Norman Leads Panel on Black Leadership

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A Precinct Reporter article about a Long Beach event exploring the meaning of black leadership featured Alex Norman DSW ’74, a UCLA Luskin professor emeritus of social welfare. Norman and Long Beach City Council member Al Austin led a panel discussion with advocates and civic leaders on issues critical to the region’s African American population. Norman called on black leaders to join forces to address the poverty and lack of educational attainment that are driving trauma and negative health and social impacts. Black leaders must unite and collaborate the way that national organizations did in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s instead of pursuing disconnected goals, he said. Norman has compiled extensive research through Rethinking Greater Long Beach, a community-based think tank that focuses on education, public safety and urban demography. 

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Manville on Efforts to Reduce Congestion Near Utah Resorts

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville told NPR Utah that public transportation improvements may not be enough to solve a congestion problem in the state’s Cottonwood ski resort area. Utah transit officials recently upgraded the area’s bus service in an effort to reduce traffic during the winter ski season. The officials predicted that the improvements, including an increased number of trips, faster service between routes and more seat space, will increase bus ridership by at least 25 percent. However, Manville pointed out that, while improved public transit is a positive step, it’s not necessarily going to solve the problem. “At its best, public transportation offers people the chance to avoid the headache of driving in traffic,” he explained, “but it has never been demonstrated to actually reduce congestion.” According to Manville, “The textbook solution is a toll on the road based on the level of demand for it.”

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Roy on the Meaning of Community

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Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography, was featured in KCET‘s report about the meaning of community, part of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture’s ongoing series “10 Questions: Centennial Edition.” Community can be built through struggle, often by dismantling systems of oppression, Roy said at the forum. “I urge us to use the term ‘community’ with great caution, and I urge us to use the term ‘solidarity’ with even greater caution,” she said, saying real solidarity demands taking real risks. Roy emphasized the importance of simply showing up and also spoke of the complex power of social media, which can be a force for both “techno-capitalism” and democratization. Despite its potential to exclude, social media “is a key space now in community-making,” she said. Roy appeared with panelists Jennifer Ferro, president of KCRW and a UCLA Luskin Senior Fellow, and Kevin Kane, director of UCLA’s Visual and Performing Arts Education Program.

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Transition to All-Electric Expected to Create Jobs, Study Finds

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Two articles by NRDC and the Sierra Club, and an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Daily News, summarize the findings of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation’s recent study “California’s Building Decarbonization: Workforce Needs and Recommendations.” The study is the first to estimate the potential employment impacts of decarbonization as California moves away from the use of fossil fuels in buildings. Despite a loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industry, the report estimates that the transition to all-electric buildings will support a net increase of more than 100,000 jobs over the next 25 years. The study recommends policy interventions and programs to ease work transitions, including bridges to retirement for older works and retraining and job placement assistance for younger ones. As California lays out its long-term climate goals, the report highlights the importance of planning and policy action to protect workers and ease the transition from one industry to the next.

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Matute on E-Scooters in Santa Monica

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to LAist about the future of e-scooters in Santa Monica. “Santa Monica has a relatively stable system … that can demonstrate to other parts of Southern California what might be possible,” Matute said. The city launched a pilot program of 3,250 dockless scooters in September 2018. Matute said its manageable level and investment in quality over quantity is key to its success, in comparison with Los Angeles’ pilot program of 36,000 e-scooters and e-bikes. “It would be hard for any group of people to regulate that many devices,” he said. Better roads and investment in bikeways are also key, he said. While Santa Monica’s new green bike lanes are a step in the right direction, Matute advocated for more bike lanes that are segregated from car lanes.

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Roy Reflects on Sanctuary Jurisdictions

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Ananya Roy, professor of social welfare and urban planning and director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, joined Society and Space for an interview about her recently published article “The City in the Age of Trumpism: From Sanctuary to Abolition.” Roy explained that her own journey as a “student of sanctuary” and its long and complex history was prompted by the 2016 election of President Trump and her subsequent participation in local efforts to combat the normalization of Trumpism. “I was particularly struck by the limited scope of sanctuary jurisdictions and their reliance on the authority of the police,” Roy explained. “Liberal cities committed to sanctuary status, such as San Francisco, are also sites of brutal practices of displacement and expulsion of the (always racialized) poor.” Roy identified the selective practices of protection and policing in today’s sanctuary cities as a “logic of liberal inclusion” that must be met with an ethics of abolition.

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Taylor on the Incomplete 710 Freeway

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Brian D. Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to KCRW’s Greater L.A. about shelved plans to expand the 710 Freeway through the San Gabriel Valley. Taylor, a professor of urban planning, said the project was one of many freeway expansion proposals to face opposition. The major difference, he said, was that much of the 710 project was completed. “The dilemma we have is, as we built fewer and fewer of the projects that were to be the planned network, we ended up making the freeways that were built larger and larger,” disrupting surrounding communities, Taylor said. Now that the freeway will not be extended on land that had been procured, officials have an opportunity to develop an already built-up area, he added. “The larger nut to crack, which is how not to have chronic congestion, probably doesn’t lie in building more of these kinds of highways,” Taylor concluded.

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Safety Measures Are Not Enough, Astor Says

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In the aftermath of the fatal shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor joined the hosts of an EdSource Radio podcast to discuss the importance of school climate and social-emotional learning. Astor argued that law enforcement measures like metal detectors and random searches increase the school-to-prison pipeline and should be used judiciously, if ever. Instead, Astor recommended softening schools to create a better school climate and improve social-emotional learning. Astor pointed out the irony of school drills that assume that the shooter is an outsider, when most of the school shootings that have occurred in the United States have come from current or former students who have a grievance with the school or the school population. “It’s a misnomer that we’re protecting against outside terrorist groups,” Astor said. “The shooters themselves are learning exactly where the students are going, and they know all the drills.”

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Shoup on Battle Over Street Parking in Manhattan

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A New York Times article on a Manhattan transportation panel’s proposal to do away with free street parking in a 50-block stretch of the Upper West Side cited Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning. New York City has installed miles of bus and bike lanes and banned cars from a major thoroughfare. Next year, it will start charging drivers in Manhattan’s most congested zones. Some drivers feel unfairly targeted, while many transportation advocates say car culture has been unjustly subsidized for too long. Shoup, who has long promoted pricing as a way for cities to manage parking demand, noted that New York is the only major city in the country that does not have some form of residential parking permit. Such permits are meant to let people with cars park near where they live and keep outsiders out.

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Pierce on Southern California Desalination Plant

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Gregory Pierce, adjunct professor of urban planning and associate director of research at the Luskin Center for Innovation, wrote an opinion piece for the Press-Telegram about water affordability in Southern California. The West Basin Municipal Water District is considering building a desalination plant whose cost would be shared among residents of the 17 cities it serves. Upon examining an environmental impact report, Pierce found that the project is seeking approval without releasing a rate study that would determine how to allocate the cost. “Before greenlighting a half-billion-dollar (or more) desalination plant, West Basin should be looking at all its options to effectively increase available water supply,” Pierce argued. “I hope they take their responsibility to deliver on California’s Human Right to Water law seriously, and only make a decision when they can fully demonstrate that the desalination project would not make its water unaffordable for the region’s working-class residents.”

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