‘Become a Leader, Not Just a Bureaucrat’

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A Los Angeles Times piece asking veteran public servants to offer words of guidance to the seven new members of the Los Angeles City Council included insights from Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. Yaroslavsky, who served the people of Los Angeles as a city councilman and county supervisor for nearly four decades, stressed the importance of mastering the rules and processes of legislating, but said it’s essential to become a leader, not just a bureaucrat. He advised each of the new councilmembers to look in the mirror each morning and ask: “What issue am I willing to lose my job for?” He continued, “People will respect an elected official who takes a calculated risk in the interest of the public.” 

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Shoup Weighs In on Parking Debates, From Napa to Virginia

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UCLA Luskin’s Donald Shoup weighed in on proposals to reform parking policies on both sides of the country. In downtown Napa, California, some business owners fear that a plan to eliminate free parking could disrupt a tourist boom, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Shoup countered, “There’s a lot of evidence that we can make things much better with meters,” particularly if revenues are used to fund improvements such as sidewalk paving and landscaping. In Fairfax County, Virginia, homeowners are fiercely resisting a proposal to overhaul requirements that developments include a minimum number of parking spots. Shoup told the Washington Post that continuing to prioritize the storage of cars “will be looked back on as a horrible mistake,” and spoke to CNN about the lasting damage to the economy caused by rigid parking mandates. Shoup’s decades-long scholarship has also been spotlighted in reviews of the book “Paved Paradise” by Henry Grabar in publications including the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Common Edge and the California Planning and Development Report.

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Defining Excellence in Urban Planning Education

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A Planning Commission podcast episode devoted to the nation’s top 10 urban planning graduate schools highlighted the program at UCLA Luskin, ranked No. 1 in a new guide published by Planetizen. UCLA’s rise to the top spot can be attributed to a variety factors, Planetizen Editorial Director James Brasuell told the podcast hosts. These include a large faculty reflecting a diversity of opinions, transportation planning scholars who are among the world’s finest and access to the Southern California urban landscape. “L.A. is an interesting place to study planning because we are working so hard to overcome some of the mistakes we made in the last century and exported around the world,” Brasuell said. Discussion of UCLA Urban Planning begins at minute 52. The 7th edition of Planetizen’s Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs was released in June.

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‘Everything Becomes Secondary to Where You Can Store a Car’

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UCLA Luskin’s Michael Manville appeared on Code 53, The Apartment Podcast to explain the history, economics and politics of minimum parking requirements and argue that housing people must take precedence over housing cars. Mandating that new developments include a minimum number of parking spaces encourages driving while limiting the amount of space for housing, research shows. “If you have a situation where land is very valuable, and lots of people want to live there, and you are forcing everyone who wants to build something to put parking in at a number you have specified and a location you have specified, what you are basically saying, whether you intend to or not, is that everything becomes secondary to where you can store a car,” said Manville, chair of Urban Planning at the Luskin School. “That is not the recipe for a good city or a good life.”

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Leap on Community Violence Intervention

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UCLA Luskin Social Welfare’s Jorja Leap commented in a Truthout article on various efforts to reduce and prevent gun violence in communities throughout the United States. The article details approaches taken in communities including violence interruption, a nonpolice model of combating gun violence, which has become a leading cause of death of young people in the U.S., according to the article. All programs are not the same, with some focusing on community members who serve on the street-level as “interventionists, intermediaries, interrupters and even innovators.” Some work in conjunction with academic researchers, law enforcement agencies and probation departments, with other programs somewhere in between. Leap, who evaluated a program based in New Jersey in 2020, said community violence intervention is “at a very meaningful inflection point,” explaining that the practice has not yet reached full maturity but is becoming more accepted, studied and understood as a component of public safety and community well-being.

