Study Shows Access to Cars Important for the Poor

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A new study co-authored by professor and chair of Urban Planning Evelyn Blumenberg is getting some play in the media for its unique, and possibly controversial, findings concerning automobile access for low-income households.

The Washington Post’s Emily Badger writes: “In many circles – among advocates for cleaner air, safer streets, less congestion and public transit – it’s a major policy goal to get people out of cars. Reduce car use, and you reduce pollution. Reduce car use, and we’ll need fewer costly roads and parking garages. Reduce car use and shift more people onto bikes and trains, and maybe we’ll all spend less of our lives idling in traffic.”

“This line of thinking, however, seldom considers a group of people for whom more car use might actually be a very good thing: the poor.”

The study, titled “Driving to Opportunity: Understanding the Links among Transportation Access, Residential Outcomes, and Economic Opportunity for Housing Voucher Recipients” examined low-income families in 10 cities who participated in two federal housing voucher programs. According to the study, housing voucher recipients with cars lived and remained in higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Data from participants in the Moving to Opportunity housing voucher program showed that those with cars were twice as likely to find a job and four times as likely to stay employed. The study notes that this is not necessarily because cars are better than mass transit, but because public transit systems are usually slower or insufficient in metropolitan areas.

In a blog post reprinted in Atlantic Cities, the study’s co-author Rolf Pendall of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center explains that more research is needed to determine if the relationship between cars and improved neighborhood and employment outcomes is causal or associative. However, he notes that the current findings are “enough to raise important questions.”

Badger says: “All of these findings are as much a reflection on the value of cars as the relatively poor state of public transit. The underlying issue also isn’t so much that cars create opportunity. Rather, it’s that we’ve created many places where you can’t access opportunity without a car. Which also means that we’ve created places that punish people who don’t have one (or can’t afford to get one). That’s a much larger critique.”

 

Journalist Sasha Issenberg to be Civil Society Fellow

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Political journalist Sasha Issenberg will be in residence as a Fellow in the Center for Civil Society in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA Department of Political Science for spring quarter 2014.

Mr. Issenberg is currently Washington correspondent for The Monocle, a magazine covering global affairs, business culture and design. He is the Author of The Victory Lab: the Secret Science of Winning Elections (Crown, 2012), which shows how political campaigns have been transformed by innovations in data, analytics, and behavioral psychology. He is also the author of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of Modern Delicacy (Gotham/Penguin, 2007), which describes how sushi went from a street snack to a major global commodity in less than a decade.

He is currently writing a book on marriage equality to be published by Crown/Random House, The Engagement: A Quarter-Century of Defending, Defining, and expanding Marriage in America. The Engagement will document the political, legal, and social history of the battles over gay marriage in the United States. Mr. Issenberg’s UCLA Fellowship is supported in part by a generous contribution from the David Bohnett Foundation.

Mr. Issenberg will co-teach a Fiat Lux undergraduate course, Victory Lab, Exploring the Mechanics of Modern Campaigns with Lynn Vavreck of the Political Science Department, who was instrumental in bringing Mr. Issenberg to UCLA. The Fiat Lux Course will meet every other Tuesday from 3:30 to 4:50 in room 1284 of the Public Affairs building. Luskin students are welcome to sit in on the class, which will also feature a number of prominent guest speakers from the political arena.

In addition he will lead brown bag lunch discussions for the Luskin community: Thursday, May 1, 12 pm “Why We Stopped Fighting over Gay Marriage” in 3333, and Wednesday, May 14, 12 pm for “Why the Democrats Are Better with Data” in Room 3343. He will also lead a Dean’s Salon in May on the topics of “Sushi, Campaign Strategy, and Civil Rights.”

Mr. Issenberg has held editorial and reporting positions for George, Philadelphia Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Slate. He has also published articles in a wide range of major publications including the New York Times Magazine, New York, The Atlantic and The Washington Monthly. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics in 2013. He is a 2002 graduate of Swarthmore College.

Most recently, he published “America Exports Democracy, Just not the Way You Think,” in the March 14 Sunday New York Times Review.  And in 2012 he held his own with Stephen Colbert.

