Archive for category: Research Projects

Increasing Urbanization Contributes to Racial and Gender Pay Inequality, Study Shows Newly published research finds that an 'urban wage premium' in large cities primarily benefits white and male workers

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By Les Dunseith

Researchers who study cities have long documented an “urban wage premium,” whereby workers in denser, larger cities tend to have higher wage and salary incomes. But a new study by a UCLA scholar is providing fresh insight into how growing population density in urban areas contributes to pay inequalities by race and gender.

In research published this month in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Max Buchholz, a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Michael Storper of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, shows that this wage premium primarily benefits white and male workers, with significantly less positive impacts for Black workers, and possibly none for Latino and female workers.

Furthermore, gender-based wage inequality related to urbanization tends to be significant between men and women who have children but relatively insubstantial between men and women without children.

“My findings suggest there is something about cities that makes it particularly difficult for women to manage the dual responsibilities of child care and having a career,” Buchholz said.

He also looked at the constraints and tradeoffs that arise when urban workers balance employment opportunities with choices about housing quality and affordability, commuting and other activities. These “congestion costs” have been shown to have negative impacts disproportionately borne by women and people of color.

In particular, Buchholz found that the relationship between density and pay inequality became stronger when commute times to and from work also increased. Moreover, as urban areas get denser, commute times for Black workers and Asian American and Pacific Islander workers increase relative to white workers. But female–male commuting inequality decreases.

“This suggests that rising density doubly disadvantages Black workers with relatively lower wages and longer commutes, prompts AAPI workers to commute longer for pay that is equal to white workers, and constrains women’s access to jobs that suit their skills and qualifications,” Buchholz said.

The research was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

UC Grant Will Fund EV Research by UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation Team led by a Fielding School professor gets nearly $2 million to pursue an equitable model for electrical vehicle charger placement

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The UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation will be a key contributor to research recently funded through a partnership between the University of California and the state intended to spur real-world solutions relating to climate change in California.

A team from the Center for Innovation, or LCI, will focus on community engagement relating to a project led by Yifang Zhu, professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, that will look at how efforts to reduce greenhouse gases can better enable residents of disadvantaged communities to adopt electric vehicles more readily. 

A $1.99 million grant under Zhu’s direction will fund the study of EV usage in communities that have historically lacked access to charging stations. The LCI researchers will work with local residents and community-based organizations to identify barriers, improve knowledge and awareness of EVs, and design plans for deploying and installing charging stations in underserved areas. 

To date, the siting of EV chargers has been a top-down process driven by business priorities rather than community needs and preferences. Gregory Pierce, adjunct associate professor of urban planning and co-executive director of LCI, said researchers will partner with three community-based organizations in the Los Angeles area to co-design the first-ever procedurally equitable process for placement of EV chargers. 

“We hope that this project leads to a new community co-designed model for placing electric vehicle charging stations throughout California that can accelerate our transition to a zero-emissions transportation future,” Pierce said. 

The UCLA Luskin-affiliated team will be co-led by Rachel Connolly, project director for air quality and environmental equity research at LCI. The effort will include surveys and a three-part workshop process relating to the siting of EV chargers and future investments in coordination with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and other partners. Connolly, who earned doctorate and master’s degrees in environmental health sciences from UCLA, has been working at LCI since 2017. 

In all, $83.1 million in California Climate Action grants were awarded to a total of 38 projects involving researchers from across the UC system, as well as California State University campuses, private universities and community, industry, tribal and public agencies. The two-year grants are part of $185 million allocated by the state for UC climate initiatives that advance progress toward California’s climate goals.

Read about other UCLA research funded by California Climate Action grants

Capstone Projects Tackle Complex Social Issues Clients explore tough policy decisions with help from graduating UCLA Luskin students, including those in Urban Planning 

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By Les Dunseith  

Antonia Izuogu, a second-year urban planning student, came to UCLA with an interest in affordable housing, and as a Bohnett Foundation fellow, she has had an opportunity to participate in initiatives relating to homelessness for the Los Angeles mayor’s office. 

“I was homeless at one point, actually twice, within my childhood,” Izuogu said. 

But when the time came to choose a topic for her required capstone research project, Izuogu chose to pursue an emerging interest in the community development side of urban planning, particularly work cooperatives. She ended up doing a feasibility study for a partner group of the Downtown Crenshaw Rising community organization. 

“My capstone and my mayor’s work didn’t really touch each other — they’re just two passions of mine that I was able to work on this past year,” Izuogu said.

Read about Graham Rossmore’s capstone on al fresco dining and its influence on policy in L.A.

Throughout the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, soon-to-graduate students pursue monthslong deep dives into pressing policy issues with social relevance. In the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program, the capstone experience may involve individual students like Izuogu working with community groups, government officials or public agencies to investigate real-world policy issues.

Other MURP candidates work in small teams or participate in one of two longstanding group-learning opportunities — the Community Collaborative and the Comprehensive Project classes.

The Community Collaborative is a unique pairing of students with community-based organizations in need of the expertise that academic researchers can provide. In turn, the students benefit from the insights of activists and others with lived experiences, fostering a mutual learning experience. 

This year’s Spatial Justice Community Collaborative course was taught by Professor Ananya Roy, and it focused on issues relating to life in homeless encampments. Class participants included individuals who had been among the unhoused populations at encampments forcibly cleared by law enforcement.  

The second group option is the Comprehensive Project class, which is a more traditional group project experience led by a faculty member who directs student researchers through an examination of a complex policy issue. Interested students had to apply nearly a year in advance to be admitted to the class, which this year focused on heat equity under the direction of Gregory Pierce BA ’07, MURP ’11, PhD ’15, an adjunct associate professor of urban planning and co-director at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.

