Risks of Privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

/0 Comments/in /by

UCLA Luskin Professor Wesley Yin wrote a Fortune op-ed titled “Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the wrong way risks a second Great Recession.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that play a major role in the U.S. housing market by purchasing qualifying mortgages from lenders and bundling them into mortgage-backed securities, helping keep borrowing costs lower and credit accessible for homebuyers. The Trump administration has signaled that reprivatization could begin as early as the second quarter of 2026.

Yin, a professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin with a joint appointment at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, warns that the current approach lacks transparency and could dismantle critical safeguards established after the 2008 financial crisis. “A hasty insider-driven IPO and exit from conservatorship will erode the safeguards that have kept the housing market stable, exacerbate systemic risks, and primarily enrich shareholders,” he says. “Such a move would align with the Administration’s agenda of rolling back other financial regulations and oversight.”

Rather than improving affordability, Yin argues that it would instead benefit wealthy investors and increase borrowing costs, potentially encouraging the type of risk-taking that contributed to the Great Recession.

Pandemic Relief Programs Helped Small Businesses Survive, but Fraud Risk Remains

/0 Comments/in /by

As small businesses struggled to remain open during the COVID-19 pandemic, programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) provided critical funding to cover operating costs and cushion the economic impact.

Research by Public Policy and Economics professor Robert Fairlie, cited in a recent MPR News article, shows the number of active business owners fell sharply from 15 million to 11.7 million, while the national unemployment rate surged to 14.8 percent. PPP loans were rapidly distributed to prevent possible crises, but this also gave rise to opportunities for fraud and error. In Minnesota, for example, 6,900 borrowers were recently suspended amid suspected fraud investigations.

While experts in the field note that there was not enough administrative infrastructure to properly screen loan applications, many believe that the possible crises that could have occurred made the trade-off between helping small businesses stay open and the possibility of fraud worth the risk.

Why Cars Are More Expensive Than Ever As vehicle prices hit record highs, affordability threatens Americans’ access to jobs, mobility, and opportunity.

/0 Comments/in /by

In late 2025, U.S. car prices have reached historic highs, with the average new vehicle costing around $50,000 and many popular models costing thousands more than they did five years ago. While inflation plays a role, pandemic supply disruptions, consumer demand for larger vehicles, and automakers’ focus on high-margin SUVs and EVs have driven prices up faster than ever.

Political efforts to improve affordability, such as eased fuel-efficiency standards or suggestions to import cheap micro-cars, have yielded little relief. Even relatively affordable options are pricier than before, and used cars and repairs have also become costly. For many Americans, cars remain essential for daily life.

As Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, put it: “For much of the country, cars are necessary to ‘lead a reasonable quality of life.’ If people can’t afford a decent car … they sacrifice huge amounts of time, job opportunities, and upward mobility.” The article suggests that without structural change, high prices will persist.

Pierce on LADWP inspections by U.S. EPA

/0 Comments/in , /by

Although there is no evidence of water contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to inspect nearly 100 drinking water reservoirs and storage tanks.

Millions of people rely on these systems, and the EPA wants to ensure LADWP is meeting federal and state drinking water standards.

Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, stated in an interview on L.A. Times that while such actions are not common, there are instances in which federal agencies issue consent orders with local agencies over violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

“I do not see many [consent orders] for drinking water systems, and I do not see many announced in this way for issues that, yes, should be addressed, but are not of severe concern, especially since there is no evidence of contamination,” Pierce said.

Pierce added that he believes politics played a role in the decision. “I have no reason to think that this consent order would have happened if not for the politics between the federal government, the administration and the city of Los Angeles,” he said.

Measuring the Impact of the Community Schools Model

/0 Comments/in , /by

A Chalkbeat article on a Chicago Public Schools initiative to give high-poverty schools about $500,000 annually for wraparound support cited UCLA Luskin’s Isaac Opper, who has studied the effectiveness of community schools models elsewhere.

The Sustainable Community Schools program supports partnerships with nonprofits to transform some of the city’s most disinvested campuses into service-rich neighborhood hubs.

A Chalkbeat analysis, however, suggests that the investments have not yet led to widespread improvement in how likely students are to attend school regularly, graduate from high school, or pass key reading and math tests. Chicago school officials say the model needs more time to show results; it plans to triple the number of campuses in the program by 2027.

