Debate Over the Best Path to Affordable Housing

/0 Comments/in /by

A CityWatch article about the competing academic and economic theories at play in California’s affordable housing debate put a spotlight on comments made by UCLA Luskin’s Michael Storper during a meeting with the California Alliance of Local Electeds. Housing costs reflect a mix of economic, market and cultural factors, so a complex suite of policies is needed to address interpersonal inequality in our cities, says Storper, a distinguished professor of urban planning. He takes issue with the notion that simply constructing more units will lead to lasting solutions to California’s affordable housing crisis. “I think this is one of the toughest challenges we’re facing,” he said. “In big, prosperous metropolitan areas, what would it take to build housing for the big middle or lower end of the income distribution, quality housing that people want to live in?”

Read the article

On the CSU Picket Line, Anger Over Pay Gap

/0 Comments/in /by

An LAist article on a strike by California State University faculty called on Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly for insights on equitable pay. The strike by the union representing 29,000 coaches, counselors, lecturers, librarians and professors led to a tentative agreement after one day. However, many of the union members remain indignant over the salaries awarded to top executives — including the CSU chancellor’s compensation package, which is worth nearly $1 million and includes a $96,000 annual housing allowance. The stark pay gap between workers and executives is an issue across many labor sectors, Tilly said. “I think it’s a disgrace that the gap is that big. But I would not put that just on the CSU,” he said. “CEO pay is completely out of control. I think that it sort of spilled over to higher education, with the private higher education institutions in the lead.”

Read the article

 

 

A ‘Generation-Altering Moment’ in the Homelessness Crisis

/0 Comments/in /by

Marques Vestal, assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Capital B about an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that will determine whether people experiencing homelessness can be issued jail time, tickets and fines for sleeping on the streets, even if there are no shelter alternatives available to them. If the court decides to uphold laws that target the unhoused, “it will be a generation-altering moment in urban history where cities are going to be able to enforce constitutional removal and displacement,” said Vestal, whose research includes the underlying causes of Black homelessness in Los Angeles. “We’re supposed to put people from encampments into either temporary or permanent housing. Instead, we’ll lose most of those people,” he said. “This will lead to a new regime of debt, and for Black folks, debt is always some kind of leverage for some other burying harm.”

Read the article

 

Lingering Impact of the Shelved 710 Freeway Project

/0 Comments/in /by

Research led by Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, will help guide a master plan for rebuilding Pasadena neighborhoods razed decades ago to make way for the 710 Freeway extension, a project that has now been abandoned. Pasadena Now covered Ong’s presentation before a city task force considering the future of the undeveloped acreage the size of 40 football fields, once the site of 1,500 homes occupied by mostly low-income and minority residents. Ong’s team will assess the historical impact of freeways on segregation in Pasadena by examining census data, policies and practices over more than seven decades. The 710 Freeway project came “at a juncture in our history that involved struggles around civil rights, around suburbanization of white flight, around post-industrial development and around immigration-driven demographic changes,” Ong told the task force. “Freeway development … occurs within a larger context, a societal transformation.”

Read the article

 

Modernizing Zoning Laws as Population Expands

/0 Comments/in /by

Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to the Post and Courier about land use and zoning ordinances at the center of a dispute over a South Carolina turkey-shoot business. A neighbor’s complaint about the business — which invites customers to shoot at targets, with a turkey awarded to the best marksman —prompted a review of zoning decisions made decades ago. The turkey shoot was found in compliance with the law, which did not require a buffer between the gunfire and other properties and did not regulate hours of operation. But officials were left to ponder how to preserve the county’s character amid a rapidly growing population. The episode casts light on recurring frictions over land use ever since the U.S. began to rapidly suburbanize in the 1940s and 1950s. Governments have grappled with how to modernize zoning regulations to accommodate more development, Lens said. “It just involves a lot of trade-offs.”

Read the article

 

Political Courage Is Key to Curing Traffic Ills, Manville Says

/0 Comments/in /by

UCLA Luskin Urban Planning chair Michael Manville spoke to the Los Angeles Times about plans to tap into artificial intelligence to find ways to make California’s roads safer and less congested. Caltrans is asking tech companies to pitch generative AI tools that could analyze immense amounts of data quickly, perhaps helping the state’s traffic engineers make decisions on signal timing and lane usage. Manville said that the problem is not a lack of data-backed solutions but rather a lack of political courage to put existing solutions, such as congestion pricing, into play. “If you want to make cities safer for pedestrians, if you want to lower speeds, if you want to deal with congestion in a meaningful way, technology is not going to rescue you from difficult political decisions,” he said.

Read the article

 

Moving Away From Public Transit’s Commuter Focus

/0 Comments/in /by

Brian Taylor, director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, spoke to the Canadian Press about Ottawa’s transit system, once a model of innovation but now facing low ridership and budget woes. Taylor, a professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA Luskin, recalled attending a lecture about Ottawa’s transit success when he was a student in the 1980s. “Ottawa and Adelaide, Australia, were sort of the poster children for looking at a more cost-effective way to provide the metro-like service, but with less expensive buses,” he said. For decades, many people worked and studied in a concentrated area in downtown Ottawa, and the buses ferried riders on a transitway set apart from congested roads. Post-pandemic, transit systems would be wise to cater to communities rather than commuters, Taylor said. “The spatial and temporal characteristics of demand for transit are changing. It’s less downtown-centered, and more sort of moving from place to place,” he said.

Read the article

 

Preparing Schools for a Warming World

/0 Comments/in /by

Education Week put a spotlight on a UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI) policy forum focused on protecting schools and students from extreme heat. “For some students, school might be the only time where they get a chance to cool off during the day,” said V. Kelly Turner, associate director of LCI, during the conversation with partners from the nonprofits Ten Strands and UndauntedK12. Schools must act now to prepare for a warming world, the panelists stressed. They laid out steps school districts can take to prepare for hotter days, including keeping classrooms under 80 degrees Fahrenheit; adding shade to schoolyards; developing emergency heat plans; and tapping into federal funding to upgrade energy systems. LCI also produced a resource kit offering further strategies for making schools more heat-resilient.

Read the Education Week story
Watch the LCI policy forum

 

Hurdles to Breaking Into the Housing Market

/0 Comments/in /by

A Washington Post article on millennials saving up to buy a home by living rent-free with family or friends cited José Loya, assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin. Record-high rental prices, along with student loan debt, car payments, child-care costs and other expenses, have tapped the finances of many young adults. Breaking into the housing market is particularly difficult for Black and Latino homebuyers, who have applied for mortgages at declining rates since the start of the pandemic, said Loya, who researches housing inequality. Such groups are disproportionately affected by rising home prices because they tend to have lower incomes. “They’re getting squeezed out,” he said. Loya also reviewed a Futuro Investigates project that found that financial institutions in New Jersey rejected Latino mortgage applicants at higher rates than their white counterparts between 2018 and 2022. Latinos who did get mortgages, meanwhile, paid higher interest rates than white borrowers on comparable home loans.

Read the Washington Post article