Planning Professor’s Research Cited in Mexico Housing & Urban Policy Report

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Since 2012, Mexico has been working on an ambitious structural reform agenda across various sectors to boost the country’s competitiveness and economic growth. Housing and urban policy is considered a priority within this reform agenda as authorities are hoping to reduce a housing deficit that affects roughly 31% of Mexican households.

This attention to housing and urban policy, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) recent urban policy review on Mexico, is unprecedented for the country, and differs from past approaches to housing and urban policy in that it is focusing more on qualitative housing and the environment as opposed to quantitative goals. Over 200 Mexican political figures, policy makers and academics attended the launch of the report. Speakers included INFONAVIT Director General, Alejandro Murat; Governor of the State of Mexico, Eruviel Ávila Villegas; and Mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Mancera. They were accompanied by the Minister of Public Administration, Julián Alfonso Olivas Ugalde, and Mexican Ambassador to the OECD, Dionisio Pérez-Jácome Friscione.

Urban Planning Professor Paavo Monkkonen has conducted extensive research on housing vacancy in Mexico, including two projects in collaboration with OECD and the World Bank. His work was cited heavily in OECD’s urban policy review, which generated over 30 articles in the Mexican press. The policy review discusses the role of large housing lenders in housing policy for Mexico, priorities that will make the country create more competitive and sustainable cities, and various reforms to urban governance that will improve housing and development outcomes. The issue of vacant housing received particular attention in the media.

Last year, Professor Monkkonen delivered a presentation at the Institute of Social Research of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City on the topic of housing finance in urban policy, which also received a lot of attention by Mexican media outlets. Monkkonen argued that the Mexican government’s support of urban infill and higher density development would only be achieved with larger and more comprehensive reforms of the Mexican housing finance system than those currently proposed.

 

 

 

Urban Planning Student Awarded Switzer Fellowship

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By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
UCLA Luskin student writer 

Aaron Ordower, a graduate student pursuing a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning in the Luskin School was awarded the Switzer Environmental Fellowship, a highly competitive and merit based award, by the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation.

The fellowship is awarded to 20 environmental leaders recognized by their academic institution or environmental experts. Through the fellowship, Ordower was awarded $15,000 to complete his degree and will be supported by the Switzer Foundation to continue his work facing crucial environmental challenges in Los Angeles.

Ordower has focused on urban sustainability and studies strategies for the development of transit friendly neighborhoods and urban growth to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the effects of urban sprawl. He is also interested in how the different sectors of urban development, transportation, resource management and others can affect one another and work together for a more sustainable urban environment.

Urban planning students who have previously been awarded the prestigious award include Colleen Callahan who focused on transportation planning and environmental policy (2010) as well as John Scott-Railton and Miriam Torres who focused on climate change adaptation and water quality in low income communities (2011).

Ananya Roy to direct new UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Appointment effective July 1, 2015.

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International development scholar Ananya Roy will lead a new institute examining inequality and democracy at UCLA Luskin as its inaugural director, Dean Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., announced today. Roy’s appointment is effective July 1, 2015.

Roy’s charge at the new institute will be to oversee a multifaceted program of research, training, and public outreach operating at the nexus of democracy, social justice and governance/political participation. The project is a major initiative of UCLA Luskin’s five-point strategic plan, adopted in the wake of the $50 million naming gift from Meyer and Renee Luskin to UCLA’s School of Public Affairs in 2011.

Roy comes to UCLA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as a professor of city and regional planning and distinguished chair in global poverty and practice. She was also the education director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. In 2010 The New Yorker called her “one of Berkeley’s star teachers,” and in 2006 she earned the Distinguished Teaching Award, the college’s highest faculty teaching honor, and the Distinguished Faculty Mentorship Award.

“I am thrilled to welcome Ananya to UCLA Luskin as the head of the institute,” Dean Gilliam said. “Her creativity, collaborative spirit and impeccable academic credentials are an exact match for the positive change inherent in this new endeavor, and I know she will serve as an inspiration to our faculty and students.”

With research interests ranging from social theory to comparative urban studies, Roy has dedicated much of her scholarship to exploring and understanding the formation of geopolitical hierarchies. Her book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development won the 2011 Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, given for books that promote participatory planning and positive social change. She is also the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America; The Practice of International Health; and Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.

Projects under her direction have received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Ford Foundation, USAID and others. Roy’s service on editorial boards includes the publications Public Culture and Territory, Politics and Governance, among many others.

