Diaz Recommends Staying Focused on COVID Relief

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Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, spoke to the Associated Press about growing criticisms of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. A new poll found that Newsom’s approval rating dropped from 65% last May to 54%. Newsom was criticized in November after being spotted at a birthday celebration at a luxury restaurant while simultaneously telling Californians to avoid large gatherings. More recently, he has drawn criticism for the messy vaccine rollout in California, failure to reopen schools and his decision to abruptly lift stay-at-home orders. Diaz said young workers and people of color are bearing the brunt of the state’s coronavirus surges and that the Trump administration deserves much of the blame for the disjointed response. However, she argued that Democrats should stay focused on the priorities of vaccinating people and providing economic help rather than bending to critics on the right. “This isn’t really just on one governor,” she said.

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Ong on Prospects of Closing Rifts Among Immigrant Communities

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Research Professor Paul Ong spoke to NBC News about President Biden’s immigration policies and rhetoric, which are being closely watched by much of the nation’s foreign-born population. Some immigrants who are grappling with scarcity and insecurity in the United States were particularly susceptible to Trump administration characterizations of “good immigrants” and “bad immigrants,” the article noted. It added that limited access to unbiased information in a native language contributes to the level of vulnerability to such rhetoric. Ong offered the example of Vietnamese Americans, who have been closely allied with the Republican Party. Many come from refugee families shaped by unique experiences with the Vietnam War and strong opposition to communism. This background makes the group more likely to buy into an American nationalistic narrative, Ong said.

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Images of Pepper-Sprayed Girl Underscore Urgency of Minimum-Age Laws

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Video footage of a 9-year-old girl being handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by police in Rochester, N.Y., has put a spotlight on a key question for policymakers: At what age should a child be shielded from detention, prosecution and incarceration in the criminal justice system? That question is the focus of scholarship by Social Welfare Chair Laura Abrams and Elizabeth Barnert, assistant professor of pediatrics at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Their collaborative research at the intersection of child health and juvenile justice has led to data-driven recommendations about the minimum age of criminal responsibility, factoring in brain development, competency and childhood experiences. Abrams and Barnert recently worked with the National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN) to form a broad coalition of advocates and health professionals working to raise the age at which children can be processed on criminal charges. Internationally, that age is most commonly set at 14; in the United States, more than half of states have no minimum age at all. “Processing and confining children in the juvenile justice system is traumatic and exposes them to damaging collateral consequences,” including disruptions to education, employment, and mental and physical development, argues NJJN, which released a policy platform and other resources on the issue in January. The incident in Rochester, captured on police body cameras and viewed widely, illustrates the urgency of this advocacy, Abrams said. “No child should ever be cuffed or arrested. Period,” she said. “Our work on minimum age laws shows that criminalizing childhood is racist and has adverse outcomes on children’s health.”

 

Yaroslavsky on Role of Unwieldy Government in Vaccine Rollout

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In a Los Angeles Times article about California’s chaotic distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke about the role played by unwieldy county governments. “The weakness of the county governance structure reveals itself when there’s a life-and-death issue like coronavirus,” said Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles County supervisor. Most California counties are governed by an elected board of supervisors, meaning there is no single executive in charge. In the early days of the vaccine rollout, L.A. County’s enormous size — 10 million people — created an additional hurdle. Yaroslavsky said strong, decisive leadership is key. “You have to have someone in charge who is the field general who says, ‘We’re marching this way. I’ve taken into account all the evidence,’ ” he said. “And everyone marches in lockstep.”

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Study Assesses Tools Used to Prioritize COVID-19 Resources

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A new study by the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) at UCLA Luskin assesses four vulnerability indicators used by public agencies to identify neighborhoods most in need of pandemic-related resources and services. The choice of indicators used in prioritizing the COVID-19 interventions has implications for how many people of color and minority neighborhoods are served, the study found. Race and ethnicity are important because people of color encounter multiple dimensions of inequality that are only partially reflected in the indicators, said CNK Director Paul Ong, who led the research. The study aims to help ameliorate a policy dilemma. “Despite the reality that African Americans and Hispanics have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19, the 1996 Proposition 209 prohibits the state from explicitly using race as a factor in the provision and distribution of pandemic relief and coronavirus vaccines,” Ong said. Of the four indicators assessed, an index measuring pre-existing health vulnerabilities is the most likely to be inclusive of people and neighborhoods of color, the study found. It also recommended that public agencies develop new indicators tailored to the unique policy goals created by the pandemic. The research was conducted in partnership with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, the UCLA BRITE Center for Science, Research and Policy, and the public interest research group Ong & Associates.

New Book by Turner Focuses on Urban Sustainability

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A new book by Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner highlights contributions to urban sustainability scholarship made by geographers in the 21st century. Co-edited by Turner and Professor David Kaplan of Kent State University and published by Routledge in December, “Geographic Perspectives on Urban Sustainability” delves into issues of transportation, green infrastructure and gentrification and analyzes the intersections of social theory, spatial science and geography. Exponential and uneven growth of urban areas and the growing threat of climate change have prompted concerns that current urbanization patterns are unsustainable. Experts in the field have recognized the need for increased scholarship on urban sustainability, including human-environment interactions and emerging urbanization patterns. Through chapters originally published in the journal Urban Geography, Turner and Kaplan raise questions of urban resilience, environmental justice, political ecology and planning from a geographic perspective. “Contributions [to the field of urbanization science] should embrace systems thinking, empirically connect social constructs to biophysical patterns and processes, and use the city as a laboratory to generate new theories,” they write. The book is a resource for scholars, students and policymakers interested in urban and city planning, political ecology and sustainable urbanism.