The client for the class of 13 MURP students was Marta Segura, chief heat officer and director of the city of Los Angeles’ Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, which is known informally as CEMO. Segura and her staff are developing strategies for Los Angeles’ efforts to deal with rising heat from climate change in an equitable manner. 

“The work that CEMO is doing is really important, and they have a huge mandate, particularly on heat,” Pierce said. “But they have very little actual staff capacity to do a lot of the research they need to do.”

The office’s agenda is driven by nonprofit and community-based organizations, which “aligns with the social justice orientation of the Luskin School, for sure,” Pierce said. 

The students, whose research has also been guided by Ruth Engel, project manager for environmental data science at the Luskin Center for Innovation, have divided the task into three subtopics — cooling centers, emergency response and bus shelters. Their final report was due to CEMO on June 9, just one week before UCLA Luskin’s commencement. 

Pierce said the report commends Los Angeles for being at the forefront of government efforts on extreme heat, but it notes room for improvement in terms of action and having systems in place to ensure public safety and equitable distribution of resources. 

“This is a pretty new space for a lot of cities, so it’s in its early days,” Pierce said of the strategic planning. “But there’s a lot of work to do to really follow through on what needs to be done as it gets hotter all the time.”

Among the students’ recommendations: 

  • increasing cooling center density in underserved areas of the San Fernando Valley and Harbor Gateway;
  • developing heat responses in cooperation with unhoused residents and their advocates to better meet their needs; 
  • utilizing more expansive definitions of heat emergencies and heat warnings, with lower heat thresholds than existing city policy;
  • shifting the priority for bus shelter development — often guided in the past by political considerations or the revenue potential of shelter advertisements —  toward geographic equity, thus prioritizing the placement of shelters in hotter neighborhoods with high numbers of bus riders.

Among the bus shelter group was Miguel Miguel, a second-year urban planning student who grew up in an area of the San Fernando Valley that often sees dangerously high temperatures. 

“I grew up seeing people suffer from what happens without adequate heat protection. It was really important for me to be involved, and to bring lived experience and emotional compassion into this project,” Miguel said. He said the capstone experience helped position him to play a role in shaping the nature of environmental justice in Los Angeles moving forward.

young woman in blue jacket gestures while talking about research shown on poster to her right

Pearl Liu’s capstone research looked into safety issues on public transit in San Francisco. Photo by Les Dunseith

Equity was a foundational element of many urban planning capstone projects completed this year, including one by Pearl Liu. Her capstone project focused on public transit safety issues among women and gender minorities.

An international student, Liu was accustomed to getting around her home city of Taipai, Taiwan, via ready access to a clean, safe public transit system. She didn’t find the same conditions in Los Angeles or San Francisco, where she did an internship with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or SFMTA. 

“As a woman, and living without a car at all for two years in L.A. and also in S.F., I totally understand how women feel when they travel,” Liu said. “I have all these struggles. I have all this … built-up anger and complaints. I hope to change all these things as a transportation planner.”

At SFMTA, she had an opportunity to become familiar with a grant-funded gender equity initiative. During the internship, she started building a transit safety survey that eventually led to her capstone project.

The survey was launched through the Transit app for riders of San Francisco’s public transportation system, known as the Muni. Within a month of launching, a total of 1,613 people had filled out the survey. 

“Sexual harassment is a very common experience for many transit passengers, but especially to women and gender minorities  —  transgender people and those with non-binary gender identities,” Liu said. 

Another MURP, Greer Cowan, worked with Liu on the survey about Muni usage and travel patterns among women and gender minorities in San Francisco, with special attention paid to riders’ experiences. Gender-based violence can include inappropriate swearing or leering, as well as physical assaults. Were the survey respondents victims? If not, had they witnessed it? If so, where? When? Was it on a train, a streetcar or a bus? While riding or while waiting for a ride? Night or day? And so on.

Cowen focused on the reporting of incidents, noting that many people only tell their friends or family, so authorities have insufficient data to take action. Liu’s capstone focuses more heavily on how respondents feel about their safety, and where incidents occurred.

Among gender minorities, more than half of respondents felt the least safe at a bus stop, for example. But for male and female transit users, harassment and the fear of it happening was more intense during transit rides, particularly on buses. 

She did a spatial analysis of the data, overlaying the incident maps with the transit lines and transit stops, and produced a “heat map” to determine places with higher concentrations of incidents of gender-based violence. The bus system showed the most problems.

“It is mostly happening in the downtown area,” she found. “A lot of it was on Market Street,” in the financial core of San Francisco.  

Therefore, her capstone recommends that safety and equity initiatives by the SFMTA focus heavily on bus routes near Market Street. She also advocates for a safety toolkit for women and gender minorities. A transit ambassador program to monitor stops, stations and vehicles could focus more attention on buses. And the No. 1 suggestion to benefit women and gender-minority riders? Install more lighting.

“That always — always — is something that we’re pushing for,” Liu said. “Most people … feel at least somewhat safe during the daytime or when a station is well-lit.”

Liu said the capstone project helped refine her career aspiration. 

“This project … it really sparked an interest in me in how safety is so important in public transit,” Liu said, “and I feel like that has given me a passion to want to work in this area in the future.”

In some cases, the capstone projects serve as a reality check for the client organizations. Such was the case for Izuogu’s research for Downtown Crenshaw Rising. 

Her capstone project focuses on cooperative ownership, or co-ops, as a means to foster economic development in lower-income areas. The project was built on work that had been done by the previous year’s Community Collaborative class  — a project that ended up being recognized by the American Planning Association’s Economic Development Division for its Student Project Award. 

That project had recommended several possible ways to improve economic conditions in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, and her client was interested in the possibility of creating a cooperatively owned manufacturing facility in the area. 

