Stiffer Housing Requirement Will Benefit Angelenos, Monkkonen Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the state’s ruling that Los Angeles must add more than 250,000 homes to its zoning plan. State housing regulators rejected the city’s proposed long-term plan for growth and will require the city to rezone to accommodate the additional quarter-million new homes. City leaders must fix the housing plan by October in order to access billions of dollars in affordable housing grants, which will be necessary to support the growing number of low-income and homeless residents. Monkkonen agreed that the state’s ruling was justifiable given the city’s rejection of more assertive state-led rezoning proposals in favor of greater local control over where growth should go. “Allowing more housing more quickly will benefit Angelenos,” he said. “City officials shouldn’t drag their feet on taking the necessary actions to allow more housing, and should act at the pace that a crisis demands.”

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Vestal on History of L.A.’s Black Homelessness Crisis

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Mark Vestal spoke to LAist about the role of racial inequity in the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Vestal co-authored the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy report “Making of a Crisis: The History of Homelessness in L.A.,” which explored the history of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, starting with the Great Depression and leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Black unhoused people are one of the largest groups facing homelessness in Los Angeles, and Vestal pointed out that the long history of racist housing policies has led to a discrepancy in homeownership among Black residents. “Black folks were segregated in inner cities and subject to predatory mortgage markets and home-buying schemes that continued to suck Black dollars and wealth from bank accounts for decades,” Vestal explained. Lack of federal support and mental health crises have exacerbated the issue of homelessness, he said.

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Yaroslavsky on West Hollywood’s Ex-Soviet Immigrants

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A CBS2 News report on West Hollywood residents’ reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine featured Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. In the 1970s, West Hollywood offered a fresh start for Jews fleeing religious oppression in the former Soviet Union after World War II. Now, the city claims more Russian speakers than any U.S. city outside of New York, the report noted. “West Hollywood became a magnet for those fleeing the Soviet Union,” said Yaroslavsky, whose parents emigrated from Ukraine earlier in the 20th century. “You had the very liberal, progressive gay and lesbian community in West Hollywood and then you had the Russian community. But over time, they became partners, and it’s really a beautiful history they have in West Hollywood.”

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Delving Into the Archives of Japanese American Incarceration

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Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto was featured in a UCLA Newsroom article about an undergraduate course focusing on the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during the 1940s. Eighty years ago this month, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II. The order sent nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent, branded suspicious solely by virtue of their heritage, to live in prison camps. The upper-division course immerses students in the growing online archive of primary source materials related to the experiences of Japanese Americans. It is co-taught by Umemoto, who directs the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and public historian Brian Niiya, who earned a master’s in Asian American studies at UCLA.

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Diaz on New Latino-Majority Districts in California

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Founding Director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative Sonja Diaz was featured in a Los Angeles Times column about the role that California Latinos will play in the midterm elections. New congressional maps were drawn based on the results of the 2020 Census, and the number of Latino-majority districts in California increased from 10 to 16. The six new districts with Latino majorities could help Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives in the upcoming elections. However, some experts are concerned that it may take time to mobilize voters in these districts, which are concentrated in the Central Valley and encompass rural and historically disenfranchised communities that may be hard to organize. “Latinos are at the periphery of California politics even though they’re central to the economy and to its future,” Diaz explained. She said that Democrats should seek Latino candidates who can speak to the concerns of Latino communities.

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Vaccine Hesitancy Isn’t a COVID-Specific Phenomenon, Reber Says

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Sarah Reber co-authored a Milbank article about the deadly consequences of vaccine hesitancy. Thousands of Americans are dying of COVID-19 each day despite the availability of a free vaccine, but widespread and persistent vaccine hesitancy existed even prior to the pandemic, wrote Reber and Cyrus Kosar of Brown University. “Vaccine hesitancy is not a COVID-specific phenomenon and is not unique to Republicans or vocal anti-vaxxers,” they wrote. The authors pointed out that seasonal flu kills tens of thousands annually, yet only about a third of adults between 18 and 49 get an annual flu shot. Research shows that younger and low-risk individuals, those who perceive vaccines to be less effective, the less educated, the uninsured, and racial and ethnic minorities are consistently less likely to get vaccinated for both COVID-19 and the flu. “Serious investment in research on how to reach the vaccine-hesitant is long overdue,” they concluded.

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Yaroslavsky on Caruso’s Campaign for L.A. Mayor

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to media outlets including the Los Angeles Times and Financial Times about billionaire developer Rick Caruso’s entrance into the L.A. mayor’s race. The L.A. Times piece focused on Caruso’s real estate company, which would be put into a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest if he is elected to office. Referring to recent corruption scandals involving City Hall and local developers, Yaroslavsky said voters are keenly aware of the breach of trust among city leadership. He added, however, that homelessness and crime are the biggest issues facing the city right now. “It’s much lower than it was 20 years ago, but crime is more ubiquitous now,” he told the Financial Times. “It’s shown up throughout the city.” Caruso joins several other candidates who are campaigning on public safety, including front-runner Rep. Karen Bass, Yaroslavsky said. 

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Monkkonen Calls for Collaboration on Student Housing

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen was featured in a CalMatters article about the California State University system’s application to build affordable housing for nearly 3,400 students. The revised plan calls for $823 million in total funding for housing projects across 10 campuses, with $535 million coming from a new state housing grant and the rest from outside funds. The proposal comes as tens of thousands of college students struggle with unstable housing situations and even homelessness. Some campuses are currently building new living facilities to accommodate long waiting lists of students seeking campus housing, but student housing is often expensive. Looking ahead, Monkkonen said the state should better coordinate the student housing construction efforts of California’s public colleges and universities to share financing and other ideas. “This is a very obvious place for knowledge sharing,” he said. “We’re all on the same team.”

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On the Evolution of Voter Access in California

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Alisa Belinkoff Katz, senior fellow at the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy and associate director of the Los Angeles Initiative, and Sonja Diaz, founding director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, spoke to ABC7 News about the complicated history of voter suppression in California. Despite major strides in voting access, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a report co-authored by Belinkoff Katz found that California voters do not reflect the diversity of its people. She described the origins of the “exclusion of low-income people from the vote,” starting with Chinese immigrants and some Native Americans during the 18th and 19th centuries. Diaz added that some people are still being left out today because of the color of their skin, their class or their ZIP code, as well as redistricting decisions that dilute their voting power. 

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Gilens on Efforts to Undercut American Democracy

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Public Policy Chair Martin Gilens joined a Scholars’ Circle panel weighing threats to American democracy and prescriptions for reinvigorating democratic norms. Recent efforts to overturn elections and restrict voting rights are rooted in a long-standing lack of government responsiveness to the needs of ordinary citizens, said Gilens, noting that the nation’s elite is responsible for the latest attacks on democratic practices. “It doesn’t take a majority of the public to abandon democracy, for our institutions to be eroded or our electoral processes to be undermined,” he said. “It only takes a willingness of people to look the other way.” Gilens likened the current political atmosphere to the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th Century, a period of gaping economic inequality and dysfunctional government. Political and economic reforms were enacted, but only after decades of effort at the local, state and national levels. “The change did come, but it didn’t come quickly or easily,” he said.

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