Local Demand Is Helping California Surpass Renewable Energy Targets UCLA study shows 30% of residents now can choose cleaner power from community choice aggregators

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By Michelle Einstein

In California, local demand for renewable energy is helping the state exceed its clean energy goals, according to a new UCLA study.

Research by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation shows the growing impact of community choice aggregators, or CCAs, on energy procurement and illustrates the effects cleaner energy providers are having on the state’s power supply.

Community choice aggregators buy clean energy on behalf of their residents and businesses, offering an alternative to investor-owned utilities and enabling localities to take control of their energy procurement. The CCA serving much of the Los Angeles region is Clean Power Alliance, which provides energy to customers in 31 cities and counties, including Alhambra, Culver City, Downey and Santa Monica.

“Community choice in energy has largely fallen under the radar, but it is rapidly reshaping the energy sector in California,” said Kelly Trumbull, a researcher at the Center for Innovation and lead author of the report (PDF).

According to the report, the use of community choice energy has grown quickly in the state. More than 30% of California households and businesses — more than 10 million customers — now have the option to choose a CCA as their electricity provider, up from less than 1% in 2010.

The vast majority of these energy providers offer more energy that derives from renewable sources. In all, the energy delivered by CCAs comes from renewable sources by an average of 25 percentage points more than energy from investor-owned utilities in the same regions. CCAs purchased twice as much renewable energy as required by the state from 2011 to 2019, researchers found.

That has helped the state achieve a cumulatively larger reduction in greenhouse gas emissions each year. The clean energy goals, established by the state’s Renewables Portfolio Standard, stipulate that 100% of the state’s energy be carbon-free by 2045. An interim target was set at 25% renewable energy until 2019. According to the report, a weighted average of 50% of the CCAs’ energy came from renewable sources that year.

The trend toward cleaner energy providers has also benefited residents by providing cheaper electricity: 73% of communities that offer community choice do so at a lower default rate than their investor-owned counterparts, the study found. And the CCAs often provide additional environmental and economic benefits, including financial assistance programs for low-income residents and incentives for electric transportation.

The authors write that the community choice aggregator model could be replicated in a variety of communities across the nation.

“We found that in California, CCAs successfully serve a wide variety of communities with ranging sizes, median incomes and political affiliations,” Trumbull said. “This suggests that CCAs could be implemented throughout the country.”

Nine states currently allow for a community choice approach, and interest is growing. Among the study’s takeaways from the California model:

  •  CCAs are most effective in communities where the demand for carbon-free energy exceeds what is currently provided.
  •  Partnerships among multiple cities and counties give CCAs an economy-of-scale advantage by keeping operating costs low.
  •  State policy and regulation play a critical role in the success of the community choice approach, starting with the fact that California needed to enact legislation to allow for CCAs to exist.

The research, which was supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, adds to the Luskin Center for Innovation’s large body of research on community choice electricity and renewable energy.

Leap on Alternative Measures for Promoting Community Safety

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap joined KPCC’s “Take Two” to talk about police and social justice reform in Los Angeles. According to Leap, special units such as gang units are more adversarial than beneficial, making community members feel as though they are being watched. Instead, she pointed to the success of alternative measures like the Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) Department, in which community interventionists come together and work with residents, families and youth to stem the tide of gang violence. Residents of Los Angeles are anticipating a new relationship between law enforcement and communities of color with the establishment of the Community Safety Partnership Bureau under LAPD Chief Michel Moore, Leap said. “Relationship building is at the core of public safety,” she said, adding that it is important to reconceptualize the role of police as relationship builders partnering with community members — not as enforcers. The segment featuring Leap begins at minute 29.

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Urban Planning Faculty Spearhead Mass Incarceration Archive Project

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Urban Planning Professors Kelly Lytle Hernández and Karen Umemoto as well as incoming Urban Planning Assistant Professor Marques Vestal are collaborating on a new initiative to create an archive on policing and mass incarceration in Los Angeles. The project, called “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration,” aims to collect, digitize and preserve a sustainable archive of data, testimonies, artifacts and police files for the next generation of research on racial and social justice. “The new platform will catapult our centers into the digital future in knowledge-sharing and knowledge production,” said Umemoto, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. The archive will build off the work of the UCLA-based Million Dollar Hoods research project, a community-driven initiative that began in 2016 to quantify the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Scholars from UCLA ethnic studies centers and the Million Dollar Hoods project will train UCLA students to work with the digital archives. “This new collaboration between Million Dollar Hoods and UCLA’s ethnic studies centers will preserve the documentary evidence of mass incarceration and its impact on people’s lives in Los Angeles while building a new digital bedrock for racial justice scholars and scholarship at UCLA,” said Lytle Hernández, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. The project will encompass research across several communities of color, highlighting ways in which they are disproportionately affected by mass incarceration. “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration” is made possible by funding from a three-year, $3.65 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.