Mr. Issenberg’s office is Rm 6273, in the Public Affairs Building, and he can be reached at sashaissenberg@gmail.com.

Soja’s ‘My Los Angeles’ Reviewed in L.A. Times

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Distinguished Urban Planning professor emeritus Edward Soja’s new book, My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanizations, has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times.

“Edward Soja, a geographer at UCLA, has spent much of his long career trying to read Los Angeles,” the reviewer, journalist and UCLA academic Jon Christensen writes. “Along the way, he developed innovative and sometimes controversial theories of urbanization and became a founder of a dynamic ‘L.A. School’ of urban studies.”

In placing Soja at the creation of this school of thought, Christensen, who is the editor of Boom: A Journal of California, credits Soja with “some of the most provocative and productive ideas to our understanding of cities in recent history.”

Soja’s book primarily addresses Los Angeles’ socio-economic landscape in the wake of the 1992 civil unrest, which he sees as a consequence of decades of economic decline and racial isolation. The key factor to future growth will be networks — of employment, transportation and culture — that serve all areas of the city and empower stronger communities and individuals.

Soja’s observations are important, Christensen writes. “In the next 30 to 40 years, as the worldwide population grows from 7 billion to 9 billion and possibly more, all of that growth effectively will be absorbed in cities, doubling the urban population on Earth.”

“That means the urban built environment will double too,” he continues. “The shape of those urban spaces, as Edward Soja shows, will fundamentally shape the future.”

My Los Angeles is published by the University of California Press.

Students Journey Far Afield for Spring Break Work

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Students in Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning are taking their shows on the road this Spring Break.

In pursuit of independently organized projects, groups of students will travel to Detroit, Mexico City and Tokyo. The trips are designed to encourage a broader understanding of issues of urbanization, governance, policy and social service.

In Detroit, a group of 10 students will explore the consequences of the city’s bankruptcy on urban policy. During their time in the city they have meetings scheduled with a host of city officials, including agency heads, nonprofit leaders and Mayor Mike Duggan. In their conversations the students hope to uncover lessons of governing a city in crisis, resources available to city managers and the role citizens can play in rebuilding an iconic city’s image. “Detroit represents the most extreme versions of problems in the urban core,” the students write on their trip blog. “This trip will serve to contextualize urban planning issues in the canonical distressed city.”

The Mexico City trip will cross disciplinary lines to understand transportation access in the context of a global metropolis. With many similarities in structure and environment as Los Angeles, 28 students from all three UCLA Luskin departments will use the Mexican capital as a source for new ideas in social justice, equity and community empowerment. The sessions packed into the five-day schedule, spanning such topics as bikesharing, parking management, women’s needs, sustainable development and public space programming, will be distilled into a post-trip event at UCLA Luskin. The group will also be posting updates to a dedicated website during the trip.

Two groups of students are heading for Tokyo. The first will follow a path established in previous years as they travel to the Tohoku region of Japan’s largest island, where they will engage with civic leaders responding to the 2011 earthquake that inundated the city of Sendai. More than three years after the disaster, the region still offers vital lessons of emergency planning, critical response and community rebuilding. The second group, traveling under the auspices of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Institute, will explore the role of transportation in crafting a community through an innovative interpretation of the neighborhood surrounding Shinjuku Station, the world’s busiest transportation center.

Beyond the March pause in classes, UCLA Luskin students spend summer breaks living and working overseas through the International Practice Pathway program.

Student Postcard: Seeking Resiliency in the Pacific Rim

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Greg Pierce, a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning, was selected as the sole UCLA representative to attend the Second Annual Pacific Cities Sustainability Initiative Forum in Manila this month. Upon his return to the states, he shared this postcard of his experience in the city, which is still recovering from a major typhoon that struck in 2013.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the 2nd annual Pacific Cities Sustainability Initiative (PCSI) Forum in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. I was selected as the graduate student representative from UCLA to participate in the conference. The Urban Land Institute and the Asia Society jointly sponsored the forum, which brought together a diverse group of academics (including Professor Robert Spich from the UCLA Anderson School), officials from the Philippine government, real estate developers and other development consultants. Participants traveled from all across Asia and North America to Manila.

