Congestion Pricing Is Good for Drivers, Manville Says

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, was featured in a Government Technology article about Los Angeles’ plan to study congestion pricing to reduce traffic. City officials and LA Metro, the region’s public transit agency, plan to complete the feasibility study within the next two years. Manville said that, while the public should be informed of environmental benefits, such as cutting back emissions and reducing transportation’s total footprint, people should also be aware that congestion pricing would also make driving easier. “If you have a region full of drivers, it’s real important to frame congestion pricing as a policy that is good for drivers,” said Manville, who was speaking at CoMotion, a recent conference on urban mobility.

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Yaroslavsky Offers Insights on Democratic Debate

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KCAL9 News spoke with Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, following the fifth debate of Democratic presidential candidates. Yaroslavsky commented on the prominence of women’s issues during the forum, noting that in addition to the four female candidates on stage, all four moderators were women. “It was a change. You don’t see that many questions and answers on women’s issues in a typical debate,” he said. “In a Democratic primary, women have a disproportionately high percentage of the vote,” Yaroslavsky said. “African American women are a significant percentage of the African American vote and of the Democratic primary vote. So it was both a meritorious set of questions and also a politically significant set of questions.” Yaroslavsky’s tenure as a public official and civic leader in Southern California spans more than four decades.

 

Manville Compares ‘Blade Runner’ Predictions to Los Angeles Today

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to LAist about how Los Angeles today has lived up to the predictions of the 1982 sci-fi cult classic “Blade Runner,” which takes place in an imagined future 2019. The film presents a “vision of a sort of hyper-dense metropolis of the future … that’s really not pleasant at all,” he said. While the film’s characters have been left behind on Earth, Manville points out that present-day Los Angeles is actually planning for a future with more people. Furthermore, he explains that the film presents aerial transit “in a highly stylized way that ignores most of the actual logistics,” whereas a real-life flying car service in a major city would cause huge congestion problems. “Blade Runner,” Manville concluded, “is one of the great urban backdrops, especially dystopian urban backdrops, in film, but its relevance to the Los Angeles we live in is probably pretty limited.” 

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Summit Highlights Local Transitions to 100% Clean Energy

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The Summit on State and Local Progress Toward 100% Clean Energy, which brought experts from 30 states to UCLA to discuss different community approaches to environmental goals, was covered by media outlets including Forbes and Greentech Media. The summit was hosted by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI), which issued a report finding that more than 200 cities and counties have committed to a 100% clean electricity target — and dozens have already hit it. The report highlights differences in how and when communities plan to achieve their targets. “We’re going to look back on this moment as the moment when local action and state commitments began to push the entire nation toward this goal,” LCI Director JR DeShazo said. Senior analyst and policymaker-in-residence Kevin de León added, “The lack of leadership at the national level has forced states, cities and counties to take the lead and fight for their own public health.”

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Torres-Gil on Latino Retirement Insecurity

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Fernando Torres-Gil, director of the Center for Policy Research on Aging, spoke to La Opinión about the economic and retirement insecurities Latinos face as they age. Although older Americans have “more disposable income and assets accumulated at this time in their life, they also have the lowest savings rates, higher debt and will live longer,” said Torres-Gil, a professor of social welfare and public policy. “Latinos in general — especially Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Central Americans (Cubans are the exception) — have lower savings rates and pension coverage compared to African Americans and whites,” he said. Latinos also have overall lower education levels and are less likely to have higher-paying jobs that permit them to save money, he added. “Latinos and especially Hispanic women have the highest life expectancy rates compared to whites and African-Americans and, therefore, will live longer with greater economic and retirement insecurities,” he said.

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Ong on the Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund

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Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, spoke to KCRW’s Greater L.A. podcast about community mobilization against gentrification in Little Tokyo. Local residents and business owners organized the Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund to raise $2 million to collectively buy a building in Little Tokyo and rent it out below market value to selected tenants. Ong, a UCLA Luskin research professor, said the group has the credibility to make it happen but asked, “Will they be able to get enough investors?” He commented, “In many ways, you have to factor in things that normal businesses would not think about. That is, what is the cultural value, for example, of these businesses? What do they represent symbolically?”

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Astor on Schools’ Obligation to Create a Caring Environment

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor, an authority on school safety, spoke with media outlets including CBS News, NBC4 News and KNX1070 in the wake of the deadly shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita. Astor recently presented a report to Congress on reducing weapons in schools, based on data collected from California high schools. Among the findings was a startling statistic: Students at nearly 90% of high schools surveyed said they had seen weapons on campus. Astor said early intervention when warning signs appear is key, and schools must create a caring environment that encourages staff and students to come forward. “If we can actually get schools to see that this is their job, this is what they do, this is not just a prevention for shooting, this makes a better society, then we think we’ll see a massive reduction” in the most severe acts of violence on campus, Astor told NBC4.

Listen to Astor’s podcast on reducing weapons in schools.

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Monkkonen on Southern California’s Task to Build 1.3 Million New Homes

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Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to LAist about Southern California’s commitment to plan 1.3 million new homes by 2029. The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) originally planned to concentrate housing in the Inland Empire rather than in wealthy, coastal communities. Monkkonen said the original methodology, which relied on population projections, rewarded cities that have historically resisted new housing. Without new construction, a city’s population cannot grow; as a result, restrictive zoning in the past led to less zoning for homes in the future. “Cities that don’t want housing were able to project very low growth and get a very low housing number,” Monkkonen said. SCAG ultimately adopted an alternative plan that places more homes near major job centers and transit lines. The state’s housing department will review the plan, which will be finalized next year.

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Land Is Finite, but Housing Is Not, Manville Says

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to Architectural Digest about Apple’s announcement that it would invest $2.5 billion to address California’s housing crisis. The plan includes converting a 40-acre plot of land the company owns in San Jose into space for affordable housing. Manville said much of San Jose is reserved for detached single-family homes, “making for very inefficient use of valuable land.” Residents may be hesitant to change zoning rules because they like how their neighborhood looks or the fact that their house has tripled in value, Manville said. But he urged, “We must build up, so that the same plot of land of one home can accommodate many families. You know, the elevator also exists in Silicon Valley.” The alternative, he said, is a place that has the economy of a megacity and built environment of a suburb, “and that’s simply not sustainable.” Manville concluded, “Land is finite, but housing is not.”

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Americans Reject Criminalization of Humanitarian Aid, Zepeda-Millán Finds

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An Intercept article about the upcoming retrial of Scott Warren, a volunteer with the migrant advocacy group No More Deaths, cited the findings of a national survey conducted by Associate Professor of Public Policy Chris Zepeda-Millán and Sophia Jordán Wallace. Warren was indicted on felony harboring and conspiracy charges for giving two undocumented migrants food, water and a place to sleep for three days after they made a dangerous trek across the Sonoran Desert. The survey found that Americans of diverse political affiliations overwhelmingly reject the notion that providing lifesaving care to people in the desert should be criminalized. Strong, bipartisan consensus on immigration-related policy is rare in the era of President Trump, Zepeda-Millán said. “At the moment of life and death that migrants in the desert often find themselves in, Republicans seem to be willing to throw undocumented migrants at least a momentary lifesaver,” he said, but added, “That’s a pretty low bar.”

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