As the institute builds an interdisciplinary approach to solving societal problems and leveraging the work of our three departments and across the campus, Roy’s previous experience at the University of California will play a key role. As the founding chair of Berkeley’s undergraduate program in global poverty and practice, she led a field of study that brings together hundreds of students from over 30 majors to understand the challenges of global poverty through creativity and practical experience. She also served as chair of the urban studies major, which takes a holistic approach to designing a new, humane approach to urbanism for a global populace.

At UCLA Luskin, Roy will hold an endowed chair provided by Meyer and Renee Luskin. Born in Calcutta, she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at Berkeley and took her bachelor’s at Mills College.

‘Most of us could do more to make it a truly charitable-giving season’ Bill Parent writes in the LA Times on the holidays and charitable giving in Los Angeles.

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“Greater Los Angeles is not as generous as it used to be and not as generous as it could be,” UCLA Luskin’s Bill Parent wrote in an op-ed printed in the Los Angeles Times.

Parent, associate dean for Strategic Initiatives, also serves as the director of the Center for Civil Society, which produces an annual regional nonprofit survey that reports on the state of charitable giving. This year’s report was released in November.

According to the report, charitable giving in Los Angeles County is 12% lower than it was in 2006, the year before the Great Recession hit. And the majority of residents give less than 2% of their household income.

“As the end-of-year charity appeals pick up, it’s important to remember what a difference just a little more giving can make,” Parent says.

A summary of some of the report’s more salient points can be found in this news story.

 

Global Public Affairs’ Stephen Commins Contributes to World Bank Report Urban Planning lecturer Stephen Commins was one of the researchers that put together the 2015 World Development Report.

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By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
UCLA Luskin student writer 

Urban Planning lecturer Stephen Commins was part of a team of researchers that wrote the World Bank’s new World Development Report for 2015, Mind, Society and Behavior, published on Dec. 4.

The report focuses on understanding human behavior for economic development, psychological and social perspectives on policy. It aims to capture how the processes of the mind and the influence of society can improve implementation of development policies and interventions that target behavior.

Commins said he thinks the report asks very different questions about the nature of public policy and the role of government and the way we understand poverty and power than what has been the standard approach to development.

“People are social beings and have a sense of social bonding. This is not surprising but it’s surprising that it hasn’t been taken into account more frequently,” he said. Commins also wrote a piece about the report for Public World blog.

Though it is typically assumed in economic policy making that people think rationally, the report finds more complex and thorough information about how people make decisions. It finds that people think automatically, socially and with mental models which are drawn from social networks, norms and shared history and society.

The goal is to integrate these findings into policy making and practice and make them available for systemic use by organizations and professional staff working in diverse countries and communities. The findings apply both to these professionals and to individuals in developing countries.

Commins said there has been huge international interest in the report. His role is to bridge the gap between the external audience and authors. He does this by managing events with professionals and government officials around the world to discuss the report’s main ideas and helping them think through what it means for practice and implementing policies in different countries.

Commins also worked with the report’s authors to discuss key issues and think about the larger puzzles with a small group of experts on the subjects. Since he was not an author himself, Commins played the role of a neutral party to give suggestions about what could be improved, what ideas to include. He had the most input in the health, development professionals and policy implementation chapters.

“With any author, they can get tied into the subject and not think about who’s going to use it. I tried to think about the external audience and how to make the report easier to implement,” he said.

Commins said he particularly enjoyed the subject of the behavior of development professionals and that it was a critical chapter.

“It would be easy to read the report and say poor people have certain behaviors or are limited in perspective, but the flipside is that actually everyone has limited perspectives and bias,” he said. “How academic and development professionals look at their work and how they criticize themselves is important as well.”

Commins is also the associate director of Global Public Affairs at UCLA Luskin, which addresses problems and processes of global public affairs through teaching, research, and partnerships and offers preparation for students seeking international careers.

He said the world report can help students in GPA to prepare to become insightful and competent professionals by helping them learn how to ask good questions, be self critical and understand the culture and context of their work.

 

Lewis Center Hosts Talk on Policy Implications of Ridesharing with Lyft

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By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
UCLA Luskin student writer 

On Dec. 8, the Lewis Center hosted a presentation about ridesharing transportation services based on smartphone technology and “access over ownership.” The Center invited Emily Castor, the director of Community Relations at Lyft, to speak about implications for policy and planning as these services begin to increase in density.

