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.
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.”
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.
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.
By Max Wynn
UCLA Luskin Student Writer
On January 29th the UCLA community packed into a sold-out Royce Hall to take part in the third Luskin Lecture Series event of the 2013-14, “A Conversation with Madeleine Albright.”
In a list of achievements in public service spanning nearly four decades, Albright most notably served as President Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997-2001. When she was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, she became the first woman to hold that position, and at the time was the highest ranking woman in the history of U.S. government.
Former Massachusetts Governor and visiting professor of public policy Michael Dukakis introduced Secretary Albright, describing how much he had enjoyed working with her during his 1988 presidential campaign. Albert Carnesale, a professor of public policy and engineering and former Chancellor of UCLA, then presented her with the UCLA Medal, an award given to those who have not only earned academic and professional acclaim, but whose works also illustrates the highest ideals of UCLA.
Upon receiving the honor, Albright joined Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and basketball coach John Wooden in the exclusive club of UCLA Medal recipients.
Albright’s keynote address focused on the difficulty of creating effective foreign policy in the face of rapid technological change and growing global interdependence. These two megatrends, as she described them, are difficult to address from a policy standpoint because they create their own contradictions. They both share the potential to foster international cooperation and understanding, she said, and yet in many instances they have hardened sectarian, ethnic and regional divisions.
Conscious of her audience of students, Albright described her remarks as centering on “the challenges facing the next generation of global leaders,” saying “given all that’s happening across the globe, we have an awful lot to talk about.
“The world’s a mess,” she summarized.
Despite these weighty pronouncements, her light-hearted nature, sense of humor and inspiring closing statements made it clear that she retains an optimistic outlook for the future. “Higher stakes mean greater rewards,” she said.
“The leaders of today and tomorrow have a chance to examine the options before us, discard what is broken, adapt what can be made to perform better and create new mechanisms where they are needed so that the global system benefits us all,” she said.
In his opening remarks, UCLA Luskin Dean Franklin D. Gilliam. Jr., stated that “The mission of our school is to change the world. We do that by training the next generation of transformative leaders.” Albright echoed Dean Gilliam’s sentiment, recognizing the potential of Luskin’s students to do just that.
Describing the leaders that the 21st century landscape requires, Albright stated that we need “leaders who bring a broadened understanding of their role…men and women who understand the connections between policy, planning, and social welfare…who recognize the need for an interdisciplinary approach to an interdependent world.
“The Luskin School is the kind of place in which those leaders will be forged,” she said.
Early in her address Albright noted that she was particularly looking forward to the question and answer portion of the evening’s event. She explained that since she is no longer in government she was excited to be able to actually answer the questions students and members of the public asked her, and her answers were nothing if not candid.
After a conversation with Dean Gilliam in which the two discussed a series of topics ranging from the Syrian conflict to the revelation of National Security Agency spying practices to her father’s mentorship of Condoleezza Rice, Albright fielded questions from the audience, the majority of which came from UCLA Luskin students.
The questions touched on specific policy issues as well as covering more general inquiries about the experience of being one of the few women in the corridors of power. Lance Cpl. J. Vincent Barcelona, a Marine Reservist and a third-year undergraduate student, asked Albright what force she would recommend President Obama deploy in Afghanistan as he prepares to withdraw combat troops by the end of 2014.
After thanking him for his service, Albright said she didn’t know of the exact number, but she knew it was important to protect the United States’ investment in the country. She also spoke of her own experience advising on military action, and how seriously she and others in her role take the responsibility of sending young people to war.
Vernessa Shih, a second-year Public Policy student, asked what advice Albright would give to young women interested in public service. Albright responded that she would encourage women to not be afraid to interrupt, because if an idea is important enough to be shared, it’s important enough to break up a conversation. She also passed along what she called her “most-quoted line:”
“There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women,” she said.
Members of the audience took part in the discussion on Twitter. See what they were saying:
Students in Paul Ong‘s Urban Planning 214 class, “Neighborhood Analysis,” completed reports of important demographic information last fall about seven Los Angeles neighborhoods.
The series of reports, which integrated data collected in the field with information from the U.S. Census Bureau, were delivered to EmpowerLA, the city’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. According to a blog post on the empowerla.org site, the reports will help Neighborhood Councils in the areas drive their engagement with and service to their communities.
“I am so impressed by the caliber of the students’ work,” said EmpowerLA general manager Grayce Liu, according to the post. “I think this asset mapping is essential for all Neighborhood Councils.”
Read the entire post and see the reports — which cover Valley Glen, Highland Park, Lake Balboa, South Central, Sunland-Tujunga, Van Nuys and Southwest — on the EmpowerLA website.
Reclaiming the Right-of-Way, a comprehensive toolkit on planning methods to encourage walkability and complete streets design in neighborhoods, has been named a recipients of a National Planning Achievement Award for Best Practice, presented by the American Planning Association.
