Leap Explains Increased Violence During Lockdown

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap spoke to California Healthline about the spike in homicide rates in California during the pandemic. An increase in conflict among young adults, including gang activity, and the closure of schools, sports and community programs led to an increase in violence that disproportionately affected Black and Latino communities. “The sports after school — football, basketball, whatever it might be — all that is stopped,” Leap said. “So, frankly, you got a lot of adolescent and young adult energies out there.” She also noted that pandemic-fueled anxiety and isolation corresponded with a huge increase in gun sales, which further contributed to the rise in violence. As California slowly reopens, Leap said, it will take a broad effort to bolster jobs and education, along with short-term intervention aimed at those still hurting from the pandemic, to improve the social conditions that contributed to the increase in homicides.

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Report Documents Struggle to Keep the Lights and Water On

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A Grist article highlighted the findings of a UCLA Luskin report about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on utility debt, particularly in communities of color. Scholars from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and Center for Neighborhood Knowledge co-authored the report, including CNK Director Paul Ong, LCI Associate Director Greg Pierce, senior researcher Silvia González and graduate research fellow Ariana Hernandez. The paper, “Keeping the Lights and Water On: COVID-19 and Utility Debt in Los Angeles’ Communities of Color,” evaluates utility debt levels to measure residents’ difficulty paying rent during the pandemic. They found that one-quarter to one-third of households in Los Angeles have utility debt, but Black, Latino and lower-income neighborhoods are most severely impacted, as well as renters and people with limited English proficiency. The authors recommended developing and implementing debt-forgiveness and relief programs in order to support low-income households and severely burdened neighborhoods.

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Manville on ‘America’s Disastrous Experiment With Parking Requirements’

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville wrote an article for The Atlantic about the disastrous impact of parking requirements in American cities. Zoning laws that require homes and businesses to include space for parking cars have created “an unreasonable, unaffordable and unsustainable city,” he wrote. “American urban history is stained with tragic missteps and shameful injustices, so parking requirements are hardly the worst policy cities have tried. But they are notable for how much needless damage they have caused, over a long period, with few people even noticing.” Manville argued that parking mandates make driving less expensive and development more so, which in effect prioritizes the needs of cars over the needs of people. He concluded, “In an age of ostensible concern about global warming, it shouldn’t be illegal to put up a building without parking and market it to people without cars.”

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Yaroslavsky on COVID-19’s Stark Lines of Inequity

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Spectrum News’ “Inside the Issues” about this year’s UCLA Quality of Life Index, which offered a deep dive into the impacts of COVID-19 on Los Angeles County’s residents. “There are two Los Angeleses,” Yaroslavsky said. “There are the people who are doing well, who are making it. … And then there are those who are struggling, who are living on the margins of the economy and are always feeling one step away from oblivion.” The index included the surprising finding that Latino residents were more positive about their overall quality of life than white residents. Yaroslavsky said this may be because white people on average had higher incomes and more to lose during this pandemic, despite their greater privilege overall. Latinos faced tough challenges but “they worked their way through it, and they are much more optimistic about getting ahead in Los Angeles,” he said.

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Climate Research Brightens an Elementary School Campus

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The research of Urban Planning Assistant Professor V. Kelly Turner has helped to create a colorful gift for the children of Fernangeles Elementary School. A new mural melding art with science, and reflecting inspiration from youth in the community, was installed on the school’s Sun Valley campus this spring. Called “Beat the Heat,” the mural depicts a park with shade trees and a large purple paleta melting under a bright sun — all painted with a solar reflective coating that reduces surface temperatures up to 30%. Turner conducts research into the effectiveness of this coating as a climate change intervention that cities can use to combat the “urban heat island effect.” At Fernangeles Elementary, schoolchildren watched as Turner “took the temperature of the building” with a thermal camera that demonstrated the effect of the cooling paint. Turner then used the camera to measure the heat signatures of walls, the ground and a picnic table on campus, giving the students a real-world lesson in climate science. Artist Kristy Sandoval designed and painted the mural based on ideas conceived by youth from the environmental justice nonprofit Pacoima Beautiful. Mural collaborators include Dora Frietze-Armenta, Yesenia Cruz, Nicole Martinez, Diego Ortiz and Veronica Padilla of Pacoima Beautiful; Fernangeles Elementary Assistant Principal Carolina Gonzales; art historian Lizy Dastin; and Creative Paving Solutions, which manufactured the solar-reflective paint. The mural is the second spearheaded by Turner as part of a “green intervention” aimed at starting a conversation about climate change. The first, a massive rendering of the Greek god Zeus, was installed in South Los Angeles in 2019.