Izuogu is a native of North Carolina who had gotten her undergraduate degree at Spelman College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, Georgia. She was excited for an opportunity to familiarize herself with a neighborhood like Crenshaw with a sizable Black population and do work that might benefit its residents.

“I was like, ‘That sounds really interesting, and I want to work with Black communities, too,’” Izuogu remembered thinking. 

two Black women pose in front of a poster about a research project

Antonia Izuogu, right, had an opportunity to discuss her research with Eve Fouché, who represented the project’s client during the poster event at UCLA. Photo by Les Dunseith

Her feasibility study reflects the Crenshaw group’s interest in launching an eco-friendly manufacturing site for electric vehicle charging stations to take advantage of incentives created by the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden initiated in 2021.

“I didn’t know much about clean energy before coming [to UCLA] or about working with co-ops. At the same time, I’ve been taking economic development classes,” she said, “so everything was … fleshing out well together.”

Once she delved into the data, however, it became apparent to Izuogu that manufacturing electric vehicle charging stations was not the best option for the group. They lacked startup financing. No one in the group had experience building charging stations, nor connections within the industry. That led to the reality check. 

“As a consultant, I’m saying that maybe we should take a pause on that,” Izuogu said. Her capstone report suggests that the group instead create a co-op to install such stations and maintain them as part of a long-term strategic plan that would start small — a bakery/restaurant co-op is already in the works — and build over time into a hub for economic activity. 

Izuogu said her client expressed gratitude for her insights. 

“They like the idea that I didn’t stop and just say, ‘OK, this is not a good idea. Goodbye,’” said Izuogu, who has urged the group to think beyond Year 1. “Let’s go further than that. And they’ve been very appreciative of the information.”

The capstone project also helped inform Izuogu’s future plans. She will be pursuing a law degree, envisioning a career focusing on “solidarity economy lawyering,” helping small businesses and worker co-ops organize, drafting contracts and successfully navigating government regulations. 

Izuogu is a big fan of the UCLA capstone requirement.

“I love how they’re community-based, and this is not just a theory, but we’re actually applying what we’re learning in the classroom,” she said. “I love that I had the opportunity — even though I’m not from L.A. — to benefit the residents here. And getting to know their names and, basically, that we’re continuing this connection between academic institutions and the residents around them.”

View photos of other individual capstone projects in Urban Planning in this Flickr album:

Careers, Capstones and Conversations 2023

Click the links below to view photos from the numerous other capstone project presentations at UCLA Luskin this year:

Comprehensive Project class

Community Collaborative class

Public Policy’s Applied Policy Presentations

Master of Social Welfare capstones

Undergraduate Public Affairs capstones

Click here and enter “capstone projects” to find stories from previous years and other information about student research at UCLA Luskin.

‘We’re Beginning the Work of Rewriting the Next Chapter of Los Angeles History’ Top officials join scholars and advocates to tackle the region's most pressing problems at the fifth annual UCLA Luskin Summit

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By Mary Braswell

A search for solutions to Southern California’s most urgent problems brought top researchers together with government and civic leaders at the fifth annual UCLA Luskin Summit.

Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian gave the keynote address at the April 19 gathering, attended by more than 200 scholars, students and community members seeking to learn more about how the region is responding to homelessness, climate change, racial disparities, voting rights violations and more.

Krekorian spoke about the state of governance at L.A. City Hall, acknowledging that citizens’ faith has been shaken by corruption cases, politicized redistricting and the release of a racist recording that led to high-profile resignations. But he added that the upheaval has opened the door to a period of change.

“The kind of city hall that the people of Los Angeles deserve [is] a city hall that’s more ethical, more transparent, more trustworthy, more urgent, more collaborative and hopefully much more effective,” Krekorian said.

He laid out a roadmap that includes a top-to-bottom charter review that could add more seats on the City Council, change who decides land-use issues to reduce incentives for corruption, and take the power of setting district boundaries away from elected officials.

“Together, we’re turning the page on a very dark time and we’re beginning the work of rewriting the next chapter of Los Angeles history,” Krekorian said.

Zev Yaroslavsky, who oversees the annual UCLA Quality of Life Index, reports on this year’s findings. Photo by Les Dunseith

The Luskin Summit, held in person at the UCLA Faculty Club after three years of remote and hybrid convenings, continued its tradition of spotlighting the UCLA Quality of Life Index (QLI), a wide-ranging survey of Los Angeles County residents.

This year’s QLI revealed deep dissatisfaction with many aspects of life in L.A., a sign of the region’s slow emergence from the dual shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring inflation, said Zev Yaroslavsky, who oversees the survey as director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin.

In conversation with ABC7 News reporter Josh Haskell, the emcee of this year’s Luskin Summit, Yaroslavsky said the high cost of housing continues to sow anxiety, with 28% of respondents saying they worry about losing their home and becoming homeless as a result.

“Now, let me put this in more stark terms than just percentages,” Yaroslavsky said. “The county’s population is a little over 10 million people, so 28% means that there are 2.8 million people in this county who are going to bed every night worried about whether they’re going to lose their home. Think about it that way. That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of stress.”

The region’s housing emergency also took center stage at a plenary session that illustrated a hallmark of the Luskin Summit: the participation of key elected and appointed officials in a position to turn social science research into policies for change.

Lourdes Castro Ramírez, secretary of California’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, moderated the dialogue with L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, L.A. City Council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson and the city’s chief of housing and homelessness solutions, Mercedes Márquez.

The conversation emphasized a new push to coordinate efforts by a multitude of agencies to relieve California’s housing emergency.

“A challenge of this magnitude requires all levels of government to work together, and that’s exactly what we have been doing over the last two years, working very closely with our federal partners, working very closely across the state agency and department, and working in a unified and coordinated manner with local cities, counties, continuums of care and folks on the ground that are doing this work every single day,” said Castro Ramírez, a UCLA Luskin Urban Planning alumna who oversees 11 state departments and boards.