The award is the latest in a string of honors for the toolkit, which is led by program manager Madeline Brozen and UCLA Luskin Urban Planning professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris through UCLA Luskin’s Complete Streets Initiative. Local and regional APA chapters had previously recognized the project’s contributions to planning theory and practice.
In a letter supporting the project’s nomination, Los Angeles City Councilmember José Huizar called the toolkit “invaluable,” saying the toolkit encouraged the city to try new ideas and “helped the shift toward a healthier, more walkable and enriching public realm gain a stronger foothold in Los Angeles.” Similar letters of support came from the L.A. Department of Transportation and the City of Cincinnati.
Though focused specifically on parklet development in Los Angeles, the toolkit provides methodologies and guidelines that can be applied to other communities and cities. The city of Pasadena, for example, just announced the possibility of parklets being installed alongside their Colorado Boulevard; additionally, LADOT launched a website titled www.PeopleSt.org that offers resources for community members to create and apply for their own public parklet spaces.
Reclaiming the Right-of-Way is the first part of a three-phase effort, made possible by a $75,000 grant from The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, that included the publication of the toolkit, installation of two demonstration parklets in Los Angeles, and evaluation of the parklets’ role in their neighborhoods.
A brief description of the toolkit and award is available on the American Planning Association’s website:http://planning.org/awards/2014/achievement.htm
ACCESS Magazine, the publication housed at UCLA Luskin that reports on research funded by the University of California Transportation Center, has been named the recipient of a National Planning Excellence Award by the American Planning Association.
The award celebrates efforts to increase awareness and understanding about the planning profession, and “tell the planning story.”
Launched 21 years ago by Berkeley planning professor Mel Webber, ACCESS has consistently made transportation research useful for policymakers and planning practitioners. With a goal of translating academic research into readable articles intended for a lay audience, ACCESS helps bring academic research into the public policy debate. ACCESS is currently housed within UCLA Luskin’s Institute of Transportation Studies, and is managed by editor in chief Urban Planning professor Donald Shoup and managing editor John Mathews.
The biannual magazine has more than 8,500 subscribers and 1,000 website visitors per month from more than 60 countries. Its ease of reading and widespread fan based has led to numerous reprint requests and articles being translated by international publications, including the leading Chinese journal, Urban Transport of China.
“As a teacher, I regularly assign ACCESS articles because students love them,” said Joe Grengs, associate professor at the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning. “In both style and substance, the articles are compelling enough to draw students into a conversation in ways that standard, dry academic writing cannot.”
Research published in ACCESS also inspires the implementation of new public initiatives. For example, San Francisco’s SFpark, a program that prices parking by demand, stemmed in part from ACCESS articles.
“ACCESS Magazine has undoubtedly increased public awareness of the transportation and planning industry,” said Ann C. Bagley, FAICP, chair of the 2014 APA Awards Jury. “The magazine presents study findings in an engaging and comprehensible manner, helping to spread sustainable planning ideas to a global audience.”
ACCESS Magazine received the 2012 Organization of the Year award from the California Transportation Foundation and was nominated for the 2013 White House Champions of Change Award. The publication is funded by the California and U.S. Departments of Transportation.
The Communications Initiative Award will be presented at a special awards luncheon during APA’s National Planning Conference in Atlanta on Tuesday, April 29, 2014. The magazine also will be featured in Planning magazine, APA’s flagship publication.
To learn more about ACCESS and sign up for a free subscription, visit the publication’s website.
Donald Shoup, distinguished professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin, has become the nation’s oft-quoted, go-to expert on parking. He was recently named one of the world’s Top 100 City Innovators Worldwide by UBM Future Cities. The author of “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Shoup has inspired a growing number of cities to charge fair market prices for on-street parking and remove off-street parking requirements.
He recently sat down with UCLA Luskin writer Matt Hurst to talk briefly about his favorite subject. Here is an edited Q&A.
How did you get interested in parking?
I backed in. Initially, I did research on land economics, and I realized that parking is a land market few academics had studied, perhaps because parking has such low status. In academia, international affairs have the most prestige, national affairs are a step down, state government is even lower, and local government seems parochial. Then, within local government, parking is probably the lowest rung on the status ladder. So I was a bottom feeder, but there was a lot of food down there.
Why is parking an important land market?
The footprint of parking is bigger than the footprint of any other land use in most cities. Parking spaces are also the most uniform and most frequently transacted pieces of land on Earth. People are even conceived in parked cars.
So drivers don’t mind paying to use these pieces of land over and over again?
No one wants to pay for curb parking, including me. To counteract this unwillingness to pay, I’ve tried to devise policies that create the political will to charge for curb parking. I recommend cities should dedicate the meter revenue to pay for added public services on the metered streets, as Pasadena does. Residents and businesses can then see that parking meters provide the funds necessary to improve their neighborhood. In all the reforms I recommend, I’ve tried to devise policies that will be politically popular and won’t require big changes.
