Matute on Prioritizing Safety of E-Scooter Services

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Dot.LA about Superpedestrian, an e-scooter startup that aims to prioritize rider and pedestrian safety. Some e-scooter companies have faced lawsuits from riders over bodily injury and death. Superpedestrian says it has spent years improving its technology to protect vulnerable pedestrians and alert the user when they are breaking the rules. According to Matute, focusing on safety makes it easier for cities to adopt micro-mobility like e-scooter services. “Having self-regulating technology like Superpedestrian has is really attractive to cities because they can approve scooters to go in without worrying so much about users behaving badly,” he explained. “People have died because of vehicle system failures, brakes not being up to snuff.” Superpedestrian recently made its debut in Los Angeles with 5,000 LINK e-scooters.

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All Parking Is Political, Shoup Says

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Distinguished Research Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup was featured in a Bloomberg article arguing for the abolition of free parking. According to Shoup, drivers are subsidized at the expense of everyone else, and there is “no such thing as free parking.” He proposed pricing street parking according to market value, including desirability of the space, time of day and the number of open spots. Then, he suggested spending the revenue from street parking to better the surrounding neighborhoods. Parking is the most obvious way to make progress on issues including affordable housing, global warming, gender equity and systemic racism, Shoup said. Now, the pandemic has challenged modern notions about parking in America, with many parking lots converted into restaurant spaces and dramatic decreases in traffic. Shoup sees this as an opportunity to facilitate a dialogue about parking in order to make cities more equitable, affordable and environmentally conscious. “All parking is political,” he concluded.

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Leap on Complicated Origins of Gang Activity

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap was featured in an ABC 7 News segment about the complicated history of gang activity in Los Angeles. “People think that gangs are about criminal activity, but they’re really about economics,” Leap said. She explained that when factories in South L.A. began to close down in the 1970s, job opportunities and income narrowed and created a vacuum for gang activity. “Thousands of people lost their jobs, and the area never recovered,” she said. “You don’t see the pain that goes into gang membership and the reasons why people join gangs.” Leap said the Crips, one of the oldest gangs in the South Los Angeles area, have been involved in significant social services in addition to gang activity and criminal behavior. “To understand the Crips is to understand a very lengthy, very complex picture of a street organization that began in the Southern California area,” she said.

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Latinos in Labor Unions Were Better Protected From Job Losses During Pandemic UCLA study finds Latinos in non-union jobs were seven times more likely to become unemployed amid COVID-19 surge

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Latinos in non-union jobs were seven times more likely than Latinos in labor unions to fall into unemployment during three key months early in the pandemic, according to a new report by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

The report also found that Black and Latino union workers had higher wages than their counterparts in non-union jobs during the pandemic, but that both groups still received lower pay than white workers in union jobs.

Following previous studies demonstrating that Latinos faced disproportionate public health and economic consequences during the pandemic, the new report highlights the benefits that labor unions can provide to vulnerable workers during an economic crisis, said Sonja Diaz, the founding director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

“Labor unions gave us child labor regulations, work-free weekends and the collective power to demand better conditions,” Diaz said. “Our report shows that during economic downturns such as the one we faced amid COVID-19, union jobs can also provide much-needed stability for workers and their families.”

The report’s authors analyzed data from the Current Population Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, to understand the impact of the pandemic on employment rates, wages and union protections between January 2020 and June 2021. The time frame was chosen so the researchers could compare conditions from the outset of the pandemic in the U.S., the months of uncertainty that followed and the time period when policy actions began to spur an economic recovery.

Unionized workers of all races and ethnicities were less likely than non-union workers to experience job loss during the height of the economic downturn, but the report found that the effect was most pronounced among Latinos. For example, from April to June 2020, the employment rate for Latinos in labor unions fell by only 2.5%, while the employment rate for all union workers declined by 10.2%. During the same period, the employment rate for Latinos who were not in labor unions declined by 18.5%, representing a loss of nearly 4.3 million jobs.

Diaz said the nation’s economic recovery is inextricably tied to how well Latinos can bounce back from the setbacks they experienced during the pandemic. The report recommends policy actions including passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021, a bill that would make it harder for employers to obstruct organizing efforts. The legislation is currently awaiting action in the U.S. Senate.

“The economic devastation spurred by COVID-19 made it clear that it’s essential to build more resiliency and strengthen wages for the nation’s workers, particularly for groups that are most vulnerable during a crisis,” said UCLA research analyst Misael Galdamez, the report’s lead author. “Unionization is an important tool to give workers the economic stability and dignity that they deserve.”