Research has shown that well-implemented programs can yield measurable student gains, said Opper, an assistant professor of public policy who helped evaluate New York City’s community schools program. Over several years, it produced attendance gains, graduation rate increases, and modest but notable test score improvements, he said.

In Chicago, said Opper, “If you are seeing no difference, one story is that Sustainable Community Schools isn’t working. Another is that it is working, but so are other things the district is doing.”

Rethinking Rent Control in California

/0 Comments/in /by

Luskin’s Michael Manville discussed rent conrol on the California Insider Show, examining its effects on tenants and landlords across California. While rent control can help limit year-to-year increases, housing costs have continued to outpace inflation, underscoring the need for alternative solutions to affordability in Los Angeles.

“The more you turn the clamps with the rent control law, the more you give people incentives to be the worst version of themselves,” Manville says. While rent control laws can provide temporary aid for certain renters, housing costs have not kept up with inflation in California.

“Rent control can be a reliable way to prevent big rent increases from happening year to year, but it isn’t necessarily a good path to actually make housing affordable,” Manville explains.

Manville also argues that population growth is not effective to infer need for more housing. He suggests approaching housing the same way businesses look at prices to assess demand.

Kim on the Rebuilding Efforts After the Palisades Fire

/0 Comments/in /by

Rebuilding efforts are ongoing following the destructive Palisades Fire that swept through southern California this January. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass released a statement that 340 homes are actively being built, and with recent rebuilding plans being approved, that number is projected to increase further.

This news has been received with disappointment by some, taking into account the thousands of buildings, including schools and businesses, that were lost in the fire.

The Guardian cited Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Minjee Kim’s insights on the rebuilding efforts. She stated that although the figure cited in Bass’ statement seems relatively small, the number of homes being rebuilt should be increasing exponentially in the future. She expresses hope that though it may take five or ten years for rebuilding to be complete, the Palisades can be restored similar to its previous state before the fire.

“It’s all about the community and people’s attachment to their community,” said Kim. “I think there’s enough core that remains in Palisades and enough families that really want to go back and rebuild – it won’t be a completely new neighborhood.”

Michael Manville on Why L.A. Traffic Isn’t Improving Much

/0 Comments/in /by

UCLA Luskin’s Michael Manville was quoted in a recent Los Angeles Times article analyzing why traffic congestion in Los Angeles remains persistently high despite modest year-over-year changes.

Manville, a professor and chair of urban planning at UCLA, said flat or slightly declining congestion levels are not surprising given the continued prevalence of remote and hybrid work. He also emphasized that traffic conditions in Los Angeles have long been severe, making dramatic improvement unlikely. “Things have always been pretty bad traffic-wise in L.A.,” Manville said.

Pointing to the region’s distinctive development patterns, Manville explained that Southern California’s moderate but widespread density creates a challenging transportation environment. While other metropolitan areas have dense downtowns that can support robust transit systems, Los Angeles is “not really dense enough in any area to really support public transportation, but dense enough to make traffic bad.” As Manville noted, this structural reality makes small improvements difficult for commuters to perceive.

Only Los Angeles could spend $1.5 billion to make airport traffic worse

/0 Comments/in , , /by

by Jacob Wasserman

When millions of people come to Los Angeles for the World Cup, Olympics and Paralympics, their first taste of the city will probably be the infuriating congestion of LAX. Now, do we want to treat our guests — and ultimately ourselves — to an even worse welcome: a half-finished, $1.5-billion roadway project at LAX that will only end up making traffic more gridlocked?

Whether you are crawling along in holiday traffic — achingly close to the terminal just hoping you’ll make the flight — or are making your daily commute to work at the airport and the many businesses that surround it, the approach roads to LAX are already one of Angelenos’ least favorite places. Now, LAX’s board has approved what they call a “modernization” project to reroute and expand the roads leading into the airport’s infamous “horseshoe.” This project isn’t scheduled to be completed before the 2028 Olympics. And what’s more, it won’t fix traffic at the airport — it will only make it worse.

Why? For one, any short-term travel-time improvements won’t last. Most drivers use Google Maps and Waze to algorithmically navigate shifts in traffic when heading to the airport. So even if a new ramp is temporarily faster, it will soon fill up again as traffic is directed there and as drivers gain familiarity with the routing. The idea that new lanes quickly become congested again as they draw in drivers from other routes, times of day and modes of travel is what planners call “induced demand.” This same thing happened in 2014, when authorities widened the 405: traffic got worse within just nine months as people shifted their travel onto the new lanes.