The Luskin Summit’s plenary session on the region’s housing emergency featured, from left, Lourdes Castro Ramírez, secretary of California’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency; Mercedes Márquez, Los Angeles’ chief of housing and homelessness solutions; L.A. City Council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson; and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath. Photo by Les Dunseith

With the end of pandemic-era eviction moratoriums, Horvath said her office is working with cities to implement new protections for both renters and mom-and-pop landlords, with the aim of keeping residents in their homes.

“We have no time to waste,” she said. “We’re not going to wait until every detail is perfect. People are dying on our streets and we have to do something.”

The panelists credited newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for jumpstarting efforts to shelter the homeless, including the appointment of Márquez to cut the red tape that has delayed the construction and acquisition of desperately needed housing.

“We have identified 360 projects that are 100% affordable. That’s over 8,000 units that are now on a fast track,” Márquez said, adding that her team is also reviewing government-owned land including Metropolitan Transit Authority car lots that could be converted to residential development.

Harris-Dawson, whose district includes South Los Angeles, said housing strategies must be guided by a sense of equity to prevent poverty from becoming concentrated in pockets of the city.

“The commitment has to be both to build and build fast, but also to build where it’s difficult to build,” he said. That includes parts of the city where the prevailing attitude is “ ‘send all the poor people over there, build housing over there and build it as dense as you need to, but keep them over there’ — as if poverty is a communicable disease and living near it damages your quality of life somehow.”

The Summit also featured a series of breakout sessions where scholars, officials and advocates zeroed in on critical issues. They included representatives from UCLA Luskin research centers, including the Luskin Center for Innovation and its Human Rights to Water Solutions Lab, the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies  and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. The sessions explored:

  • vehicular homelessness, the unique circumstances of those who must shelter in their cars;
  • persistent disparities based on race and ethnicity in the mortgage industry;
  • how to build popular support and political momentum for investments in climate infrastructure;
  • whether California’s plan to transition to zero-emission vehicles is sufficient to meet climate goals;
  • the uncertain future of voting rights pending decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • and the activation of far-reaching programs to bolster the region’s water supply.

Following the Summit, several participants gathered for a lunch presentation on equity and clean energy that included UCLA experts and representatives from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the lead sponsor of this year’s Luskin Summit. Other sponsors include Bank of America, the Weingart Foundation, David Bohnett Foundation, California Community Foundation and California Wellness Foundation. The media partner is ABC7.

View photos from the 2023 UCLA Luskin Summit on Flickr.

Luskin Summit 2023

L.A. County Residents Express Second-Lowest Satisfaction Ever With Quality of Life Despite overall uptick in eighth annual index, dissatisfaction remains high due to inflation, homelessness and the COVID-19 pandemic

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By Les Dunseith

Los Angeles County residents are feeling more upbeat today than a year ago — but not by much.

Inflation remains a primary concern as people worry about losing their homes or feeding their families. Many residents said their quality of life had been affected by a homeless encampment. And they believe the pandemic’s impacts on L.A. life will be long-lasting.

Those are just a few of the key takeaways from the latest Quality of Life Index, or QLI, a project of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs that measures county residents’ satisfaction levels in nine categories. The overall rating rose two points to 55, but it was still the second-lowest rating in the eight years of the project. The highest rating of 59 was recorded in 2016 and 2017.

“Last year’s record negativity appears to have bottomed out and made a slight upward turn,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative, who oversees the index. “But inflation has taken a toll, especially among lower- and middle-income residents.”

In fact, 94% of respondents said they were affected by inflation and the increase in costs of basic needs. And 71% said it had a major impact. Rising housing costs were an issue for 82% of respondents, and 58% said it’s a major concern.

More than a quarter, or 28%, of respondents worried about losing their home and becoming homeless, while 25% were afraid their families will go hungry because they can’t afford the cost of food. Nearly half of people in households earning less than $60,000 were concerned about becoming homeless.

Almost three-quarters of residents, 73%, said their quality of life had been impacted in the last year by a homeless encampment. A major impact was reported by 43% of respondents, with San Fernando Valley and Westside residents at 50% and San Gabriel Valley residents at 28%.

Most respondents, 75%, said life has been fundamentally changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 23% expect life to return to the way it was before.

Of survey respondents who are employed, 49% said they always work away from home, 36% divide their work between home and a workplace, and 14% always work from home. Lower-income residents were far more likely to always work away from home, 61%, than higher-income households, 39%. Hybrid schedules were more common for higher-income workers, 41%, compared to 29% for lower-income households.

Many respondents said their income changed during the pandemic, with 27% saying it went down and 30% saying it went up. More than a third, or 35%, of those with a household income below $60,000 said it declined. Nearly half, or 45%, of respondents with a household income over $120,000, said it rose.

“The income disparities that have defined the Southern California economy for several decades have been exacerbated by COVID, as the rich seem to be getting richer while the poor are getting poorer,” Yaroslavsky said. “County residents whose incomes have not rebounded have less money than they used to, and what they have doesn’t buy what it did before. They’re getting hurt coming and going.”

This year’s QLI was based on interviews conducted with 1,429 county residents over 30 days beginning on Feb. 24. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6%.

Ratings were up slightly in all nine categories except health care, which remained the same as 2022 at 66.

Among the other results:

  • Cost of living, which is always the lowest rated, increased to 41 from 39. White respondents gave it a 37, among the lowest in any category in the survey’s history.
  • Also scoring below the survey’s midpoint of 55 were education, 48, and transportation and traffic, 53.
  • Public safety, jobs and the economy, and the environment came in at 58.
  • Race and ethnic relations, 67, and their neighborhood, 68, were the top-rated categories.

