Astor on Bullying Motivated by Religion

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke with Education Dive about proposed changes to the data collected by the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. The office plans to eliminate some survey questions involving early-career teachers and early childhood education but will add questions about religion-related bullying. While school districts would not be required to identify a student’s religion, they would be expected to assess whether a bully was motivated by religious differences. The Office of Management and Budget found that roughly 10,000 of the 135,200 bullying incidents reported in 2015-2016 were related to religion. Astor said it would be “good to know if kids of certain religions are getting bullied more or not” but cautioned that one’s perceived religion may or may not be the real reason for the mistreatment. He added that incidents actually reported by schools are likely to represent only the “tip of the iceberg” of what’s taking place.

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Yaroslavsky on Race to Succeed Ridley-Thomas

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Wave about the upcoming race to succeed county Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. Term limits will force Ridley-Thomas to give up his 2nd District seat on the powerful Board of Supervisors. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in a March primary, the top two vote-getters will face off in November. Of the eight candidates who have emerged so far, the three with the highest chance of winning the election are Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson, state Sen. Holly Mitchell and former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, according to Yaroslavsky. Perry, who has already raised more than $500,000 for the campaign, has “surprised some people with the amount of money she’s raised,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a horse race.”

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Shoup on the Real Price of Free Parking

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In an essay for CityLab, Distinguished Research Professor Donald Shoup used vivid examples to lay out his arguments for eliminating parking requirements in urban development. Shoup did the math on the real price of free parking: The average construction cost of a single parking space is $24,000 to $34,000 — more than the net worth of many U.S. households, he found. And nationwide, the area of off-street parking per car (about 900 square feet) is greater than the area of housing per human (about 800 square feet). “A flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements poison our cities, increasing traffic congestion, polluting the air, encouraging sprawl, raising housing costs, degrading urban design, preventing walkability, damaging the economy and penalizing everyone who cannot afford a car,” the urban planning professor wrote. He added, “Simply improving parking policies could be the cheapest, quickest and most politically feasible way to achieve many social, economic and environmental goals.”

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Astor on Risk of Suicide Among California’s Youth

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A Southern California News Group article about a survey asking California students whether they have thought about killing themselves cited Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor, an expert on school safety. Of the students surveyed, nearly one in five had considered suicide within the last 12 months, the news group’s analysis found. The rate at individual school sites ranged from 4% to nearly 70%, according to Astor, who has conducted an extensive study of the data. “What happens in the classroom and on the playground matters,” he said. “How students are treated between themselves and by teachers, it matters.” Each school district in the state decides whether to administer the survey to ninth- and 11th-graders and students in non-traditional high schools. Districts that obtain the information and act on it report a reduction in suicide ideation rates, the newspaper reported. Astor also commented in a second Southern California News Group article about three California bills aimed at preventing teen suicide, and discussed the issue in a televised interview with CBS Los Angeles.

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Ong on the Undermining of Ethnic Enclaves

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Paul Ong, research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the imminent departure of two Chinatown grocery stores following disputes with landlords. Such grocery stores act as anchors for ethnic communities, bringing foot traffic to barbers, bankers, restaurants, remittance businesses and other culturally specific vendors, the column noted. Ong said that ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Historic Filipinotown and Boyle Heights find themselves directly in the path of change because they’re located in the core of the city, where redevelopment is most intense. “There’s still a need for these culturally specific services in the urban core. But the question is, are we going to see these needs served?” Ong asked.

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Taylor on Bay Area’s Mega-Plan to Coordinate Transit

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Urban Planning Professor Brian Taylor spoke with the Mercury News about a proposed “mega-measure” to turn the Bay Area’s extensive network of rail, buses and ferries into a coordinated transportation network. A $100-billion-plus transportation sales tax that could go before voters in nine counties as early as 2020 would fund the plan. The reforms under consideration include coordinating timetables, standardizing ticket prices and adopting the same maps. Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, said the individual agencies were created to serve local, rather than regional, customers, adding that smaller bureaucracies tend to be more accessible and cost-effective. However, he said, “right now we have a system, and a tradition, where each transit agency has its own map, its own color scheme, its own way to organize fares, its own way to describe its services.”

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Koslov on Communities Rallying Around ‘Managed Retreat’

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Liz Koslov, assistant professor of urban planning, spoke with Vice about “managed retreat” — the politically and emotionally complex process of moving entire populations away from escalating climate hazards. Common perceptions of retreat involve force — the government mandating the removal of a population or people barred from returning to their homes in the wake of a major disaster, Koslov said. This was not the case in many Staten Island neighborhoods that had experienced repeated floods for decades before they were devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, she said. Many residents were not only on board with managed retreat; they were actually impatient for state buyouts of their properties, her research found. “These are some of the most politically conservative parts of New York City, so I was really struck by watching older people who prided themselves on being individual homeowners — many of whom had longstanding, multigenerational ties to these neighborhoods — come together to organize essentially to disperse themselves,” Koslov said.

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Yaroslavsky on Frustrations Over Combating Homelessness

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke with KCRW’s Press Play shortly after President Trump criticized California cities for the spread of homelessness during a trip to the state. Yaroslavsky took issue with Trump “coming in here and lecturing to us about what’s wrong with our housing policy,” saying several of the administration’s actions are responsible for pushing citizens onto the streets. He also said the root of homelessness is income inequality, not the availability of housing units. “The bottom line is this: We have an affordable housing crisis. We don’t have a market-rate housing crisis.” Yaroslavsky argued against loosening rules on zoning and development. “The proposals that have come out of Sacramento to eliminate the single-family homes and the duplex zones and the quadruplex zones in the city and allow seven-story massive apartment buildings with no parking is not the answer,” he said. “The people who are squeezed in this housing environment are people who are of low and moderate income, and that’s 40 to 45 percent of the city.”

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Matute on E-Scooters Hitting an Invisible Fence

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the emergence of electronic geofences that slow down or shut down e-scooters to enforce rules of the road. Cities across California are testing the technology, which erects invisible fences to enforce speed and parking restrictions and, in some places, create dead zones. The rules change from neighborhood to neighborhood and have caused confusion and frustration among riders whose rented e-scooters come to a halt. Cities and scooter companies negotiate the restrictions, but “these aren’t on the books,” Matute said. “Given that what the companies are asked to do changes week to week, it can be hard for an individual to keep up with what’s permitted and what each company’s restrictions are.”

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Koslov on ‘Managed Retreat’ as a Moral Act

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A New York Daily News opinion piece about communities that choose to retreat from coastal areas threatened by climate change highlighted the research of Liz Koslov, assistant professor of urban planning. The world is witnessing storms that are increasing in frequency and severity, as well as a dramatic rise in sea levels as massive ice sheets melt. As a result, some coastal communities are considering relocation. Koslov noted that some Staten Islanders who participated in a buyout of their property after 2012’s Superstorm Sandy viewed retreat not as surrender but as a form of resilience. “They spoke of retreat very differently — as a moral achievement, a sort of sacrifice for the greater good,” she said. “They felt that that was a very profound and meaningful act.” Koslov shared her research at a conference on “managed retreat” at Columbia University’s Earth Institute this summer.

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