The theme of this year’s forum was ‘Creating Livable and Resilient Cities.’ This theme was particularly appropriate in the context of Manila, which experiences serious flooding several times a year, especially in lower-income areas. Moreover, the country as a whole is still recovering from Typhoon Haiyan. The typhoon struck in November 2013, devastating cities and towns throughout the islands of Leyte and ranking as the deadliest typhoon in the country’s history. Outsized, adverse weather events in the Philippines and throughout the Pacific Rim are only expected to increase in light of climate change.

The day before the forum began, I had the opportunity to visit Fort Santiago in Old Manila. Much of this area of the city was built in the 16th century by the Spanish. This area is rich in colonial and post-colonial history and featured a range of diverse architecture, including Manila’s city hall building. While in this part of town, I was also able to visit some neighborhoods nearby that provided a taste of the typical day-to-day experience of the city’s residents.

The first day of the forum consisted of ‘mobile workshops’ to different areas of the city to see urban resiliency in action. The mobile workshop I attended served as quite a contrast from Old Manila. I visited both Makati, the central business district and financial hub of the city, and Bonifacio Global City, a relatively new master planned development. Both areas have taken urban resiliency to heart by implementing advanced storm water management techniques and constructing earthquake-resistant buildings with the most flexible materials. However, Makati and Bonifacio are largely designed for wealthy Filipinos and foreigners, and do not facilitate the inclusion of the city’s lower and middle income residents. Another poignant portion of the tour included a visit to the memorial cemetery for the Americans and Filipinos who perished in World War II.

An explanation of the storm water management system in Bonifacio Global City

The World War II memorial cemetery with Bonifacio Global City in background

The subsequent days of the conference were held at the eclectic Mind Museum in Bonifacio Global City. The forum featured keynote addresses by Sir Robert Parker — the mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand when the major 2011 earthquake struck the city — and Dr. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the director of disaster relief in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami devastated Aceh province. These experts provided both practical advice for urban resiliency in future disasters as well as a welcome people-oriented approach to handling such crises. I was also able to attend a number of lively panel discussions and small-group breakouts on more specific topics in urban resiliency, such as public private partnerships and sustainable urban design. The conference also included numerous opportunities for knowledge-sharing and networking.

In addition to taking in knowledge, I contributed to the range of policies which can enhance urban resiliency. Along with other graduate students, I presented a poster at the forum. My proposal, ‘Performance-Based Pricing for City Parking in the Pacific Rim,’ outlined how large cities, both in the United States as well as in Asia and Latin America, can implement market-based pricing for their public on-street parking supply. Implementing dynamic pricing addresses past urban planning urban mistakes, improves livability by reducing congestion and pollution, and increases cities’ financial resiliency. Enhanced revenue from parking can also be diverted to urban residents without cars, the vast majority of those living in Asia and Latin America.

Overall, visiting Manila and attending the forum was a great experience but also served as a reminder of ongoing challenges for urban resiliency in countries such as the Philippines. While we know much about best practices and can see how well-off residents can ensure resilience in light of climate change and disasters, mainstreaming disaster risk reduction and everyday livability for the average resident of a low or middle income city remains a challenge.

Student Report Reflects on Japanese Disaster Preparation

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Three years after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, students from all three departments have produced an anthology of personal reflection and academic analysis of the disaster’s impact on the community.

“Telling our Story: UCLA Luskin Japan Trip 2013” collects writing from 22 students in Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning that traveled to the region last year. In a weeklong trip over Spring Break, the students toured disaster sites, examined official and community responses to the tragedy, and documented the country’s progress toward recovery.

“We, the authors, made promises to our sponsors and hosts to never forget Tohoku, and sharing our academic observations and personal experiences here not only immortalizes them but makes them accessible to those who cannot travel to the region themselves,” write the editors — Urban Planning student Vicente Romero, Social Welfare student Elizabeth Schaper and Public Policy student Keitaro Tsuji. “It is our hope that this body of work will help us achieve our promise to increase this region’s global visibility.”

The students also documented their trip in a video piece produced by Public Policy student Dustin Foster.