Over the last 2.5 years, Lyft has provided over 10 million rides and has affected mobility in several ways. Castor said these services can promote a car-free lifestyle and provide transportation options in underserved areas.

Despite some ideas that Lyft is only available in high socioeconomic neighborhoods, Castor discussed the different ride sharing features Lyft offers and its reliability different areas regardless of socioeconomic profile.

She also provided insight into the new industry’s development and how it will impact consumer behavior. For instance, people’s sensitivity to price presents the potential for systems that allow people going the same direction to share a ride. Adopting this feature in high density areas can reduce the cost for consumers up to 60% and benefit drivers who earn more per ride, she said. These features, such as the Lyft Line system, have already launched in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“The more people adopt this service, the better match rates customers get,” Castor said.

Though these services and features have much potential for mobility in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, there are questions remaining about successfully implementing and evolving them. For instance, Lyft’s upcoming launch of incidental carpooling will allow drivers to filter customers to focus on the driver’s designation. However, it is likely this would work best when there are events happening in the area.

“For carpooling to be mainstream, it needs to be flexible, reliable, quick, trustworthy and lucrative,” she said.

Public Policy student Begoña Guereca contributed to this report.

 

Latest Issue Of ACCESS Magazine Now Available; New Website Launched The magazine which translates academic research into readable prose is now available at accessmagazine.org

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The Fall 2014 issue of ACCESS magazine is hot off of the press and now available to view at the brand-new ACCESS website, accessmagazine.org. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find in the latest issue:

Phantom Trips

Adam Millard-Ball

When you see a new development being constructed, the first thing you might think is how much traffic it might bring to your neighborhood. (Well, that and will there be a good coffee shop there.) You may not be aware that developers pay more in costs based on the estimated number of new trips their developments create. But when that new coffee shop gets put into your neighborhood, how many new trips are really created?

Trip Generation for Smart Growth Projects

Robert J. Schneider, Susan L. Handy, and Kevan Shafizadeh

Developers must evaluate how much a new project will add to local traffic levels. If deemed necessary, developers must then invest in substantial capacity-adding projects, which can make some infill projects financially infeasible. But how much new vehicle traffic are developments creating, especially in smart growth areas?

Pounds that Kill

Michael L. Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer

When you buy a car, you may not be thinking of the effect you have on other people. But more and more, we see that there are public costs to private choices. Your car may produce more pollution than another car, thus leading to an environmental impact affecting others. But what about the weight of your car? How does that affect others?

Fuel-Efficiency Standards: Are Greener Cars Safer?

Mark Jacobsen

The United States has strengthened its fuel efficiency regulations several times in recent years in an effort to reduce environmental, economic, and energy costs. These standards have led to an in increase fuel efficiency by manufacturing lighter, lower-horsepower vehicles. But are these new fuel-efficient vehicles safe?

An Innovative Path to Sustainable Transportation

Dan Sperling

At one time, it looked as though humanity might go on a greenhouse gas (GHG) diet simply by running out of fossil fuels. But due to new and improved technologies for finding and extracting oil, including extraction techniques like fracking and horizontal drilling, we are far from running out of oil. So how do we cut back on GHG levels, and the environmental impact they have, if we’re not running out of oil?

THE ACCESS ALMANAC: Making Parking Meters Popular

Donald Shoup

When it comes to making a list of things people are excited about, parking meters are not just near the bottom, they’re not on the list. So how can government officials gain local support for parking meters? Donald Shoup’s answer: grant parking discounts to residents.

 

Irvine Fellow Creates New Course on Arts and Cultures in Los Angeles Urban Planning alumna Maria Rosario-Jackson's new course is open to students in the humanities and Luskin.

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By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
UCLA Luskin student writer 

Urban planning alumna Maria Rosario Jackson (PhD ’96) hopes to break boundaries in what it means to be an urban planner for students with a new course titled, “Arts & Culture in Communities: Implications for Planning, Design, Policy and Comprehensive Community Revitalization.” The new course integrates two worlds in the Los Angeles community and in her classroom by including students from both UCLA Luskin and the humanities.

Students enrolled in the course are from all three departments of the Luskin School, as well as degree programs in the humanities such as Chicana & Chicano studies, English literature, and World Arts and Cultures, among others. Jackson hopes that through the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of the course, students can learn from each other’s perspectives and knowledge in their field.