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Turner on How to Protect Children From Extreme Heat

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V. Kelly Turner, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times calling for action to protect California’s schoolchildren from extreme heat. “Schools are some of the hottest places in our region,” Turner wrote. “Single-story buildings surrounded by open, asphalt-dominated play yards with few trees provide little opportunity for cooling shade.” She identified a number of equity-minded funding opportunities, legislative actions and policy recommendations to help schools adapt to rising temperatures. Turner’s research into urban planning and design approaches that can make communities more resilient to climate change has made her a sought-after commentator this summer. CNN and KCRW spoke with Turner about adaptation strategies including planting shade trees and covering streets with cooling paint. And Ethnic Media Services covered a news briefing on coping strategies featuring Marta Segura, chief heat officer in the city of Los Angeles, Turner and other leaders.

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Tilly on Working Conditions in the Retail Sector

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Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly spoke to Boston Globe Magazine about working conditions in the retail sector, particularly at supercenters that attract consumers with discount prices made possible in part by keeping employee wages low. “In the 1960s into the early 1970s, working in retail really was a decent job,” said Tilly, co-author of “Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies.” That changed due to a number of factors, including the increasing desirability of part-time positions. “Retailers figured out they could offer half the wages and none, or some, of the benefits,” Tilly said. Now, “the dominant model has been a low wage, high turnover, low benefits and increasingly crazy schedules.” Market forces, including pandemic-era labor shortages, have pushed retailers to improve working conditions, but those gains could be reversed if employers regain the advantage.

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Torres-Gil on Plight of California’s Caregivers

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Fernando Torres-Gil, director of UCLA Luskin’s Center for Policy Research on Aging and professor emeritus of social welfare and public policy, commented in a CalMatters article on low wages and lack of benefits and safe working conditions for California’s caregivers. Experts say the need for caregivers is only increasing in the state and across the country. “We don’t, as a society, value or honor persons that do caregiving,” Torres-Gil said, explaining that one reason the field is undervalued is that caregivers are predominantly immigrant women. In the coming decade, with nearly one-fifth of the population age 65 and older, California will face a shortage of more than 3 million caregivers, according to the California Department of Aging. Torres-Gil said that caregivers working in homes or nursing centers earn minimum, or near minimum, pay and lack benefits of regular 9-to-5 jobs, making long-term care as a career “a hard sell for young people.”

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Sharing the American Dream Through Granny Flats and Garage Units

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Urban Planning Professor Vinit Mukhija joined the podcast UCLA Housing Voice in a two-episode appearance focused on how American neighborhoods are being reshaped by the addition of living spaces to existing lots. Often unpermitted, these spaces run the gamut from a fully appointed backyard unit to a storage shed used for shelter. Mukhija’s new book, “Remaking the American Dream,” shows how single-family living has been transformed to meet the growing demand for adequate housing. He delves into the issue with podcast hosts Shane Phillips of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and Paavo Monkkonen, UCLA Luskin professor of urban planning and public policy. Their expansive conversation includes an assessment of state and local government efforts to bring unregulated housing out of the shadows and encourage the construction of permitted accessory dwelling units. Policies that increase housing density, Mukhija says, allow more people to share the American Dream by “sharing single family lots, … sharing neighborhoods, sharing cities, sharing suburbs.”

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Wasserman on Transit Agency Ambassador Programs

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Jacob Wasserman, a research project manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, commented in a Washington Post story about the nationwide growth of transit agency ambassador programs designed to reduce crime and augment security on public transportation. The civilian ambassadors provide additional “eyes and ears” for law enforcement, report maintenance and safety issues, and provide enhanced customer service, according to the article. While transit leaders say the programs have had some successes, the overall effectiveness is not yet clear since the positions are relatively new. The article also cited a 2021 University of California study that found that service referrals made by outreach workers, ambassadors and other aid workers were more effective, for example, at directing homeless people to shelters or treatment programs than referrals by police officers. “This is not what police want to be doing or are trained to be doing,” said Wasserman, co-author of the study.

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