need, and that’s the trade-off that voters face.”

LAX’s Long-Awaited Rail Connection

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UCLA Luskin’s Brian D. Taylor and Zev Yaroslavsky commented in a Los Angeles Times story on L.A.’s long-awaited rail connection to Los Angeles International Airport. A link to the region’s famous air transportation hub, while contemplated for decades, has faced a number of obstacles. “To not have public transportation at one of the busiest airports in the world … is a major faux pas,” said Yaroslavsky, the longtime county and city official who now directs the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. The project is now set to open in 2026, with an Automated People Mover connecting LAX to the Metro rail system. The 2.25-mile system also is expected to reduce traffic at the airport. “When the trains are essentially running every couple of minutes, that tends to reduce the transfer burden,” said Taylor, professor of urban planning and public policy, and research fellow in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin.

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Zev: Legendary L.A. Politico Retires From UCLA Luskin Faculty Yaroslavsky used his real-world experience grappling with the region's knottiest problems to teach and mentor UCLA Luskin students

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UCLA’s Blueprint magazine interviewed Zev Yaroslavsky, who joined the UCLA Luskin faculty after decades serving in elected office in Los Angeles. Yaroslavsky is retiring from teaching this summer but will continue to direct one of the Luskin School’s signature projects, the annual Quality of Life Index measuring Angelenos’ contentment with life in L.A. This article is reprinted with the permission of Blueprint.

By Jean Merl

On the eve of a Jewish holiday last fall, Zev Yaroslavsky was standing in the front yard of his Los Angeles home when a neighbor he hadn’t seen for a while walked by on his way to the synagogue. The man stopped to greet Yaroslavsky and posed a question that gladdened the former longtime elected official.

“‘Is it my imagination, or has the homeless situation gotten better around here?’” Yaroslavsky recalled the man asking.

“It’s not your imagination,” Yaroslavsky responded, adding details about at least two area homeless encampments that were cleared when their inhabitants had been housed and offered services under Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program.

“It took time, but they housed them,” Yaroslavsky, 75, said in a far-ranging interview as he prepared to retire this spring from his second career, teaching at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. “They didn’t just sweep them to another street. They housed them. It’s not easy, but you can do it.”

Yaroslavsky knows his subject. He served nearly four decades as an elected official: on the Los Angeles City Council from 1975 to 1994, when he was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. Term limits required him to retire from that post in 2014. Until then, he had wrestled with — and helped shape responses to — nearly every major issue in the region: health care, land development, open space preservation, police reform, public transportation, cultural development. And homelessness.

Soon after leaving the Board of Supervisors, Yaroslavsky was invited to return to UCLA, where he had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees before leaving a doctoral program to pursue a calling to social activism and politics. He eschewed a common path for retiring politicians — a corporate position or a lobbying or consulting gig — in favor of joining his alma mater, a public university where he could continue his life of service.

“I wanted to bring a real-world perspective to students,” he said. “And I wanted to learn from them.”

From elected office to academia

Yaroslavsky’s decade at the Luskin School has placed him squarely at the intersection of public policy and academia. He has taught classes on public policy and directed the Los Angeles Initiative, which conducts the Quality of Life Index, an annual survey of county residents’ satisfaction levels in several categories, including housing costs and homelessness.

He has helped steer bright young students into careers in public service, including Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles). In the spring of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, he turned his class into a crash course in crisis management by inviting various public officials to talk — via Zoom — about how they were responding to the pandemic.

Although academics and politicians often don’t speak the same language, Yaroslavsky said it is important that they listen to and learn from one another.

“I do think there is a functional role between academia and government,” he said, noting that think tanks and researchers provide data and reports for policymakers to use in their attempts to find solutions to pressing problems. “It’s important,” he adds, “for academics to understand the pressure politicians are under from constituents and for politicians to know what the facts are.”

Paying attention to the research helps policymakers find solutions and avoid mistakes. “We can’t live without it,” he said.

A history of homelessness

In his role as an academic, Yaroslavsky was one of the authors of a comprehensive study of homelessness in the region, published in 2021 by the Luskin Center for History and Policy. “The Making of a Crisis: A History of Homelessness in Los Angeles” detailed some 120 years of ebbs and flows in the problem, including causes and recommendations.

Earlier, during his time as a county supervisor, Yaroslavsky led an effort to take a comprehensive approach to homelessness, a problem he compares to a Rubik’s Cube — a complicated puzzle that can’t be solved quickly or easily.

In 2007, he spearheaded Project 50, a two-year county pilot project that focused on Skid Row people who were deemed the most vulnerable. The project got them into housing and offered them services to help with the issues that had caused them to be homeless, including addiction and mental health problems. It was based on a successful program in New York City, and it pioneered what is now the standard thinking about ways to combat homelessness — first, provide a home, then address underlying problems to keep people from falling back into life on the streets. The process can be costly and time-consuming, and its success depends in part on removing such stumbling blocks as housing costs, racial discrimination and poor education. But advocates of this approach say the social and financial costs of not solving what has become a crisis are much higher.

