Tearing Down Barriers to Homeownership

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The podcast Policy Research and Poverty spoke to UCLA Luskin’s José Loya about his research on how race, gender and age affect access to mortgage credit. “Homeownership is the largest vehicle for creating wealth,” said Loya, assistant professor of urban planning. “It’s not small businesses. It’s not owning stocks or bonds. It’s actually the purchasing of a house.” Yet multiple barriers prevent certain demographic groups from accessing mortgages and achieving the multigenerational security that homeownership represents, his research shows. These inequities affect not just individual families but entire neighborhoods — the presence of quality schools, public transit, government services and high-opportunity jobs. Programs that expand homeownership opportunities in lower-income neighborhoods are not just about owning a piece of real estate, Loya said. “I always joke around that it’s not really about having the right to paint the wall or move my fence or whatever. It’s really about the opportunities that that home provides for that family.”

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Subway or Monorail? LA Metro Weighs Options for Easing Congestion

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LAist’s coverage of competing proposals to ease congestion in the Sepulveda Corridor features Jacob Wasserman of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Wasserman explains the pros and cons of two alternatives under consideration by LA Metro: a monorail and a subway. Increased capacity for riders and shortened travel times are advantages of the subway, but some homeowners object to tunneling beneath their properties. A monorail would require little or no tunneling and lower the cost and duration of construction, but one potential disadvantage is noise and air pollution. Wasserman also speaks about the benefits to people who work and study at UCLA, which has “one of the biggest concentrations of jobs and, unique to the Westside, a big concentration of people without cars.” All of the subway proposals would have a stop at UCLA, while only one of the proposed monorail routes would stop directly on campus.

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On the ‘Pernicious and Hidden’ Toll of Chronic Heat

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V. Kelly Turner, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI), spoke to several media outlets about the dangers of rising temperatures as well as cross-sector efforts to make communities more resilient to extreme heat. In a Guardian piece about this summer’s brutal heat wave in the United States, Turner noted that “chronic heat exposure can affect people in really pernicious and hidden ways.” On Spectrum News 1, she reminded viewers that heat not only contributes to more deaths than all other weather-related disasters, it also touches every aspect of daily life, from prenatal health, children’s learning, losses in labor and stresses on the medical system. Turner also spoke with the Los Angeles Times and the podcast America Adapts about the work that will be done by the new federally funded Center of Excellence for Heat Resilient Communities, to be housed at LCI. The center will be an “all-hands-on-deck approach to learn from existing efforts to prevent the worst consequences of extreme heat.”

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Measuring the Impact of Guaranteed-Income Experiments

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The Los Angeles Times spoke with Judith Perrigo of the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty about the impact of trial programs that provide a guaranteed basic income to people struggling to afford rent, child care and other expenses. Perrigo is currently studying experimental programs in Los Angeles County and Pomona, with the goal of providing scientific evidence to policymakers considering incorporating direct cash payments into social safety net systems. Her research aims to determine who benefits most from such programs and how extra cash with no strings attached affects the financial security and well-being of families, particularly those with very young children. “We know that the brain is developing rapidly in those first few years. So just to think about the opportunities that every kid could have at that age — the investments that they can have, the time that they can have from their parents, because their parents have the opportunity to spend more time with them — it’s tremendous.”

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Tilly on U.S. Wages and Job Creation

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UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly spoke to CNBC in a story about the trend in real earnings — the net growth in worker’s wages after inflation — in the U.S. over the past year. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker in the private sector saw an increase in real hourly earnings from May 2023 to May 2024. “The last year of increases in real wages is a large and important step forward for working families,” said Tilly, who studies labor markets and public policies directed toward better jobs. Tilly also commented in a Spectrum News 1 story about U.S. job growth during the current presidential administration. “The economy started out in a hole due to the pandemic when President Biden assumed the presidency, and so part of the process was getting out of that hole,” he said. “That’s a lot of jobs to create.”