Moreover, there is still only so much curb and road space along the LAX horseshoe. Imagine using a wider funnel to fill the same bottle. That’s what will happen with these new roadways: pushing more cars into the same bottleneck.

The project’s own estimates forecast almost 41,000 new miles of vehicle travel each day once complete. And its environmental review concludes that the new traffic and emissions are a “significant and unavoidable impact” with “no feasible mitigation measures.”

Spare a thought here for residents of Westchester, Inglewood and El Segundo. They already live with cut-through traffic and the dangerous crashes and pollution this traffic causes. This project threatens to make all of that worse, risking lives and livelihoods for not just the immediate neighborhoods but the nearly 1 million people living within seven miles of LAX. It’s no wonder residents continue to organize against the plan.

The project was originally part of a larger, long-discussed expansion of the airport, formally announced in 2019 with the initial aim of adding two new terminals in time for the Olympics. But with passenger counts still down after the COVID-19 pandemic, LAX authorities scuttled the terminal expansions. And yet, the roadway plan marches on, despite having less traffic demand than before and no new terminals to serve. With much of its justification dead, it has become a “zombie project.”

This is all the more disappointing after LAX has done so much to open the airport to options other than private cars. Despite continued delays in its opening, the Automated People Mover promises to connect the terminals to each other, to rental car facilities and to drop-off points outside the horseshoe. Metro recently opened the beautiful LAX/Metro Transit Center, a rail station and bus hub at 96th Street and Aviation Boulevard at the end of the coming People Mover, finally allowing people to take transit between LAX and Metro’s growing network.

Inside the horseshoe, LAX reserved the lower inner lane for buses and moved economy ride-hail pickups to the consolidated LAX-it area. Soon, you’ll be able to take a train, bus, Lyft or Uber — or be dropped off by a friend — and zoom past traffic to your terminal on the People Mover.

Yet LAX authorities still plan to throw bad money after good. The roadway project proposes to build concrete walls and supports around the airport, making it all the more difficult for anything but a car to enter LAX.

Instead of a counterproductive roadway scheme, the airport should double-down on their multimodal successes. With expanded FlyAway service, you could take a frequent, comfortable bus from locations across the region and speed along transit-only lanes into LAX. With a safe and direct network of paths, you could walk or bike to your job at LAX, instead of navigating through a spaghetti bowl of roadway ramps. And with proper regulations and curb management, you could even take a shared autonomous vehicle to your terminal.

Decades of research and experience prove that adding more lanes doesn’t fix traffic. Though the People Mover will offer an alternative to traffic in the horseshoe, the only way to end it is congestion pricing. A dynamic toll — set just high enough to keep cars free-flowing and with provisions for disability access — could finally ease gridlock at LAX. Plus, it could earn money for the city’s beleaguered budget, offsetting its billions in costs. The transponder infrastructure to collect tolls is already in place today. With the free-to-use People Mover soon to open, now is the time to consider pricing the existing roads at LAX — not tearing them up and fruitlessly enlarging them right as the world comes to our doorstep.

The “LAX-pressway” is the last thing our airport needs. With the LAX board’s approval, only intervention from officials like Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Traci Park now can pump the brakes on this project.

This op-ed was originally published by Los Angeles Times. Jacob Wasserman is a research project manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and a planning commissioner in the City of Santa Monica.

Kaplan on the Social Media Ban for Minors in Florida Florida’s new social media restrictions for children under 14 spark debate over child safety.

/0 Comments/in /by

A recent ruling by an appeals court now allows for restrictions to be placed on social media use for minors in Florida. This is a result of the lift on the temporary injunction against House Bill 3 (HB3) that requires children under 14 to have parental consent to use certain social media platforms and bans them from having social media accounts.

There is a significant divide in perspectives on HB3. Supporters say it protects children from harmful content online while critics argue that it violates the first amendment and interferes with parental authority. Professor Emeritus of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs Mark Kaplan shared his perspectives with Fox13, stating, “There is impact of social media on kids’ well-being…we’re talking about kids’ depression, depressive symptoms, suicidality and self harm.” 

This action has also resulted in a legal battle involving a federal lawsuit filed by tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association whose membership includes platforms like Google and Meta. This lawsuit will most likely move to federal court where the final ruling will be made on whether or not HB3 will stand.