The survey also examined approval ratings for local elected officials. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had the highest favorability, with 46% of all respondents viewing her favorably and 23% unfavorably. City of L.A. respondents were even more positive, with 51% favorable and 17% unfavorable.

Sheriff Robert Luna was rated 37% favorable and 21% unfavorable. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore received a 31% favorable and 22% unfavorable rating.

County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer was viewed favorably by 34% and unfavorably by 20%, with respondents ages 65 and older giving her a 47% favorable rating. Meanwhile, ratings for District Attorney George Gascón improved somewhat from last year but were still negative — 27% of county residents view him favorably, compared to 40% who view him unfavorably. Last year, the result was 22% favorable, 44% unfavorable.

The Quality of Life Index is funded by the Los Angeles Initiative and Meyer and Renee Luskin. The full report will be released on April 19 as part of UCLA’s Luskin Summit, which is being held in the Faculty Center at UCLA. In addition to a presentation by Yaroslavsky, L.A. City Council President Paul Krekorian will deliver a keynote address. A series of breakout discussions on issues of public concern will precede a closing session on the local homelessness emergency featuring state, county and city officials. The full agenda for Luskin Summit 2023 is available online.

The QLI was prepared in partnership with the public opinion research firm FM3 Research.

View the report and other information about this year’s study, plus previous Quality of Life Indexes, on the website of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

report cover with text

 

How Laws and Policies Can Close — or Widen — Gender Gaps New book by UCLA researchers shows that progress toward gender equality has stalled, particularly for caregivers in the U.S.

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By Les Dunseith

A comprehensive review of economic gender equality in 193 countries by the UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center identifies global trends and exposes policy gaps that include shortcomings when it comes to caregiving.

When the authors of a new open-access book first began tracking maternity leave policies around the world in 2000, they were alarmed to find that 18 countries had no national paid leave in place for working mothers. Today, seven remaining countries still lack such protection — five small island nations, Papua New Guinea, and the United States of America.

The book, “Equality within Our Lifetimes,” pulls together information from more than a decade of research that has also been collected into a robust, freely downloadable database. Co-author Jody Heymann, a professor at UCLA and founding director of WORLD, said that through the 1980s gender equality was rapidly advancing.

“There were more women entering the workforce. There were increased economic opportunities for women, increased educational opportunities,” she said. “That progress has completely stalled.”

The country’s gender wage gap has barely budged for 15 years. What’s more, it’s even broader among parents. In 2021, the average mother working full-time in the U.S. still earned just 73 cents for each dollar earned by a father working full-time.

Because U.S. women remain predominantly responsible for all types of caregiving, it’s not just new mothers who are impacted by the continued lack of federal paid family leave and other legal protections for caregivers in the workplace. The authors cite studies that show women are three times as likely as men in the U.S. to lose their jobs or to leave the workforce because they’re caring for an ill adult.

The economy has felt the impacts. From 2000 to 2019, the U.S. dropped from 7th to 23rd in a ranking of 36 high-income countries on women’s participation in the labor market, Heymann noted. Amid COVID-19, women’s labor force participation fell to its lowest rate since 1987 and has yet to fully recover — with Black and Latina women experiencing the greatest losses.

Heymann and her research team analyzed national laws and policies in all 193 countries of the United Nations. Among their findings:

  • Although nearly all countries (93%) now prohibit at least some form of gender discrimination in the workplace, only half prohibit discrimination based on family responsibilities.
  • In 1 in 5 countries, employers can legally discriminate against women of color because laws fail to prohibit employment discrimination based on both gender and race.
  • Over five years since #MeToo went global, 1 in 4 countries still fail to explicitly prohibit sexual harassment at work. In about one-third of countries, the law is silent on employer retaliation, meaning women can be fired if they report harassment.
  • Two- thirds of countries fail to provide paid leave to care for a child during routine illnesses or to take them to the doctor.
  • A majority of countries (58%) provide no paid leave to care for an ill spouse, and 61% offer no paid leave to care for an aging parent.

color coded map

Fathers of infants have far less paid leave available to them than do mothers.

More encouraging for the authors is a worldwide trend toward paid leave for new fathers. Between 1995 and 2022, 71 countries enacted paid leave for dads, increasing the share of countries globally with leave from 24% to 63%. The U.S is not among them.

In the United States, some private employers and 11 states, including California, now offer paid parental leave, although inconsistently. Co-author Aleta Sprague, an attorney and senior legal analyst at WORLD, said the negative impact of not providing paid family leave at the national level is far-reaching.

“It’s no longer in question that our lack of support for new parents and other caregivers is driving women to leave the labor force,” Sprague said. “And that in turn is a barrier to economic growth.”

UC Press is releasing the book — authored by Heymann, Sprague, and co-author Amy Raub, principal research analyst at WORLD — at roughly the halfway point of the Sustainable Development Goals, a 2015 United Nations commitment to ensure equal rights across the globe by 2030. It is being distributed online, accompanied by briefing papers and downloadable assets in multiple languages, as part of a commitment to making top university research readily available to everybody, Heymann said.

The book presents new research on the extent and pace of policy change in 193 countries as well as new longitudinal studies of policy impact, bolstered by case studies that show how change can occur. The lesson from around the world is that solutions exist from every political perspective.

“The way you get to 187 countries providing paid maternity leave, the way you get to every other major economy providing paid sick leave except for the United States, is that there are conservative solutions, there are progressive solutions, there are middle-of-the-road solutions,” Heymann said.

There’s little disagreement among the general public about the need for paid family leave. The Family Medical Leave Act, a 1993 law that guarantees unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons only for some employees, has proven to be inadequate. Heymann said polls have shown that across party lines and across states, paid family leave is popular.

“People want parents to be able to take time to care for a newborn child. They want adults to be able to take time to care for a dying parent,” Heymann said. “And they don’t want American parents to drop into poverty because of it.”

