Astor on Parents’ Shaken Trust in Police Response at School Shootings

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The New York Times spoke to Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor about an altercation between parents and law enforcement at an Arizona school. A man believed to be armed had approached the campus, prompting a lockdown; he was taken into custody and no students or teachers were hurt. However, concerned relatives who arrived at the school clashed with police officers, demanding access to the campus. Three people were arrested, two of whom were shocked with stun guns. Astor said widespread media coverage of the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where the police response was heavily criticized, has led to deteriorating confidence in law enforcement’s effectiveness in this type of crisis. “You can see these parents don’t trust the police because of everything they’ve seen or heard,” but that narrative is not necessarily accurate, Astor said. Police can help change that narrative by being transparent and trustworthy, he said.

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Cohen on the Marketing of Psychiatric Disorders and Drugs

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Social Welfare Professor David Cohen spoke to the science podcast Mind & Matter about the growing use of psychiatric drugs, marketing tactics used by major pharmaceutical companies, and what we are learning about long-term health effects on adults and children. Cohen linked the widespread use of anti-depressants such as Prozac to a multi-pronged effort by the “psycho-pharmaceutical medical industrial complex” to convince people that their struggles in life are due to a brain disorder. “We have created and trained generations of people to think that their distress, their misbehavior, their difficult choices, their oppression, all the problems of living as a human being are probably medical problems that have a medical solution,” he said. “That’s the dominant view today, that we are surrounded by mental illnesses.” Drugs can be a legitimate way for some individuals to function well in life, Cohen said, but he cautioned that patients should understand the medical risks and profit motives surrounding powerful prescription drugs.

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Manville on Musk’s Pitch to Ease Traffic

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to New York Magazine about Elon Musk’s Boring Company, which proposes alleviating traffic congestion through the construction of tunnels beneath U.S. cities. Musk has argued that this type of underground network could whisk drivers across town in a fraction of the time. Manville countered that if the tunnels succeeded in easing traffic above ground, city streets and freeways would then become more attractive to the same drivers, and congestion would return. An example of this induced demand is the expansion of Interstate 405 through Los Angeles’ Sepulveda Pass, which was meant to reduce traffic but instead lured more motorists to the freeway’s added lanes. Manville, who leads traffic research at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, said a wiser course of action would be to implement congestion pricing for drivers traveling on existing roads and provide more alternatives to low-capacity vehicles.

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Roy on L.A. Ban on Homeless Encampments Near Schools

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Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, spoke to the New York Times about the Los Angeles City Council’s decision to prohibit homeless people from setting up tents within 500 feet of public and private schools and day care centers. The new law, passed on a vote of 11-3, would bump the number of banned sites from 20 to 2,000, one councilman estimated. “It’s not an effort to alleviate poverty. It’s an effort to manage visible poverty and get it out of sight,” said Roy, a professor of social welfare, urban planning and geography. As more people begin living on the streets, “liberal cities are doing everything in their power to get around Martin v. Boise,” she said, referring to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 ruling that prosecuting people for sleeping in public amounts to cruel and unusual punishment when no shelter beds are available.

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Holloway on Lowering Risk of Monkeypox Infection

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Social Welfare Professor Ian Holloway spoke to the Los Angeles Times about strategies Californians are using to protect themselves from the monkeypox virus as they await vaccination. More than 1,300 monkeypox cases have been reported across the state, prompting an emergency declaration from Gov. Gavin Newsom. Men who have sex with men have been disproportionately affected, and many have changed the ways they socialize, celebrate, and seek love and sex. Sexual expression “is a huge part of gay culture and building gay community,” Holloway said. But “in the face of a pathogen that’s spreading in a way that we haven’t seen before … it’s not a bad idea to press pause for a period of time. We know the vaccine is on its way.” Holloway is director of UCLA’s Gay Sexuality and Social Policy Initiative, which has shared practical guides to help sexually active people reduce their risks.

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Taking the Measure of L.A.’s ‘Cool Pavement’ Experiment

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A CNN story on the climate adaptation strategies used by eight world cities described research conducted by V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. The article described Los Angeles’ use of cooling paint on city streets as part of a pilot project to measure the effect on surface and ambient temperatures. Turner, an assistant professor of urban planning, and research partner Ariane Middel of Arizona State University collected data from the project and found that treated street surfaces were cooled by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. However, they also found that heat radiating from the streets elevated temperatures immediately above the surface. Another type of paint could yield different results, and the city is continuing the program to see what methods work best. 

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It’s Time to End Parking Requirements Statewide, Manville Argues

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville wrote a Streetsblog California op-ed arguing for a statewide ban on minimum parking requirements in areas near public transit. Most California cities currently mandate that newly constructed buildings include a certain amount of parking. Manville argued that these rules get in the way of meeting the state’s housing, transportation and climate goals by reinforcing our driving culture and making it harder and more expensive to build housing. He called for passage of AB 2097, which would lift minimum parking mandates in areas near public transit all across the state. Ending these requirements would not ban parking but would simply mean that the government cannot dictate the quantity and location of parking spaces in certain areas. “California has some of the most valuable land on earth, but parking requirements force us, despite a dire housing shortage, to squander that land on the low-value use of storing empty cars,” Manville wrote. 

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Vestal on Law-Enforcement Approach to Homelessness Crisis

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Marques Vestal, assistant professor of urban planning, spoke to Capital B about a Los Angeles ordinance designating thousands of locations off-limits to homeless encampments. The law has divided the city, with supporters calling for increased public safety around schools and opponents arguing that a law-enforcement approach to homelessness will push vulnerable people deeper into poverty. The article noted that Black people make up nearly 45% of the unhoused population in Los Angeles County. Vestal, co-author of the UCLA report “The Making of a Crisis: A History of Homelessness in Los Angeles,” said the policy of policing the homelessness crisis has burdened Black people for decades. “The housing system has created an institutional process that makes us more vulnerable to getting money taken away from us and more vulnerable to violence,” he said.

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Manville on Lag in Building Affordable Housing

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to Courthouse News about the lag in building affordable housing in California cities despite the availability of hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding. An expensive and time-consuming process requires cities to meet several criteria in a stiff competition for state and federal funding. Many cities must make strategic policy changes if they really want to tackle their housing crises, Manville said. “If housing prices are high and no one is coming to you with a proposal, you are probably sending the message that you are not accommodating to development,” he said. Another challenge is the limited land available for traditional public housing. Senate Bill 9 — which among other things allows homeowners to turn their single-family parcels into multiple units — was a good start, Manville said, but officials should also free up land to accommodate larger complexes with denser housing.

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Turner on the Urgent Work of Chief Heat Officers

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V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, co-authored a CalMatters opinion piece offering guidance to chief heat officers, the government officials tasked with coordinating a strategic response to extreme heat. Los Angeles appointed its first chief heat officer in June, and a statewide position is also under consideration. Turner and co-author David Eisenman of the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions wrote that heat waves are becoming longer and hotter and the most vulnerable people need cooling immediately. They urged policymakers to base their interventions on science, pointing to research that shows the effectiveness of urban cooling tools such as tree canopies and reflective roofs. And they urged heat officers to act with urgency to coordinate heat-action efforts across many agencies. “We cannot wait for extreme heat policies to evolve across bureaucracies over decades,” they wrote. “Chief heat officers must get many pieces moving quickly. They must convene, collaborate and cajole.”

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