Peterson on Regulating Dialysis Clinics

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Public Policy Professor Mark Peterson spoke to CalMatters about what’s at stake with Proposition 23, which would require dialysis centers to have at least one licensed physician on site during operating hours as well as requiring clinics to report dialysis-related infection data to the state and obtain state permission before closing a site or reducing services. Many Californians will vote on Proposition 23 despite having little or no experience with kidney failure or dialysis treatment. “It’s a highly technical issue in a realm that gets into … very specific clinical concerns about the nature of care,” Peterson said. “That is not something that any of us in the general public are trained in.” Opponents of Prop. 23 say the driving force behind the initiative is not patient care but rather a labor union’s desire to organize dialysis workers. Peterson suggested that regulating dialysis clinics might be better addressed through active deliberation in the state Legislature.

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Pierce Investigates Failing California Water Systems

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Greg Pierce, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke to Bay City News about the lack of access to clean drinking water in rural regions of California. Roughly 1 million residents rely on failing water systems with contaminated drinking water. According to Pierce, “about 90% of California’s public water system violations occur in systems serving less than 500 service connections, underscoring the inherent risk of small size and lack of capacity.” Smaller systems have less revenue and often fail to provide necessary system maintenance and repairs. Pierce is leading a Center for Innovation team seeking to identify all of the small community systems and private wells that need help meeting drinking water standards. The State Water Resources Control Board has identified more than 300 systems that are out of compliance and will use the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, established last year, to upgrade and consolidate smaller water systems.

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Roy on the Intersection of Scholarship and Activism

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Professor of Social Welfare and Urban Planning Ananya Roy was featured on a Quarantine Tapes podcast episode exploring the shared struggles of scholars and activists. Roy’s research focuses on the relationship between property, personhood and the police, as well as the ways in which inequality and power fixate in space. Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, explained how universities as elite institutions continue to reproduce racial harm and discussed her recent experiences calling for UCLA to divest from the police. “We’ve become very good at gestures,” she said. “We’re not very good at actually nurturing students and faculty who come from the communities most impacted by racial harm.” She argued that “we must challenge the university as an institution if we are to produce scholarship to accompany movements,” emphasizing the importance of journeying with and learning from the movements and communities on the front lines in a shared space of scholarship.

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Wachs on the Past, Present and Future of L.A. Traffic

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Urban Planning Professor Martin Wachs joined the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy’s Then & Now podcast to discuss the history of traffic congestion in Los Angeles. Wachs was joined by MURP student Yu Hong Hwang and history Ph.D. candidate Peter Chesney. The three described the findings of their recent report, which challenged the myth of Los Angeles’ car culture. Wachs also noted that increasing transit capacity does not necessarily reduce traffic congestion. “Transit is important, but it is not an antidote to congestion,” he said. Instead, he explained that investing in transit means providing people with alternatives to driving so that they can choose to take a bus or train instead of a car. Looking forward, Wachs suggested implementing congestion pricing in Los Angeles. “We will have to learn to live with traffic congestion as long as there is a strong consensus that we would rather sit in traffic than pay a fee to avoid it,” he concluded. The report’s authors also discussed their findings in a recent webinar.

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Anheier on Silencing Dangerous Conspiracy Theories

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Helmut Anheier co-authored a Project Syndicate opinion piece arguing that social media and other digital channels have changed the way conspiracy theories are consumed and distributed — and that the only way to counter them is to use the same technologies. The far-right QAnon and other groups espousing conspiratorial thinking use social media to disseminate unfiltered ideas at no cost, wrote Anheier and Andrea Roemmele of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Disinformation has “always been part of the warp and woof of politics,” they wrote, but “rarely have political debates been so unmoored from widely accepted truths as they are today.” This has led to violent and extremist actions and undermined confidence in experts and institutions, they wrote. To combat the threat, they call for a professional, nonpartisan, nongovernmental “conspiracy monitor” empowered to scour sites and social media feeds, identify dangerous messages and initiate action to block content. 

