Cohen on the Unethical Detainment of Psychiatric Patients

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David Cohen, professor of social welfare, was cited in a book excerpt published by The Walrus about the forcible detainment of many psychiatric patients. In his five-year study, Cohen found that at least 600,000 detentions took place in 2014 under mental health laws. In addition, between 2012 and 2016, psychiatric detentions increased every year at a rate three times faster than population growth. Cohen discussed how there were apparent gaps in the data, even though medical records are electronic and should be easily accessible. He said many government and treatment providers apparently do not want to expose the reality that our mental health system has been used to incarcerate and control people. “There’s nothing pleasant about that. There’s nothing beautiful and pretty. It’s just exclusion: ‘Please take them away from me.’ And because we’re saying we’re doing it to help them, there’s a kind of systemic dissonance,” Cohen said.

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Ong on Census Miscount of Asian Americans

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Paul Ong, head of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to National Public Radio about reports regarding an overcount of Asian Americans in the latest census. A recent analysis found that while national figures reflect an overcount, Asian Americans were actually undercounted in some rural parts of the country. Ong said miscounts should not be ignored because communities may risk losing representation in government, as well as federal funding for public services. “It goes along probably with the ‘model minority’ narrative that somehow there is some statistical result that says that there are no problems among Asian Americans and therefore we don’t need to pay attention to them,” he said. Ong said possible reasons for an overcount include college students being counted once on campus and once at home, and anti-Asian rhetoric that led to more people of Asian descent to check an Asian race box on census forms.

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Manville Explains Why Freeways Are Congested Again

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, was cited in a Mercury News article about heavy traffic congestion on Bay Area freeways even though many jobs remain remote. The COVID-19 pandemic as well as remote and hybrid work schedules opened up highways and roads, which encouraged people to drive more until highways were once again full. “Traffic congestion is not only annoying — it acts as a deterrent,” Manville said. “If traffic goes down, then people are going to see the freeway is empty and get into the car and go somewhere else.” He explained that even though Californians are commuting less, there are still many reasons for them to continue driving on freeways. Some solutions to this issue are to break the habit of solo driving by encouraging people to use public transportation more often or by enforcing congestion fees to discourage people from driving at peak hours.

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Investments in Campus Climate Paying Off

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The Los Angeles Times, EdSource and KTVU News are among media outlets sharing research by Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor showing a marked decline in day-to-day violence on school campuses over the last two decades. Astor attributed the findings to investments in resources to improve campus climate and access to mental health services. Nationwide, billions of dollars have been spent on social-emotional programs for students; educating teachers and staff about how to create more caring, welcoming settings; and bringing more social workers, counselors, psychologists and other “people personnel” onto campuses. “I think there’s a deep sense of disillusion that every time there’s a shooting, there’s almost a feeling that we invested all this time and energy and nothing works, that our schools are getting worse,” Astor said. But the data do not bear that out, with students reporting that they are feeling more connected and safer, he said.

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Watch the KTVU report

 

Ong on Post-COVID Population Shifts

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Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about population shifts in California counties. Factors affecting the shifts include college students moving back to campus, the easing of COVID-19 protocols and employees moving back to the office. Ong said the “waning of the worst days of the pandemic has slowed the exit from major cities,” as crowded spaces are no longer a major source of fear. While urban centers have “once again become appealing to a new generation of young workers,” it is urgent that cities address problems regarding housing, homelessness, infrastructure and safety, Ong cautioned.  “Without correcting these flaws, major cities will continue to depopulate.”

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Torres-Gil on How to Make Elder Care Affordable and Sustainable

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Fernando Torres-Gil, director of UCLA Luskin’s Center for Policy Research on Aging and professor of social welfare and public policy, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the increased cost of care for older Americans, paired with extremely low wages for home health aides. When it comes to elder care, both sides are suffering. Caretakers, some of whom take care of family members with disabilities, are not always paid a livable wage. Many older adults may lack sufficient funds to pay caretakers decent wages. Torres-Gil suggests creating “a public universal long-term-care financing mechanism we’re all required to pay into. … The question is, do we have sufficient public support for it? Do we have a public that recognizes the risks of growing older and all the things that come with it?”

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Goh on the Consequences of Windowless Rooms

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Kian Goh, associate professor of urban planning, was cited in an article in The Architect’s Newspaper about the construction of windowless bedrooms to help meet the high demand for housing in metropolitan areas. Windowless rooms are banned in New York City and other regions because of the health hazards they pose on occupants, such as increased fire hazards. Furthermore, natural light has been shown to have positive effects on a person’s mental and physical well-being. “The thing about windowless rooms is it’s not a design issue — we can design cool windowless rooms for any floor plan. It’s that we rely on code minimums to protect the health and welfare of the most marginalized in an unjust, unequal society,” Goh said. Ultimately, people in low-income communities would bear the burden of living in windowless homes with minimum safety measures, as opposed to those who can afford well-designed homes with a windowless floor plan.

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Steinert-Threlkeld on Twitter, Algorithms and Transparency

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An Atlantic article on Twitter’s decision to publicly share part of the source code that determines which posts are prioritized in a feed cited Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, assistant professor of public policy and an authority on social media data. The glimpse at the algorithm revealed technical approaches that are “pretty standard these days,” Steinert-Threlkeld said. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has invited developers and the general public to suggest changes, and Steinert-Threlkeld noted that the company may be the biggest beneficiary of the decision to pull back the curtain on part of the code. “If bugs are discovered or improvements to the algorithms are suggested and accepted, Twitter will have found a way to replace the thousands of staff who left or were fired,” he said.

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Solace Found in Data on School Violence

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor wrote an op-ed for CNN that shines light on comforting data on school violence. While the contagion of mass shootings dominates the narrative on the safety of school campuses, research led by Astor shows that, overall, efforts to lessen violence in schools are working. “Our country deserves to know that mass shootings are just one part of the school safety story,” Astor wrote. “On a day-to-day basis, when looking at violence that is not related to school shootings, our kids are safer.” An expert on school safety, Astor appeared in a Swedish National Radio documentary series on campus violence and spoke to WKRN-TV in Nashville about the risks of creating a prison atmosphere in an effort to secure schools. Astor said that students who feel surveilled or see safety officers, police dogs, even see-through backpacks may come to this conclusion: “You’re the target or you’re the potential perpetrator.” 

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Watch the WKRN video

 

After Years of Study, Parking Reform Gaining Ground

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A Wall Street Journal piece on the growing number of U.S. cities rethinking the amount of space set aside for parking cited several UCLA Luskin experts. The article highlighted research by Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, that found that a 1999 ordinance exempting builders from adding new parking spots in downtown Los Angeles allowed them to add more residential units at a lower cost. Another study by Gregory Pierce, now co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, and C.J. Gabbe, currently a visiting scholar at the center, found that costs associated with parking mandates are often passed on to consumers through higher rents or retail prices, even as many of the spots go unused. Donald Shoup, the urban planning scholar who pioneered the field of parking research, summed up the efforts to reform parking policies: “The Dutch have reclaimed land from the sea, and I think we can reclaim land from parking.”

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