Preparing Schools for a Warming World

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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.

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Hurdles to Breaking Into the Housing Market

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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.

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Paying for the Proposed Inglewood People-Mover

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A Los Angeles Times article about the financing of a proposed elevated train that would connect SoFi Stadium and other entertainment venues with the Metro K Line cited Jacob Wasserman of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin. The Federal Transit Administration has pledged up to $1 billion for the people-mover designed to ferry riders through downtown Inglewood. The remainder of the project’s $2 billion price tag must be raised to lock down the federal award. While some officials noted that providing transportation is the job of government, Wasserman said a good case can be made that the owners of the entertainment facilities, including SoFi, the Kia Forum and the soon-to-be-opened Intuit Dome, should offer a financial contribution. “It is going to serve the customers there who pay money to go see events and games,” he said. “All transit serves businesses, and it’s a public service, but I think that this is disproportionately focused on these event venues.”

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Wooing the Fast-Growing Latino Electorate

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UCLA Luskin Public Policy Professor Gary Segura spoke to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star and public radio station WITF about the fast-growing segment of Latino voters who are a key target for 2024 elections. Economic issues, particularly concerns about better pay and the cost of prescriptions and health insurance, are a top priority for Latinos in the swing state of Pennsylvania, according to a survey conducted by BSP Research, co-founded by Segura. “Latinos are often worried that their jobs don’t pay well enough, or they have to take a second job in order to make ends meet,” Segura said. He noted that Pennsylvania’s Latino electorate includes a substantial number of Puerto Ricans, a group that historically has leaned Democratic. However, many Latino voters feel that neither of the two main U.S. political parties has shown sufficient interest in connecting with them, according to the national survey conducted on behalf of UnidosUS.

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Germany in the Doldrums

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Helmut Anheier, adjunct professor of public policy and social welfare at UCLA Luskin, penned a commentary about Germany’s political and economic doldrums for Project Syndicate. Once a beacon of stability, the Germany of recent years has proved itself unprepared for global shocks and shifting geopolitics, including a pandemic, energy shortages, and hostilities in Europe and the Middle East. Anheier points to the “liability of success” as a key cause of the country’s woes. “What is true for companies is true for countries: good financial performance can lead to complacency. During periods of strong economic growth, governments become overconfident and disregard changing conditions,” he writes. “Sitting on its laurels for too long left [Germany] ill-prepared for today’s world.”

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What If NIMBYs Got Paid to Become YIMBYs?

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Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA Luskin, weighed in on the notion of paying people to accept the expansion of affordable housing in their neighborhoods, an idea laid out in a Boston Globe commentary. Offering financial incentives to community members could turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs and increase the housing stock, which is in desperately short supply in many parts of the country, the author argued. Public support for more construction could also lead to new zoning laws permitting denser housing in some neighborhoods. The proposal, cast as creative brainstorming for a solution to the affordable housing crisis, raises questions about the logistics of making payments as well as issues of fairness and equity. “We should continue to think about ways to more evenly and equitably distribute the benefits of urban development,” Monkonnen said.

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Making Blood Donation More Inclusive

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Ayako Miyashita Ochoa of the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty spoke to ABC News about the lifting of restrictions that had prevented gay and bisexual men from donating blood. The strictest U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules, dating to the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, were based not on an individual’s risk but on belonging to a specific group. These policies were “incredibly blunt” and furthered stigma and discrimination, Miyashita Ochoa said. Now, a single risk-assessment tool that includes questions about sexual health is used for all would-be donors. While some may feel uncomfortable answering questions about sexual activity, “these questionnaires are intended to keep our blood supply safe,” Miyashita Ochoa said, adding that the rule changes promise to reduce stigma and encourage more people to donate. “I think that we are moving to a place where our policies are reflecting better the science and certainly our expectations as a society to not discriminate,” she said.

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How Stockton’s Asian Enclaves Fell Victim to ‘Progress’

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A Zocalo article authored by researchers from the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin tells of the thriving Asian enclaves of Stockton, California, that were razed in the mid-20th century in the name of “progress” — and efforts today to make amends. The city’s Chinatown, Japantown and Little Manila were once filled with stores, restaurants, religious institutions and communal gathering spaces. But discriminatory laws meant the Asian community had to live in crowded, poorly maintained housing. Stockton leaders deemed the enclaves “undesirable slums” and set out to replace them with mainstream commercial development. The effort was accelerated by California’s Division of Highways, now known as Caltrans, which razed the community to make way for the Crosstown Freeway linking Interstate 5 and Route 99. Caltrans is now proposing a project that would revitalize the enclaves displaced by the freeway. The authors note, “It’s too early to know if such rhetoric will prove to be tokenism or materialize as real restorative justice.”

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Blumenberg on Affordable Housing, Long Commutes

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Evelyn Blumenberg, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the tradeoff between affordable housing and long commute times. Census data highlight two Los Angeles County areas where commutes are especially long: South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. Blumenberg said residents of South L.A. typically live far from their workplaces and often lack serviceable public transit options. As for the Valley, “it’s a pretty dispersed environment and it takes a long time to get to destinations,” she said. Blumenberg noted that while more people are working from home, there has been an increase in traffic from delivery vehicles, such as Amazon trucks and cars used by UberEats. Congestion is currently less severe at peak hours but more widespread over the course of the average day, and “my hunch is that some of these new patterns are here to stay,” she said.

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Racial Disparities in Mortgage Approval Rates

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José Loya of the UCLA Luskin Urban Planning faculty spoke to CNN about disparities discovered in the mortgage approval rates at the largest credit union in the nation. CNN reported that Navy Federal Credit Union approved more than 75% of the white borrowers who applied for a new conventional home purchase mortgage in 2022, but fewer than 50% of Black borrowers who applied for the same type of loan. This is the widest disparity in mortgage approval rates between white and Black borrowers of any major lender, the news organization concluded. The disparities are alarming, said Loya, who studies racial gaps in mortgage approvals and reviewed CNN’s analysis. “It does surprise me that they’re doing significantly worse than other big lenders” because of Navy Federal’s status as a credit union, he added.

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