Previous research by the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative has examined other aspects of how the pandemic has affected the nation’s economy and labor force, including one study which found that Latinas were more likely to drop out of the workforce than workers from other demographic groups.

Monkkonen Debunks Myths of High-Density Housing

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen was featured in a Mel Magazine article about the stigmatization and gentrification of high-density public housing areas. For years, the Cabrini-Green low-income housing project in Chicago was associated with crime and violence. Today, the complex has been renovated into a modern-looking mix of both subsidized and market-rate dwellings, but the stigma around public housing persists. According to Monkkonen, “the stigma and belief that these large complexes are doomed to fail … is a distinctly American point of view.” He pointed out that in places like Hong Kong, France and Scandinavia, government-subsidized housing is more common and culturally accepted. “The common narrative around higher-density living and public housing, and why it became untenable, is a belief that residents didn’t take care of their home,” Monkkonen explained. “But the reason it fell apart was a totally different one. The products of the policies created poor conditions.”

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Diaz on Investing in Latino Voters

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Latino Policy and Politics Initiative Director Sonja Diaz spoke to KQED about the importance of engaging Latino voters. Many Democratic candidates have come to rely on support from Latino communities, but recent elections have highlighted political shifts among Latino voters, including increased support for former President Donald Trump. “Where the Republican Party did invest, there were some shifts and that included some minority voters,” Diaz said. “That does not necessitate that Latinos … are somehow more Republican than they ever have been, but it provides this really clear and explicit recognition that in order to engage them, you have to actually invest in them.” Diaz said Trump’s increase in popularity among Latinos during the pandemic can be attributed to his pivot from the anti-Latino tenor of his first campaign. Diaz also spoke to KPBS and the Los Angeles Times about increasing voter turnout, especially in Latino communities, to block the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

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Loya on Racial Disparities in Mortgage Approval Rates

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning José Loya spoke to Markup about new data regarding ethnic and racial disparities in mortgage approval rates. For years, the mortgage industry has said financial factors, such as credit score and debt as a percentage of income, explain any racial disparities in loan approval rates. However, Markup investigated more than 2 million mortgage applications and found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to white people with similar financial characteristics, even after controlling for 17 financial factors. “Lenders used to tell us, ‘It’s because you don’t have the lending profiles; the ethno-racial differences would go away if you had them,’” Loya said. Now that these financial factors have been made public through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, Loya concluded, “Your work shows that’s not true.” The report found that, nationwide, lenders were 80% more likely to reject Black applicants than white applicants with similar qualifications.

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Ong on Repercussions of Census Undercount

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Director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Paul Ong was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Long Beach Post discussing the results of the 2020 Census and its impact on communities of color. Accurate census counts are crucial for the distribution of federal aid and congressional representation, but Ong’s analysis of the census data suggests that Hispanic and Black populations may have been undercounted more than other groups. “There is strong evidence that undercounts in the 2020 census are worse than in past decades,” he said. Ong noted that renters, undocumented immigrants and low-income households were also undercounted, partially due to the disruption caused by the pandemic and the Trump administration’s attempt to include a citizenship question. “The big-picture implication is it will skew the redistricting process, our undercounted neighborhoods will be underrepresented, and populations that are undercounted will be shortchanged when it comes to the allocation of federal spending,” Ong concluded.

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Turner on Starting Climate Conversations With Art

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner spoke to Smart Cities Dive about how to combine art with climate change action and awareness. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston recently published a guidebook that encourages communities and artists to develop creative approaches to shade and cooling infrastructure. “When we talk about heat, a portion of it is climate change, but a portion of it is how we choose to build and divide a city,” said Turner, who studies how the urban heat island effect makes cities without green spaces hotter. She developed the idea of using cooling reflective paint in a public art project and rallied community partners to create an enormous cool-paint mural of Zeus in South Los Angeles. Turner said the mural was designed to start a conversation about climate change. “You can show people statistics, but they feel art,” she said. “I think there’s power there.”

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Armenta on Repercussions of ICE Collaboration Programs

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Amada Armenta spoke to the Los Angeles Times about increasing pressure to reform the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which has for years been criticized for its treatment of immigrants in detention. The implementation of any changes will fall under the responsibilities of the new director, nominated by President Joe Biden. Some advocates have demanded improved conditions in detention centers as well as the scaling back of programs such as 287(g), which allows for collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement. While ICE says the local collaboration programs are meant to promote public safety, the result is that many undocumented immigrants are reluctant to report crimes to law enforcement out of fear that they will be expelled from the country. Armenta argued for doing away with the collaboration programs altogether. When immigrants are afraid to engage with law enforcement, “that’s bad for all of us,” she said.

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