Jackson, who is a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts and senior advisor to the arts and cultural program at the Kresge Foundation, is teaching the course as a part of her new Irvine Fellowship sponsored by the James Irvine Foundation for the 2014-2015 academic year. As part of the fellowship, she will also be either hosting a series of community workshops or will be part of a public lecture in the winter or spring.

Her course teaches students to understand how arts and cultures in low-income and historically marginalized communities distinguish them from one another and gives them each a unique ‘pulse.’ Jackson said she developed an interest in the identity of racial, ethnic and other misrepresented groups as a young person growing up in Los Angeles and as an undergraduate student, which led her to pursue the subject in her career.

“You don’t really understand group identity until you start getting into what their aesthetic expressions are. The arts has always been a text for understanding communities,” she said.

Jackson said she thinks that strategies to address the collective uplift of marginalized groups are inherently inadequate if they don’t include the element of arts and cultures, which is often the case.

“If you look around the world and throughout the ages, in strategies to disempower and oppress a people a first step is to strip a community of its ability to make meaning and express themselves aesthetically and authentically,” she said. “So how can it not be part of efforts to strengthen them?”

Jackson said the class discusses how cultural and artistic objects, events and places can be interpreted as assets in a community and can be better understood as part of a solution for issues in distressed urban areas .

“It is an opportunity to explore and interrogate some emerging trends in urban planning and public policy that relate to the arts and figuring out how they work within the context of wanting to achieve more equitable outcomes,” she said.

Jackson said there are examples all over the country of artists who are working at the intersection of art and community revitalization and are helping to change the environment and social fabric of marginalized and low-income communities.

“Artists often help residents, who may not see themselves as artists, carry out artistic activity. Whether it is songwriting or theater, in the process of being creatively involved, residents are often treating the themes they are concerned with—health issues, fear of displacement, aspirations for better schools and jobs,” Jackson said. “Artists also can work with or as non-profit developers creating spaces and buildings far more interesting and meaningful than places without consideration for culture.”

In order to give students the opportunity to experience cultural assets in communities, they were instructed to explore a neighborhood in Los Angeles. For the project, Luskin and humanities students were paired together to encourage them to see the city in a different way that they normally would. After immersing themselves in the community, students were instructed to create a presentation that reported its cultural assets and critiques the extent to which they are evident in community improvement strategies.

Several speakers in the fields of art, urban planning, public policy and others have visited the class to have a discussion with students about projects they are working on.

Jackson said she accepted this fellowship because she thinks it is fulfilling and inspiring to be able to contribute to UCLA, her alma mater, with a new generation of people who want to improve Los Angeles. She also said she thinks this is an opportunity to explore and reconnect with her home after being away from Los Angeles for almost 20 years.

Luskin Lecture Series Features Civil Rights Icon Terrence Roberts MSW ’70 Roberts, one of the "Little Rock Nine" and a face of the school-desegregation movement, spoke about the persistent struggle for racial equality

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In 1957, Terrence Roberts MSW ’70 was a 16-year-old student at a segregated high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. After the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was unconstitutional, he volunteered to be one of the first black students to enroll at Little Rock High School, a decision with impact that is still being felt today.

As a result, Roberts’ junior year of high school was incredibly difficult. On the first day of school, he and his fellow members of the “Little Rock Nine” were prevented from entering the building by an angry mob backed by the Arkansas National Guard, who had been activated by Gov. Orval Faubus. It wasn’t until three weeks later, when President Eisenhower took control of Faubus’ troops and sent in the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, that Roberts was able to begin classes. But throughout the year, Roberts and his classmates had to attend school with a military escort, enduring beatings, vicious epithets and a national spotlight that turned him into a face of the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

More than half a century later, Roberts shared his experience at Little Rock High and reflected on a life involved in social justice during a UCLA Luskin Lecture event Dec. 4 at the California African American Museum. With the benefit of distance and time, Roberts made it clear that his experience as a teenager was part of a centuries-long struggle for equality.

“This stuff has been going on since well before you showed up,” Roberts said. From 1619 to 1954, when the Brown ruling was issued, minorities were fundamentally unequal to the white majority in North America. “It was legal to discriminate, to ‘do unto,’ to lynch, to murder,” Roberts said, and violent actions had the full protection of U.S. law.

Although laws have changed since the middle of the last century, Roberts said, changes to the legal system are just the beginning — and, given the recent protests in reaction to police officer-involved deaths in Ferguson, Mo., and New York, clearly an inadequate solution to resolve longstanding racial tensions.