At left, artist Kristy Sandoval paints the image she designed with inspiration from youth who were asked how they like to keep cool. At right, an infrared image shot by Urban Planning Assistant Professor V. Kelly Turner shows hotter surfaces, including a metal bench, in yellow and cooler surfaces in purple.

 

A Case for Removing Minimum Parking Requirements

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A Los Angeles Daily News op-ed written by UCLA doctoral student Nolan Gray featured Urban Planning faculty members Donald Shoup and Michael Manville. The piece focused on minimum parking requirements mandating that homes, offices and shops include parking spaces, as well as on Assembly Bill 1401, which would prohibit California cities from imposing these requirements within half a mile of transit — an area where residents, shoppers and employees are least likely to drive. Nolan pointed out that developers already have an incentive to include parking in order to lease or sell a space. Shoup noted that minimum parking requirements are a key culprit in the state’s affordable housing crisis because the cost of including parking gets added to rent and mortgages. Manville added that providing off-road parking is associated with a 27% increase in vehicle miles traveled and a significant increase in emissions, since people are encouraged to buy and drive cars instead of choosing more sustainable transportation options.

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Akee Highlights Need for Better Data on Experiences of Racism

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Planning Randall Akee co-authored a Brookings article with KJ Ward about the lack of available data on experiences of racism in the COVID-19 era. While the media acknowledges instances of hate crimes and racial violence that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, they are often dismissed as outliers and fail to be the subject of meaningful research. “In the absence of systematic data on this topic, we are left to these anecdotal instances, and that makes it much more difficult to identify pervasive patterns and behaviors in society,” Akee wrote. Furthermore, smaller race groups are often excluded in national surveys or are clustered in a general “other” category. A new survey explicitly oversampled for small race and ethnic groups and illustrated the pervasiveness of racism toward all non-white groups. Akee argued that collecting data by race and ethnicity is the first step to identifying, diagnosing and dismantling systemic racism in society.

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Storper on Post-COVID Life in Cities

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An article in Econ Focus about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on life in cities mentioned a 2020 paper co-authored by Urban Planning Professor Michael Storper about the predicted short- and long-term effects of the pandemic. In their paper “Cities in a Post-COVID World,” Storper and co-authors Richard Florida and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose examined the pandemic and resulting lockdown as a forced experiment and made predictions about the social scarring and need to secure the urban built environment against future risks. They argued that despite opportunities for remote work, online shopping and other alternatives to face-to-face interactions, the demand for urban amenities will remain strong after the virus-induced lockdowns are lifted. “It is highly unlikely that COVID-19, despite its high levels of devastation in certain cities, will derail the long-standing process of urbanization and the economic role of cities,” they wrote. “Nonetheless, even if cities will not shrink or die from the COVID pandemic, they will certainly change.”

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Diaz Highlights Opportunity to Expand Health Care Coverage

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In a Sacramento Bee article on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget priorities, Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, discussed the possibility of expanding Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented adults and seniors. Newsom is expected to release a revised state budget proposal this week with a huge budget surplus, which could be used to fund a variety of proposals to help Californians, including more stimulus checks, school funding and expanded health care coverage for undocumented adults. California recently expanded Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented children and adults up to 25 years old; expanding coverage to undocumented adults over 65 is estimated to cost the state about $250 million. “We’re in an unprecedented situation where we actually have resources to find robust and bold ideas that can correct failed systems,” Diaz said. “This includes expanding health care coverage to people irrespective of their immigration status and irrespective of their age.”

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Pierce on Tackling Failing Water Systems in California

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Gregory Pierce, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, was featured in a Revelator article about addressing the drinking water crisis in California. The Center for Innovation collaborated on a Drinking Water Needs Assessment that provided a detailed analysis of the problem and the cost of solutions in California. The study estimated it would cost about $10 billion to address the drinking water problem, but Piece explained that small-scale regional solutions could reduce the cost and make infrastructure more integrated. “What’s really novel is that [the report] also tries to comprehensively assess where our water quality is likely to fail next if nothing is done to prevent it,” Pierce said. While the problem is expensive, he argued that the costs of not fixing the problems will be higher in the long run. “One way or the other, society pays for this and it’s better to invest up front,” he said.

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