Students Get Up Close With Green Tech on City Hall Day

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On Friday, Feb. 28, 24 students from all of UCLA Luskin’s academic departments traveled to City Hall for a day of briefings and interviews on the topic of “Can green technology help drive L.A.’s economy?”. The students gained experience in what it takes to make government work, and the city leaders benefited from the students’ new ideas and inspiration.

Follow the action through the Storify thread below.

 

Bluestone Kicks Off FEC Lecture Series

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By Stan Paul

From President Obama and the Pope to venture capitalists and billionaires, “everyone is talking about inequality,” said Northeastern University professor Barry Bluestone in his Feb. 25 talk at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

“This is new,” he added.

Bluestone’s presentation, “The Great U-Turn: Inequality in America 25 Years Later,” launched the Luskin School’s 2014 FEC Public Lecture Series. The events, which follow the theme of “Economic Inequality Through Multiple Lenses,” are sponsored by UCLA Luskin’s Faculty Executive Council, the Center for the Study of Inequality at UCLA Luskin, the Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, among others.

While inequality in the United States is certainly not a new subject, focus on disparities among Americans and their relative freedom to pursue the American Dream has sharpened recently. In addition to a historical view of inequality in the U.S., Bluestone, director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, provided new data that showed the situation has changed since he first reported his findings in the 1980s.

Among the headings of his presentation were insights such as: “Where inequality is greatest, so is the cost of living,” (Los Angeles was recently ranked ninth most unequal on a list American cities), and “Income Gains at the Top Dwarf Those of Low- and Middle-Income Households.” He presented data showing the percent change in real after-tax income since 1979 that resembled a craggy, but ever-growing mountain range of prosperity, culminating in a 201 percent increase for the top 1 percent. But, the categories of the next 19 percent, the middle 60 percent and the bottom 20 percent appear as relatively flat foothills in comparison.

As an explanation for the causes behind the divergent fortunes of the haves and the have-nots, Bluestone referenced an Agatha Christie novel to show that no one cause is to blame. Under the heading “Murder on the Inequality Express,” he ran through a top-ten list of suspects from technology to globalization to decreased union representation to trade deficits.

One chart, named “Income Growth and the Changing Distribution of Family Income,” came with a dour subtitle, “From Growth with Greater Equity…to Stagnation and Inequality.” Following World War II and decades of growth in income generally among most Americans, the “Great U-Turn” began in the 1970s, according to Bluestone, who used that term with his co-author Bennett Harrison as the title of their 1988 book. In the preface of the paperback version of that book, the authors wrote, “When we first wrote The Great U-Turn, we began with a simple and fundamental premise: what is essential to the American Dream is the promise of an ever-improving standard of living. Americans expect to find and hold higher-paying jobs as they get older, and they expect their children to fare even better…”

Prof. Bluestone put the “current concern about growing economic inequality into some historical perspective. He and Bennett were pioneers in this field,” commented Urban Planning professor Paul Ong, who directs the Center for the Study of Inequality at UCLA Luskin.

Counter to society’s expectations of ever-increasing prosperity, Bluestone showed evidence that family income mobility has stagnated in the decades since the 1970s. While expressing pessimism about any significant changes for “current generation income equality,” Professor Bluestone said that intergenerational improvement — or the prospects for children born into low-income families to advance to a higher level of wealth – might have more luck if major changes are made.

Bluestone suggested that universal quality prenatal care for all children and more spending on early childhood education would be the best investment to address the inequality gap. By better matching educational spending to the time when a child’s brain undergoes its period of most dramatic growth, the U-turn could be reversed, Bluestone said.

How much would this cost? “A fortune, but it would be worth it,” he said.

Bluestone’s presentation is available here.

The next FEC Public Lecture, scheduled for April 29, will feature William “Sandy” Darity of Duke University who will discuss “Race, Ethnicity and Economic Inequality.” 

Hecht co-edits “The Social Lives of Forests”

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Urban Planning professor Susanna Hecht has published a new book. “The Social Lives of Forests,” co-edited by Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison of the University of Chicago and Christine Padoch of the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia, will be released in early March.