How do you do your research in parking?
Cruising for underpriced curb parking creates a lot of traffic, but it’s hard to know how much. From measurements in Westwood Village, I estimated that cruising for curb parking creates about 950,000 vehicle miles of travel per year, equivalent to 36 trips around the Earth. To show any skeptics the extent of cruising for parking when all curb spaces are occupied and traffic is congested, I walk to the driver’s side door of a car parked on the street and take the keys out of my pocket. Often, the first driver who sees me approach the car comes to a halt, implying the driver was hunting for curb parking. If the first driver who sees me usually stops to take the space, many of the other drivers in the traffic flow are also probably cruising for parking.
What do you advise city officials to do about parking?
I recommend three simple policies. First, charge the right price for on-street parking, meaning the lowest price that will leave one or two open spaces on every block. Second, return all the meter revenue to pay for added public services on the metered blocks. And third, remove off-street parking requirements.
Why do you think cities should remove off-street parking requirements from, for example, new developments?
Minimum parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars in cities already choking on traffic congestion. Removing off-street parking requirements doesn’t mean, however, that developers won’t provide off-street parking. It simply means that urban planners won’t tell developers exactly how many parking spaces they must provide. Developers will supply all the parking spaces they think tenants demand. Lenders will also insist on enough parking spaces in the buildings they finance.
Parking requirements act like prohibition: They prohibit anything that does not have all the required parking. Requiring two parking spaces per apartment, for example, prohibits any apartment without two parking spaces. In effect, parking requirements tell people without cars that you’re not rich enough to live here. Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, parking requirements do more harm than good and should be repealed.
I think minimum parking requirements will eventually join other discarded planning practices that, like urban renewal programs in the 1960s, wasted a lot of money and did a lot of harm, although they seemed a good idea at the time.
What do you think about the state of planning for parking in our cities?
Planning for parking is at a primitive stage, maybe where medicine was a hundred years ago, when doctors prescribed lead and mercury as medicines, and blood letting as a therapy. Looking back a hundred years from now, I think everyone will understand that mispriced on-street parking and misguided off-street parking requirements did immense damage to cities, the economy, and the environment.
Your book has triggered a rethinking about how parking should be planned. How do you feel about that?
I try to write clearly so readers will think, “He’s right. Let’s do it!” My ideas for parking reform once seemed unimportant or impossible, but cities are now implementing them. I hope they work.
This Q&A was adapted from an article from in the Winter 2014 issue of the Luskin Forum.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will present remarks and participate in a public discussion hosted by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Wednesday, Jan. 29, at 7 p.m. at UCLA’s Royce Hall.
Prior to her address, presented as part of the Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture Series, Albright will receive the UCLA Medal, the university’s highest honor, from former UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale.
When President Bill Clinton appointed her as Secretary of State in 1997, Albright became the highest ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. She led the country’s diplomatic corps during a dynamic period of expanding global engagement, advocating for democracy and human rights around the world. Her other government experience includes service as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and as a member of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council.
Today, Albright is chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, and chair of Albright Capital Management, an investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. She is also the Mortara Endowed Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She chairs both the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the Pew Global Attitudes Project and serves as president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation. In 2012 President Barack Obama honored her achievements with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“It is a privilege for the campus to bestow the UCLA Medal upon Secretary Albright, whose tireless commitment to expanding democracy and ensuring human rights around the world are an inspiration to countless people,” said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. “”With principled vision, she has been a trailblazer for women and a champion for diplomacy throughout her life.”
The UCLA Medal is bestowed on those with exceptionally distinguished academic and professional achievement whose bodies of work or contributions to society illustrate the highest ideals of UCLA. Recipients have included national and international leaders in government, education, science, industry and the arts. Previous recipients include Nobel laureates, President Bill Clinton, UCLA alumnus and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, basketball coach John Wooden, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and UCLA alumnus and astronaut Anna L. Fisher.
In her lecture, “The Next Generation of Global Leadership,” Albright will apply her unique perspective to the pressing questions of equality, democracy and leadership that face the next generation of diplomats, elected officials and public intellectuals. Her address will be followed by a question-and-answer period moderated by UCLA Luskin Dean Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr.
“The students and scholars at UCLA Luskin work to bring positive change to the world, and they stand ready to be a part of the changing face of leadership that is addressing challenges in an environment of rapidly shifting political and cultural landscapes,” Gilliam said. “I am delighted to welcome Secretary Albright to the UCLA community, and I look forward to a stimulating discussion.”
The event is the latest in the school’s signature Luskin Lecture Series, which has featured speakers including former Vermont Gov. and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, and Children’s Defense Fund founder and president Marian Wright Edelman.
Please note: This event is sold out. Click here for more information.
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