As he contemplated a way forward after the “horrendous, cold-blooded murders” of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Roberts cautioned of a long, difficult road ahead.  “This has been going on for centuries,” he said.

“This stuff is so woven into the fabric of our society it is so difficult to disentangle ourselves, especially when there is a lack of will to do so,” he added.

At its heart, Roberts spoke of the problem of racial inequality as a dispute over space—“physical, psychological and economic” boundaries within which the powerful majority feels threatened by the onset of a competing community. Roberts crossed a physical boundary by breaking the color barrier in high school, but in the decades since he has seen the resistance of the racial majority as a reaction to a perceived intrusion by outsiders.

In the face of this framing of the problem, Roberts counseled that protests ought to be nonviolent if they hope to advance the racial conversation and lead to progress. In response to a question squaring Roberts’ view with the facts that Brown and Garner were killed by police despite their nonviolent actions, Roberts said, “Death looms above us all.”

“The powers that be will see you for who you are — nonviolent or angry — and take you out of their space,” and violent actions by the minority will only make the problem worse, he said.

Throughout the talk Roberts exhibited the discipline and unflappability he learned in the unwelcoming halls of Little Rock High, and which he nurtured further throughout a career as an educator and consultant. In 1999, President Clinton honored the Little Rock Nine with the Congressional Gold Medal.

When a member of the audience asked how he managed to control his emotions in the face of daily abuse as a student, he said, “My emotions are under my control. Anger and rage are possible choices, but they’re not the only ones.”

Going forward, Roberts advocated that members of the audience take action to change the culture around “the racial conversation.” With more than 50 years of continued racial tension despite changes to laws, progress will only be realized through persistent pressure on cultural values, he said. After all, laws without community support aren’t enough.

“When you do things that seem forward, progressive, you have to check with the will of the people,” he said.

More photos from the event

Availability of alcohol linked to alcohol-related suicides

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Greater availability of alcohol is associated with a higher proportion of alcohol-related suicides, especially among American Indians and Alaska Natives, according to a new study by UCLA professor Mark Kaplan.

Using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System and compiling density data from state alcohol licensing agencies in 14 U.S. states, Kaplan and his co-researchers discovered positive associations between both on-premise and off-premise alcohol outlet density and the presence of alcohol in people who committed suicide.

Overall, 33.9 percent of suicide decedents were found to have positive levels of blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and 21.4 percent had a BAC greater than or equal to .08 grams per deciliters, which is used as a threshold measure of alcohol intoxication. This correlation was higher for American Indian and Alaska Native group.

Previous work by Kaplan, who was lead investigator on a project funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, showed that alcohol use and legal intoxication prior to suicide is common among US racial sub-groups, especially American Indian and Alaska Natives. This group had the highest rate of legal intoxication among other ethnicity groups.

“The associations between off premise density and American Indian/Alaska Native race status can be because of their specific patterns of drinking,” said Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Many American Indian/Alaska Native reservations and villages are dry communities, which may lead drinkers to seek off premise outlets to purchase alcohol.

The study, which was recently published in the journal Addiction, notes: “These individuals may also be affected by the concentration of off premise outlets because they are disproportionately of low socioeconomic status, and buying and drinking off premise is cheaper than drinking on premises.”

The researchers conclude that policies to reduce access to alcohol can help reduce alcohol-associated suicides in the future. In addition, more focused initiatives such as interventions and referral programs can help individuals who are contemplating suicide.

“Our analysis uses the only U.S. national data set available that examines blood alcohol levels among suicide decedents, providing accurate, timely, and comprehensive surveillance data with unrivaled toxicology information,” Kaplan said. “Combining that with detailed information about on-premise and off-premise alcohol outlet densities provides a resource for policymakers and public health officials to design and implement effective policies and programs to reduce the incidence of suicide, particularly in high-risk groups.”

The study was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R01 AA020063). Authors include Norman Giesbrecht of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health ; Nathalie Huguet of Portland State University; Lauren Ogden of Portland State University; Mark S. Kaplan, Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs; Bentson McFarland of Oregon Health and Science University; Raul Caetano of the University of Texas School of Public Health; Kenneth Conner of the University of Rochester Medical Center; and Kurt Nolte of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

For a copy of this paper, contact Jean O’Reilly, Editorial Manager, Addiction (jean@addictionjournal.org, tel +44 (0)20 7848 0853).