So, is it possible to achieve gender equality in our lifetimes?

“It is completely within our reach,” Heymann said. “There are solutions that can be achieved in real time, that are feasible.”

Sprague’s answer is similar. “I think we know how to get there. One thing that this book illustrates is how feasible it is and how much of a difference a few key policy changes can make.”

Moreover, Heymann emphasized, the standard arguments against some of those key policies in the U.S. overlook critical evidence about their potential for impact. “Too often, policymakers highlight the costs of paid leave without acknowledging its overwhelming payoffs,” she said. “The evidence is clear that when women in particular have access to paid leave for family caregiving needs, they are far more likely to stay in the workforce — and even slightly narrowing the gender gap in labor force participation would boost our GDP by hundreds of billions. It’s a powerful investment.”

Heymann pointed to studies from McKinsey, the World Bank, and others demonstrating how advancing gender equality pays huge dividends.

“At core, gender equality is a basic human right,” she continued. “But it also yields tremendous economic value—and the U.S.’s continued inaction comes at a high cost to us all.”

 

To conduct the studies referenced in this book, a multilingual, multidisciplinary research team systematically analyzed the laws and policies of all 193 U.N. member states. They also rigorously analyzed the impacts of legal changes around the world. The book is being distributed through UC Press, and downloadable resources are being made available on the website of the UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center.

The WORLD Policy Analysis Center (WORLD) at UCLA is the largest independent global policy data center, capturing over 2,500 social, economic, health, and environmental quantitative legal indicators for all 193 U.N. countries. With an international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary team, WORLD collects and analyzes information on every country’s rights, laws, and policies in areas including education, health, adult labor and working conditions, child labor, poverty, constitutional rights, discrimination, childhood, gender, marriage, families, aging, and disability. Heymann, the center’s founding director, is a distinguished professor of public policy, medicine, and health policy and management at UCLA with appointments in the Fielding School of Public Health, Luskin School of Public Affairs and David Geffen School of Medicine. She is also dean emeritus of the Fielding School.

 

UCLA Luskin Research Helps Guide Public Health Response to Ongoing Monkeypox Outbreak Ian Holloway is among researchers working with health officials to develop evidence-based strategies

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By Les Dunseith

UCLA Luskin researchers are helping shape local and state health policy decisions in the wake of the monkeypox virus outbreak.

Ian Holloway, director of the Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice at UCLA Luskin, is one of the researchers leading the effort. The Social Welfare professor was asked to sit on the scientific advisory committee to the California Department of Public Health soon after the first case in the United States was reported in mid-May.

Holloway, who aims to use research-based evidence to shape local and state public health policy regarding monkeypox, is now in the early stages of microsimulation modeling in relation to the disease. He and his researchers can model various scenarios using this advanced statistical approach, which allows policymakers to view and understand different hypotheticals.

“What if we can vaccinate 50% of those who are at risk by a certain time — what impact will that have on transmission?” Holloway asked. “What if we can get all of those who test positive for monkeypox on treatment within a certain time frame to reduce the risk of transmissibility — what will that mean for the evolution of the virus?”

Holloway has stressed the need to prioritize an equity-focused response in communities of men who have sex with other men, particularly among racial and ethnic minority gay men. In an August 18 editorial published by the American Journal of Public Health, he outlined a four-point strategy for how to scale up monkeypox vaccinations without further stigmatizing gay men.

man smiles as he stands beneath sign that designates office location for research hub

Ian Holloway of the Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice. Photo by Mary Braswell

“My hope in working with Los Angeles County and the California Department of Public Health is that we can be really strategic and use research evidence to inform public health policy,” Holloway said. “One thing that’s promising for monkeypox vaccination is that we saw very high levels overall of vaccination for COVID-19 among LGBT communities in general, and gay men specifically. However, we still saw disparities by race and ethnicity.”

Extending eligibility

He supports an August 24 decision by the Los Angeles County Public Health Department to follow national guidance and extend eligibility to more people despite an ongoing shortage of the monkeypox vaccine. Doing so will bolster efforts to reach racial and ethnic minority communities, he said.

The new strategy involves a process known as dose splitting, in which a vial that usually contains two doses is split into up to five doses and administered in a way that retains effectiveness despite the lower dosage. Traditionally the vaccine is administered in a subcutaneous manner into the fat behind the triceps muscle. The new strategy is for a shallow intradermal injection into a layer of skin under the arm. This method typically leads to higher immune responses and faster drug uptake.

“Hopefully, that will mean we can get more doses to people,” Holloway said. “But public health departments really have to start planning to reach large communities of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men.”

In cities like Los Angeles, Holloway noted, people getting vaccinated tend to be more affluent and can afford to take time off work when they get a text reminder saying it’s their turn. “It’s much more challenging to reach those with lower incomes who are disproportionately part of racial and ethnic minority communities,” he said.

Holloway also leads the Gay Sexuality and Social Policy Initiative at UCLA, which focuses specifically on the unique experiences of gay men related to sex and sexuality. Although monkeypox is spread through any type of intimate contact, 98% of U.S. infections in the current outbreak have been among men, primarily those who have sex with other men.

Alex Garner, co-director of the initiative, is also director of community engagement at MPact Global, a worldwide organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of gay, bisexual and queer folks, and advancing human rights. Garner has advised the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on communication strategies and community engagement relating to the disease. He said the outbreak has further demonstrated the structural inequalities that exist in health care.

“At the same time, we can’t allow stigma to be worse than the disease,” Garner said. “To not provide adequate investment and care for people of color, migrants, sex workers and LGBTQ folks only reinforces the idea that our lives do not matter.”

The stigma problem

Holloway and Garner are among those lobbying to change the name of the disease to something less stigmatizing than monkeypox such as MPX, which is favored by state public health officials.