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Tilly Explains Business Model Behind Prop. 22

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Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly was featured on KCRW’s Greater L.A. discussing the pros and cons of Proposition 22 on the November ballot. If passed, Proposition 22 would reclassify app-based drivers with companies such as Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Doordash as independent contractors. This would exempt them from Assembly Bill 5, which classifies many gig economy workers as employees entitled to pay and benefits required by law. Tilly said these app-based companies rely on independent contracts to sustain their business model. “Their main cost is paying drivers. So it’s been a competitive strategy to draw in the drivers. … They can always offer them a particular price — take it or leave it,” he said. The app-based companies have spent millions on pro-Proposition 22 campaigning, and some have threatened to shut down service in California if it doesn’t pass. Opponents argue that the hidden costs of app-based driving, such as vehicle upkeep and waiting times between rides, will hurt drivers and decrease their profits.

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Manville on Public Sentiments Surrounding Transportation and COVID

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in a CityLab article on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on transportation ballot measures in the upcoming election. With transit ridership at low levels and many Americans out of work or working from home, experts are wondering how voters will respond to the transportation initiatives on the ballot. Manville said that it doesn’t necessarily matter if voters don’t plan to ride buses and trains anytime soon. He pointed to various transit measures that have passed in areas where the vast majority of enfranchised people drive. According to Manville, the promises of traffic relief, economic growth and environmental benefits can be more motivating for voters than the actual mobility services. “I think the bigger question now is whether the way people are experiencing COVID and the economic fallout has changed how they think aspirationally about their transportation system,” Manville said. “We just don’t know what that will look like.”

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A Spotlight on Yin’s Research on Health Insurance Literacy

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The podcast Tradeoffs featured Public Policy Associate Professor Wesley Yin’s research into low enrollment rates in public health insurance plans, even when government subsidies are available. The study, which will be published in American Economics Review, noted that 60% of people who are uninsured and eligible for either Medicaid or Affordable Care Act premium tax subsidies choose to remain uninsured. In a randomized field experiment, researchers sent five types of letters to a group of uninsured, subsidy-eligible people in California. The letters contained escalating amounts of information, from merely announcing the start of open enrollment to specifying how much subsidy an individual could receive. Enrollment rates in this group increased about 16%, suggesting that this low-cost intervention increased their health insurance literacy and comfort level in navigating the system. In addition, the new enrollees were healthier, on average, than those already in the system, creating a more stable risk pool. Yin’s study is discussed in the second half of the podcast.

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Pierce Brainstorms Solutions for Communities in Fire Zones

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Greg Pierce, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, was featured in an Agence France-Presse article discussing the fate of communities in fire zones. Thousands of homes have been destroyed this year by deadly wildfires raging across the western United States. As the climate grows hotter, many homeowners who live in these high-risk areas are questioning the future of their communities. According to Pierce, “the idea of evicting citizens is the last solution residents want to resort to and policymakers want to resort to, because it’s so dramatic and so costly.” However, he acknowledged that “for some communities, it’s the only answer for survival.” Pierce, an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning, explained that the housing affordability crisis in California has contributed to the exponential growth of fire-prone communities built on the forested margins of cities since “it remains cheaper to build new development in outlying areas than it is in core urban areas.”

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Ong on Prospects for Rectifying Census Count

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Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, gave KCRW’s Greater L.A. program an update on the 2020 Census. In a year upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and partisan recriminations, many fear a serious undercount that will deny vulnerable populations fair political representation and access to both public and private funding. Ong called for the mobilization of independent third parties to conduct followup research that identifies the neighborhoods and populations that have been left out so that the official count can be adjusted. “After the census, after the enumeration, we need to do serious analysis and serious research to understand the patterns of undercount,” he said. “Clearly, the Census Bureau should be doing that, but I don’t think they would do an adequate job.” Ong also spoke to the Orange County Register about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow the count to be halted immediately, noting, “Is our goal to count everyone, to be inclusive? … It’s important to establish that fact.”

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