Man seated and autographing bookYaroslavsky signs a copy of his memoir “Zev’s Los Angeles” at a UCLA book event in 2023. Photo by Mary Braswell
Man seated and autographing book
Man seated and autographing book
Man with bouquet of flowers
Man with bouquet of flowers

For years, Yaroslavsky said, he had behaved like most other politicians. Stay away from homelessness, was the standard political advice, because it’s intractable and costly and you will be branded a failure if your efforts fall short. And it was easier back then to ignore homelessness because it was largely confined to Skid Row and not the crisis that has spread throughout many communities and spilled into pricy, middle-class neighborhoods today.

He said this began to change in 2002, when his daughter, then in graduate school and living in the Bay Area, urged him to pay attention to the issue. He hired a deputy to work on homelessness in 2005. She told him about a pioneering “housing first” program in New York City. On a visit there to attend his son’s law school graduation in 2007, Yaroslavsky toured the program, Common Ground, based in the converted Times Square Hotel, and met with its founder. He pushed for something similar in Los Angeles.

Project 50 worked well for a time. Clients stayed housed and accepted support services, and budget officials found the costs were more than made up by the savings in emergency room visits, arrests and other consequences of life on the streets. A county analysis showed the program cost $2.2 million but saved $2.4 million. As the pilot program was nearing its end in 2009, Yaroslavsky proposed extending and expanding it to 500, then to 5,000, taking it countywide. But he couldn’t get a second from any of the other four supervisors. Yaroslavsky put smaller projects based on the Project 50 model into his own district, but the countywide version died.

Since then, homelessness has exploded into a region-wide crisis that no longer can be ignored, Yaroslavsky said, lamenting that the failure to expand Project 50 in 2009 “basically cost us almost a decade” in solving the problem.

In 2016, voters in the city of Los Angeles approved Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure for permanent supportive housing, and the following year, county voters approved Measure H, which enacted a 1⁄4-cent increase on the sales tax for 10 years to alleviate homelessness. Bass won the mayor’s office in November 2022 after a campaign that centered around combating homelessness. Her first official act was to declare a state of emergency because of homelessness. County supervisors followed suit a month later.

Reflections on service and politics

Yaroslavsky, in his 2023 memoir, “Zev’s Los Angeles: From Boyle Heights to the Halls of Power,” called homelessness “the moral challenge of our time” and outlined ways to meet it. His experiences naturally have informed his views on Bass’ attempts. He gives her high marks while acknowledging there is still a long way to go. Other circumstances, ranging from income disparity to the lack of an elected executive in the power-diffused county, also pose considerable obstacles, he added.

A Los Angeles Times analysis of Bass’ program late last year found significant progress in her goal to find shelter for those living on the streets and clear the encampments that had sprung up along public rights of way. But the campaign to find or build permanent affordable housing remained a tough challenge. Bass called improving the system of support services, including substance addiction treatment, a “top, top issue” as the program headed into its second year.

Yaroslavsky praised Bass for her comprehensive approach and willingness to put herself in charge of the program and accept responsibility for it.

“I’m a cheerleader for her,” Yaroslavsky said. “I think she’s doing the right thing.”

But he’s realistic, too. “I’ve said from the start that [homelessness] was not created overnight and it’s not going to be solved overnight. But she’s making progress, and she has created a sense of possibility and is publicly committed to solving the problem.”

Bass also is well suited to the task because of her collaborative manner and her background as a physician’s assistant and community activist before being elected to the state Assembly and then Congress, Yaroslavsky said. He also touted her commitment to Los Angeles.

“She has made it clear she is not interested” in running for another office and probably has eight years to work on the issue, said Yaroslavsky, who expects Bass will serve a second term.

But one of the toughest obstacles to overcoming the problem is an acute shortage of affordable housing.

Increasingly, people are at risk of falling into homelessness, not because they are drug or alcohol abusers or mentally ill, but because they can no longer afford their rent on the wages they earn, Yaroslavsky said. Remedying that will take government intervention, including but not limited to housing subsidies, so that “the people who provide the backbone of the labor market here can afford to live here and not be forced out onto the street” where they eventually develop other problems.

“There’s a structural inequity in our housing economy that creates this homelessness problem,” Yaroslavsky said, “and we’ve got to deal with it.”

Yaroslavsky on Olympics’ Legacy in L.A.

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An L.A. Daily News article on Los Angeles’ long history with the Olympic Games quoted Zev Yaroslavsky, longtime public servant and director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. The Summer Games first came to Los Angeles in 1932 then returned in 1984, when Yaroslavsky was a member of the L.A. City Council. “It was a huge success financially,” Yaroslavsky said of the first privately financed games, which produced a surplus of hundreds of millions of dollars used to launch a foundation to promote youth sports. Yaroslavsky also credits the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, a 10-week event that preceded the games and drew 1.25 million visitors, for elevating the region’s reputation as a cultural hub. “L.A., which was already a cultural mecca, really went to a new level,” he said. “I think the arts was a bigger legacy of the Olympic Games than the games were.” The Olympics will return to Los Angeles in 2028.

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