Manville on Car-Free Zones for L.A.

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the temporary closure of a road in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park to stop drivers — about 2,000 a day — from cutting through the park and to improve safety for cyclists, runners, hikers and equestrians. “It is good to make it easier for people to recreationally cycle and walk and feel safe in our own parks,” Manville said. “But the fact is that people also should be able to bike and walk safely throughout the city.” Los Angeles has historically prioritized car travel, as evidenced by projects to widen streets to accommodate more traffic and requirements that new developments include ample parking. The Griffith Park pilot program “accentuates the park’s original purpose as a respite away from the noise and activity of the city. … The city should be much more willing to consider things like [car-free stretches] on its actual streets,” Manville said.

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Yaroslavsky on County Supervisors’ Authority Over Sheriff

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UCLA Luskin faculty member Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to CBS2 News and KPCC’s “AirTalk” about a motion from the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors to seek authority to remove an elected sheriff from office. The proposed change to the county charter, which would require voter approval, comes amid continuing strife between board members and Sheriff Alex Villanueva over funding, hiring, COVID-19 vaccination policies and claims of “deputy gangs” within the agency. “I think the board is right to be frustrated with this sheriff. … But they need to be careful that the remedy does not undermine their high-ground position,” said Yaroslavsky, a longtime public servant who now directs the Luskin School’s Los Angeles Initiative. The timing of the motion may be a “tactical mistake,” he said, as it could divert attention and resources to the supervisors’ action rather than Villanueva’s record as he faces a runoff election in November against former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna.

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Understanding Male Suicide

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Big Think showcased a new study of men, suicide and mental health authored by Social Welfare Professor Mark Kaplan and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study tracked recent suicide deaths among U.S. males age 10 and older and found that 60% of the victims had no documented mental health conditions. In many cases, alcohol and firearms were significant factors, the researchers determined. While it’s likely that some of the males without known mental health issues were concealing struggles, the study also suggested that men tend to be more impulsive than women. “Greater investment and focus on mental health is undeniably needed in the U.S., but to make a dent in the tragic number of American male suicides, reducing firearm access, advocating responsible alcohol use, lowering poverty, and teaching males healthy coping methods to deal with acutely stressful situations might save a lot more lives,” the article said.

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A Tool to Help Californians Assess the Risk of Extreme Heat

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A Planetizen article described the importance of a new edition of the California Healthy Places Index that is designed to educate communities about the risks of extreme heat. Developed by the Public Health Alliance of Southern California in partnership with the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, the Healthy Places Index is a powerful tool that analyzes community conditions to predict life expectancy, compare and rank scores at multiple California locations, and inform the public about concrete policy solutions. The index’s new Extreme Heat Edition provides datasets on projected heat exposure for Californians, including indicators measuring community conditions and sensitive populations as well as resources and funding opportunities that can be used to address extreme heat. The Center for Innovation explained that heat is an equity issue, so it is important to identify where protections are most needed and where they’ll have the biggest impact.

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Tilly on Retail Workers’ Fight for Better Conditions

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Grocery Dive spoke with Urban Planning chair Chris Tilly about evolving labor dynamics in the supermarket industry and other large retailers. Energized by a pandemic-spurred labor shortage, workers and labor advocates have made progress in their quest for better working conditions, including higher pay, guaranteed hours, and stronger health and retirement benefits. However, in an age of declining union membership and pressure on businesses to hold down expenses, it will be difficult for workers to make significant long-term gains in their relationships with large companies, Tilly said. In the past, publicly traded retailers were often controlled by families that could make workers a priority, but today they frequently answer to large-scale investors, like mutual fund managers, who are focused on quarterly results, he said. “Shareholders trying to squeeze dividends and increase share price … shifted the balance of power within public companies,” Tilly said.

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Miyashita Ochoa on Decriminalization of Sex Work

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Ayako Miyashita Ochoa, adjunct assistant professor of social welfare, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the repeal of a provision of California law that had banned loitering with the intent to sell sex. In signing State Bill 357, Gov. Gavin Newsom said the measure aims to end the disproportionate harassment of women and transgender adults but does not legalize prostitution. The legislation sparked a debate touching on transgender rights, human trafficking and the decriminalization of sex work. Miyashita Ochoa said criminalization pushes sex workers into “isolated and unsafe spaces,” leads to increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases and creates distrust in law enforcement. “What we’re talking about here is moral legislation. And what we should be talking about is labor protections,” Miyashita Ochoa said. “And if we can’t give women and other folks engaged in sex trades that dignity as a worker, then we are just as bad as the people that are taking advantage.”

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Climate Change Action at the Community Level

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A Streetsblog Cal article highlighted reports published by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation that evaluate the effectiveness of the state’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program in five different communities. The TCC program helps fund the development and implementation of community-defined, neighborhood-level plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “The most transformative element of TCC may also be its most foundational: the community engagement and collaborative processes that anchor each neighborhood’s efforts,” according to the reports. So far, the TCC program has been implemented in Fresno, Ontario, Stockton, and the Watts and Northeast San Fernando Valley neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and 18 more communities have received planning grants. “The TCC award not only brings a significant influx of financial resources to the community, but also reinforces the cross-sector partnerships that were built before and during the TCC application process,” the Center for Innovation found. “Empowering members of historically underserved communities can catalyze change for the long-term.”

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Astor on Good and Bad Trends in School Safety

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to media covering the release of a federal report showing that the 2020-21 school year had the highest number of school shooting casualties in the past two decades. Astor told the Washington Post that he welcomed the report’s broad definition of school shootings, which includes instances when guns were fired or brandished on school property, or when a bullet struck school grounds for any reason. The presence of a gun can be traumatic to anyone on campus, not just those hurt or targeted, he said. The report also identified a positive trend: decreased rates of nonfatal criminal victimization, such as theft, and less bullying and harassment. “People have been working really hard to reduce the bullying, the name-calling, the kicking, harassment kinds of issues, and we’ve been pretty effective as a country at reducing them,” Astor told K-12 Dive.

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Assessing the Health of American Democracy

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A Washington Post article on different assessments of the stability of American democracy cited the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index, which tracks quality of life, governance and democracy in countries around the world. The article noted that the U.S. political status quo has triggered pessimism and despair, yet several countries still regard the United States as a bulwark of liberal democratic values. The recently released Berggruen Governance Index, a collaborative project of UCLA Luskin and the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, identified significant declines in U.S. “state capacity” and “democratic accountability” over the past 20 years. “The steepness of the U.S.’s drop is unusual: Its path parallels Brazil, Hungary and Poland much more closely than that of Western Europe or the other wealthy Anglophone countries,” according to Markus Lang and Edward Knudsen, researchers who work with the governance index’s principal investigator, Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Helmut Anheier.

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Pierce on Floating Desalination Plants for Disaster Relief

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Gregory Pierce, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke to BBC about the prospect of floating desalination plants to bolster scarce supplies of fresh water worldwide. Desalination plants remove the salt from seawater, but the process of pumping large volumes of water across membranes at high pressure is expensive and energy-intensive. Now, engineers are working on building floating, nuclear-powered desalination systems that would make it much easier to create clean drinking water and power. Pierce noted that the most significant application of floating desalination systems could be in disaster relief. The current method of flying and trucking in bottled water after a disaster is “the most inefficient thing possible,” he said. “If floating desalination can address that, I’m all for that.” However, in other contexts, there are many other ways of securing clean water supplies that are more cost-effective, Pierce said.

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