With 28 chapters in five parts, the book takes a comprehensive look at humanity’s multidimensional relationships with forests and woodlands. From the publisher:

“Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face—including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation—are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests’ past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces—from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems—has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics.

“Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, ‘The Social Lives of Forests’ attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.”

The book is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Students Join Movers & Shakers at TRB Conference

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By Adeney Zo
UCLA Luskin student writer

A group of Urban Planning students looking to expand their knowledge and professional connections in the transportation world made the trip to the 93rd annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington D.C., earlier this month.

The TRB annual meeting is a massive event, with around 12,000 participants and 800 different sessions spanning the width and breadth of transportation studies each year. Attending this event offered the UCLA Luskin students an opportunity to meet a mix of professionals and academics working on issues and projects similar to their own.

One student presenter, Jaimee Lederman, recalled, “This conference really gave me the chance to talk to people I normally couldn’t gain access to. For example, I had problems getting data from people in the insurance industry because they are not easy to contact, but there was a woman there who happened to be the head of an insurance company.”

Fellow student Kelcie Ralph agreed that the networking opportunities at the program are invaluable: “My first year, I tried to go to as many sessions as possible and drilled myself into the ground just to see everything. This year, I scaled back and focused on networking. I had the opportunity to attend a women’s reception that became an amazing networking opportunity for me to meet other women in transportation.”

Four Urban Planning students — master’s student Timothy Black and doctoral students Trevor Thomas, Ralph and Lederman — each were invited to present and discuss their research in various panels and forums at the conference.

Thomas’ paper covered the topic of post-welfare reform. “There are many travel surveys done for low-income people, single parents and children under welfare reform, but none of these data has been analyzed on the national level,” Thomas explained. “After looking at travel surveys from 1995 and 2009, we found a big change in vehicle access for poor single parents — more so than for any other demographic — that reflected in distance and their speed of income.”

Black conducted his research on the effectiveness and application of methods of measurement in urban planning. “With each metric, we were looking at different ways it could be applied, along with its background and development,” he explained. “By applying different metrics to streets of Santa Monica, we can find the best ways of measuring each street for bicycles and pedestrians.”

Ralph presented both a lecture and a poster. Her paper analyzed the relationship between women’s household labor and their use of automobiles. “Men & women divide household labor, but even women who work more than their husbands do significantly more housework than their partners,” she said. “That means that they need an automobile to make these trips, so I am looking at how these two topics are connected to each other.”

For her poster, Ralph examined how participation in after-school activities can be influenced by teens’ access to an automobile. “I think the goal of transportation, at the end of the day, is to connect people to opportunities and further social equality,” said Ralph.

Lederman also focused her research on two different topics within the legal realms of transportation and technology. The first covered transportation and ecology, specifically “streamlining transportation delivery of endangered species through large-scale collaborative planning,” she said.

Her second research topic concerned liability for emerging transportation systems and technologies. “With the new integration of automated driving technology in cars, there is an uncertain legal landscape,” she said. “People are so focused on the ultimate endgame, the automatic car, but we first have to slow down and look at how legal liabilities will affect technological development in this area.”

Though the conference is promoted throughout the Urban Planning department as one of the biggest transportation events of the year, the high cost of attending often prevents students from presenting their research in person and receiving feedback from some of the top professionals in the industry. These four students were able to attend thanks to a generous scholarship from alumnus Larry Sauve MA UP ’78  in order to cover their travel costs to the conference.

Sauve first experienced the conference as a working professional at Parsons Brinckerhoff. Once he realized the range of opportunities this conference could provide to students, Sauve offered to cover the travel expenses of four UCLA Luskin Urban Planning students who were invited to present their research each year.

“I felt that money should not hold you back” from this professional opportunity, Sauve said. “I didn’t get a chance to go to TRB until I was actually working, but if I had the chance as a student it would have made me even more enthusiastic about going into my career in transportation.”

“The scholarship was very helpful because people [at the conference] asked specific questions about the research,” Black explained. “It provided me the chance to be there to answer questions in detail about my own research.”

The four students will present their research again at a conference at UCLA Luskin on February 12, 2014.