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Brozen Discusses Traffic ‘Safety Crisis’ in Some L.A. Neighborhoods

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In a recent newsletter distributed by the Los Angeles Times, UCLA Luskin’s Madeline Brozen says the lack of safety at an intersection where a 4-year-old was struck and killed in October 2019 “speaks to a lack of streamlined approach” by the city. Conditions in the predominantly non-white, low-income neighborhood of Koreatown where Alessa Fajardo died highlight the race- and class-based inequities of traffic violence. Black and brown residents are disproportionately killed in traffic collisions in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States. “In the last five years, one of every three traffic deaths in L.A. is a Black or Latino pedestrian, up from one in four in 2013-2017,” said Brozen, deputy director of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, who cites a policy brief she co-authored this year. “This is a safety crisis and we need a city process that brings improvements to communities as quickly as possible and doesn’t spend more on settlements than infrastructure,” Brozen said.

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Ripple Effects From NYC’s Pause on Congestion Pricing

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to indefinitely halt a long-awaited congestion pricing plan for Manhattan reverberated in cities across the country that had been closely watching the ambitious experiment in traffic management. Media outlets covering the impact called on Michael Manville, chair of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and an expert on congestion pricing. “With a policy this controversial, it is always helpful if someone else goes first,” Manville told the New York Times. “Being able to say, ‘These guys did it and it worked out,’ seems like a small thing, but it’s much, much better than saying, ‘We’re going to stick our necks out over this untested policy.’” Manville also spoke to the Los Angeles Times about prospects that congestion pricing will take hold elsewhere. “Had New York moved forward, I think it would have opened up some breathing room for Los Angeles and San Francisco to take their fairly dormant proposals and rev them back up,” he said.

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Mullin on How News Reporting Affects Local Infrastructure

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Megan Mullin, faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke to Susanne Whatley, host of “Morning Edition” on LAist 89.3, about a newly published study connecting local reporting to voter support for public works projects. Mullin, also a professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, is co-author of the study on how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue. Specifically, Mullin and co-author Andrew Trexler of Duke University focused on preventive spending on infrastructure maintenance and repair and its relationship with the character and depth of news reporting. Through the national survey, the researchers found that readers responded to more informative coverage. “There’s a lot of great research demonstrating the importance of political news for the health of our democracy and the negative impacts that have followed from the closure and consolidation of news outlets,” Mullin said.

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Relaxing Traffic at LAX

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Brian D. Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, commented in a Los Angeles Times story about traffic at Los Angeles International Airport and ongoing efforts to alleviate congestion in and around the world-famous travel destination. Since the airport became an international destination in 1949, L.A. County’s population has grown by millions, with ground transportation growing with increased flight travel. “Things that were perfectly reasonable in 1966 become problematic in 2024,” said Taylor, UCLA professor of urban planning and public policy. In addition to improvements including cell phone waiting lots and the LAXit lot designated for ride-hail services and taxis, billions of dollars have been allocated for projects to ease airport traffic. “They’ve done more and more over time to move the cars onto the outer part of the roadway and be able to move the shuttle buses more quickly,” Taylor said. But “the easiest default is to drive [to a parking structure] or even get dropped off.”

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RV Life as an Affordable Housing Option

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Urban Planning Professor Adam Millard-Ball spoke to Florida public media outlet WUFT about the growing number of people who live in RVs by choice or necessity. Housing research into the estimated 1 million Americans who live full-time in RVs has focused more on people pursuing a highly mobile and leisurely “Van Life” than on stationary, low-income residents, the article noted. “Some people like the nomadic existence, but for many people it’s the lesser of two evils,” Millard-Ball said. “It’s better than couch surfing or being in a tent.” Large urban centers can support this option by converting excess space on public roads and in parking lots into areas with access to basic utilities such as water hookups and garbage collection, where residents of campers and RVs can live legally. The average residential street is more than twice as wide as the functional minimum of 16 feet, Millard-Ball’s research shows, and some of that extra space could be used to accommodate housing.

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