Advising gay men without stigmatizing them — a frequent problem during the HIV epidemic — requires sensitivity in how information is communicated. Holloway’s team at UCLA has been active in working with community partners like the Los Angeles LGBT Center on education and raising awareness.

Initially, GSSPI put out a set of infographics about protecting oneself from exposure to the virus and how to identify the symptoms, which are similar to a severe flu. Infected individuals usually develop a rash and then lesions during a painful illness that can last up to four weeks.

So far, no one in the United States has died in an outbreak that now totals more than 40,000 cases worldwide and over 3,000 in California. Los Angeles County has the highest rate of infection in the state.

The outbreak spread quickly but is unlikely to disappear nearly as fast. The vaccine needs to be administered twice, four weeks apart, with 85% immunity not achieved until two weeks after the second dose. “We have a long road in front of us in terms of being able to get our communities protected through vaccination,” Holloway said.

The task at hand is both urgent and daunting, while the health and social ramifications are far-reaching. That’s why Holloway has enlisted assistance from Brian Keum, who also teaches in the department of social welfare, and Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld of UCLA Luskin Public Policy for another monkeypox-related research endeavor.

The project involves data mining of a Twitter database developed by Steinert-Threlkeld that goes back to 2014. By tracking homophobic hate speech, UCLA Luskin researchers will be able to document the types of hate speech relating to the monkeypox outbreak and inform communication strategies to confront online homophobia.

“There’s been a surge in homophobic hate speech online,” Holloway said. “The goal of this second project is understanding the ways in which homophobic hate speech online is evolving in parallel to the spread of (monkeypox) and through social media networks.”

He noted that social media can be a powerful way to spread both negative and positive information — greater attention was drawn to the outbreak in June when actor Matt Ford started posting videos on Twitter and TikTok about his symptoms and treatment, for example.

“I’m also interested in the ways in which gay communities are caring for themselves using social media during this time,” Holloway said.

Ian Holloway Named Editor-in-Chief of Sexuality Research and Social Policy At a time when people’s sexuality and reproductive rights are at issue, UCLA professor hopes to make relevant academic insight more readily available to policymakers

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By Les Dunseith

Ian Holloway, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, has been named editor-in-chief of Sexuality Research and Social Policy.

The peer-reviewed academic journal publishes research on sexuality and the implications of that research on public policy across the globe. It has traditionally been focused primarily on an academic audience, but Holloway intends to work with the editorial board to expand the journal’s reach and impact in response to a wave of anti-LGBT legislation in the United States and issues such as the ongoing criminalization of same-sex sexual behavior in many countries.

“I think that this historical moment really calls upon us, as academics, to make sure the work we’re producing reaches policymakers and other decision-makers, including practitioners and the folks who are designing programs in government and public health settings,” said Holloway, who is director of the UCLA Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice and its Gay Sexuality and Social Policy Initiative.

He envisions promoting research from the journal via social media, soliciting more special issues on timely and relevant topics, and putting short summaries of key findings atop articles — written in layperson’s language to make academic work that is relevant to ongoing policy debates more widely accessible.

“Those of us who’ve been writing peer-reviewed articles for academic journals for years have a particular style of writing, a particular format of writing, that may not be conducive to lay audiences,” Holloway noted. “But lay audiences include policymakers who may not have the time, the energy or the expertise to wade through an academic article on a particular topic.”

At a time when people’s sexuality and the reproductive rights of pregnant people are at issue, Holloway sees his new role as an opportunity to make a difference.

“A lot of times, policy decisions are not evidence-based,” he said. “They’re based in moral judgment or religious views.

“But we have robust scientific evidence that is based on sexual liberty and the impact of social policy on sexuality. And I would like to make that academic discourse more relevant and available to those who are making decisions for the future of our country and for communities across the globe.” 

As editor-in-chief, Holloway will have the final say on every manuscript that is published in the journal, about 150 articles a year. He was selected for a five-year term as editor-in-chief through a peer-nomination process that included a recommendation from the outgoing editor, Christian Grov of the City University of New York, and interviews with representatives of Springer Nature, the journal’s publisher.

“The previous editor did an incredible job of building up the journal, and he increased the number of submissions,” Holloway said. “I’m grateful to Dr. Grov for all of his hard work and look forward to continuing to grow the journal in terms of its impact in the real world beyond the ivory tower.”

 

$1.5 Million Grant Will Support Institute’s Social Justice Mission Marguerite Casey Foundation's award to Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy will bolster efforts that link academic pursuits to community organizing

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By Les Dunseith
The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has received a $1.5 million grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation to bolster the institute’s ongoing programs in support of social justice movements in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

The institute is among four recipients of grants totaling $6 million from the foundation, which are intended as a bridge between social justice scholarship and social movements.

“We believe that bold investments in ideas about how to shift power in society must be matched with bold investments in organizing efforts that help bring them to life,” foundation President and CEO Carmen Rojas said in announcing the grants.

The new funds will help the institute, launched in 2016 and based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, continue to advance social justice in cooperation with colleagues and community partners, said Ananya Roy, the institute’s founding director and a UCLA professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography.

“We have been building an interinstitutional space connecting university-based and movement-based scholars in the shared work of research and scholarship to analyze and challenge dispossession and displacement in U.S. cities and communities,” Roy said.

As part of that work, Roy and her colleagues and partners are seeking to ensure that increased government spending on public programs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic benefits those most in need rather than further entrenching race and class inequality, exploitation and oppression.

Rojas, who, like Roy, earned a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley, stressed that organizing efforts supported by the grants “should be multiracial and durable in nature to ensure that their impact reflects the character of the communities they aim to serve and leaves those communities changed, more informed, more free and better able to shape our democracy and economy.”

In applying for the grant, the institute pledged to support efforts to “advance the collective power of those who have been excluded, evicted, criminalized, banished and disappeared by liberal democracy, from the unhoused to climate refugees.”

The institute’s grant-related plans include:

  • Expanding its signature activist-in-residence program.
  • Hosting a distinguished speakers series focused social and racial justice movements, with particular attention on scholars based in the global South. To this end, the series will use both in-person and virtual formats.
  • Organizing “freedom schools” that bring together movement-based and university scholars for theoretical and methodological training related to social justice.
  • Initiating a program to unite leading university and movement-based scholars around a shared vision and narrative of housing justice that reaffirms housing as a reparative public good.
  • Creating doctoral student and faculty seed grants to support research at the intersection of ideas and organizing.

Also receiving $1.5 million grants from the foundation were the Portal Project of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago; Haymarket Books, a nonprofit publisher based in Chicago; and the Highlander Research and Education Center, a grassroots organizing and movement-building organization active in Appalachia and the American South.

Declines in Accountability Among U.S., Asian Governments Since 2000 Highlighted Berggruen Governance Index assesses the quality of democracy and measures quality of life in 134 nations

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By Stan Paul

It started as a conversation about democracy and why some countries enjoy a higher quality of life than others, and it culminated in the release of a groundbreaking analysis of more than 130 governments around the world.

The 2022 Berggruen Governance Index, unveiled June 1 during a gathering at UCLA’s Kerckhoff Grand Salon, found a dramatic drop in the quality of government and quality of democracy in the United States over the past 20 years.

At the same time, several African nations showed measurable improvements in their provision of public goods like education, health care and environmental protection.

The collaborative project of UCLA Luskin and the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute is now available online on the index’s website as a report, plus links that allow researchers to search and sort the data for themselves.

“We had this fundamental concern that governance itself was poorly understood,” said Dawn Nakagawa, executive vice president of the Berggruen Institute, recalling the origins of the index during a “chaotic and concerning time” for democracy in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

The index was compiled by researchers from UCLA Luskin and the Hertie School in Berlin. It draws on data from sources that included the United Nations, statistical offices and research institutes from  2000 through 2019.

“And these have been a really consequential 20 years for democracy,” said Nakagawa, who spoke during the launch event, as did UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura.

Leading the day’s discussion was principal investigator Helmut Anheier, UCLA adjunct professor of social welfare and former president of the Hertie School in Germany, along with Markus Lang, a researcher at the Hertie School and the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Anheier noted that although research and literature on governance have existed for some time, it has focused on various singular aspects of governance or democracy. He and his co-authors took a different, multipronged approach to understanding governance.

“We say governance is finding the balance among three components,” Anheier said.

The researchers scored selected national governments on an array of individual measures, grouping findings into three overarching categories:

  • Quality of democracy, which is based on the effectiveness of checks and balances between branches of government, and officials’ accountability to voters and society.
  • Quality of government, which considers governments’ abilities to generate revenue, function administratively and execute policies.
  • Quality of life, which considers governments’ ability to provide social, economic and environmental public goods.

“Rather than saying there is one number that represents governance performance, we see a lot of insight that had been gained by looking at the tension and relationship among these components, and that is expressed by something we call the governance triangle,” Anheier said.

illustration of a triangle illustrates the three key measurement areas of the report

The rankings evaluate quality of government, quality of democracy and quality of life measures, which the researchers call the “governance triangle.”

“It really does break open the black box of governance, looks inside, and allows us to see these three very important components interact,” Nakagawa said.

A major finding was the dramatic drop in the quality of government and quality of democracy in the United States, which was the only Western power with a declining score in those categories. The U.S. quality of life score improved, but only slightly.

Additional findings:

  • Although the U.S. score for quality of government remains far above the global average, its decline on that measure since 2000 was one of the world’s largest, on par with declines in Haiti, Hong Kong and Hungary.
  • The 10 countries with the greatest improvements in quality of life measures all are in Africa. However, as a whole, Africa still ranks well below other regions in terms of quality of life factors.
  • Quality of democracy scores retreated in several Asian nations, including in Bangladesh, China, India, the Philippines and Thailand. Many nations in the Americas also saw declines in those measures.

The day’s program also included a discussion of democracy, public policy and global challenges featuring UCLA experts. Moderated by Anheier, the panel featured Steve Zipperstein, an attorney and lecturer in global studies at UCLA;  Veronica Herrera, an associate professor of urban planning who studies political development in the Global South; Cesi Cruz, an assistant professor whose research intersects political science and economics; and Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor of public policy focusing on subnational conflict, statistics and advanced data analysis.

Closing comments were provided by Michael Storper, distinguished professor of regional and international development in urban planning at UCLA Luskin, and Andrew Apter, a professor of history and anthropology at UCLA.

“One of the most important indicators of successful research is … surprising results,” said Apter, who complimented his longtime colleague Anheier on fulfilling that ideal.

Storper, who also serves as director of Global Public Affairs at UCLA Luskin, took a comparative view of the results. Democracy in the United States is very different from the federal governments in nations such as France and Germany that fared better in the analysis.

“European governmental setups are really different than what we have here in the United States,” he said. Several European countries have more modern constitutions, he noted, than the older, more rigid U.S. constitution.

“The index is going to allow us … to do more and more of this, I would say, comparative, evolutionary thinking,” Storper said. “Thanks for doing this work and actually bringing it to UCLA.”

UCLA produces and disseminates the index thanks to a $3 million gift from the Berggruen Institute. Researchers plan to publish the next Berggruen Governance Index in 2024. In the meantime, they will present the work at key institutions in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, culminating in an international conference hosted on campus by UCLA Luskin on Oct. 10-11.

View photos from the launch event on Flickr:

Berggruen Governance Index Release

Watch a recording of the launch event on Vimeo: