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Affordable Housing Aspirations and Hurdles

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UCLA Luskin’s Michael Lens spoke to CalMatters about Vice President Kamala Harris’ pledge to build 3 million affordable homes in her first term if she is elected president — and how a similar campaign promise made by California Gov. Gavin Newsom has fared. Harris’ plan includes tax incentives, an “innovation fund” to finance construction, repurposing federal land for housing, streamlining the permitting process — “all of the stuff we talk about at dorky academic conferences,” said Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy. But as Newsom found, transforming the housing market from the top is difficult, thanks to pricey land, high construction costs, onerous regulations and community resistance. California officials are pushing to clear regulatory hurdles, with modest impact so far but the promise of a faster pace of home construction in the future. “That’s a precursor to making a lot of these things work,” Lens said. “We have to make housing more allowable in more places.”

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Doctorates in the House Four UCLA Luskin PhD candidates use equity as a guide in their research on incarceration, transit, foster care and urban spaces

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By Mary Braswell

In 1970, UCLA began sending PhDs in social welfare and urban planning into the world to serve as catalysts for change for a society in turmoil. Today, scholars are still drawn to UCLA Luskin as a place where research is turned into action.

“We’re known for our focus on social justice and equity,” said Professor Evelyn Blumenberg, who received her urban planning PhD from UCLA in 1995 and now chairs the doctoral program.

“Being in L.A. is a draw as well. There are so many opportunities for fieldwork and data collection here in Los Angeles.”

Not only is UCLA a top research university, it prizes collaboration across disciplines — a rich learning environment for PhD students, said Professor Todd Franke, chair of the doctoral program at UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

Both Blumenberg and Franke stressed the importance of “mentor matching” — pairing doctoral students with diverse and highly collaborative faculty members who will stretch their capacity to think critically and systematically to solve real problems in their community.

“The quality of the scholars here, and the support for interdisciplinary work among faculty and students, is exceptionally strong at UCLA,” Franke said.

Here’s a look at four current doctoral students, what led them to UCLA Luskin, the research they have spearheaded and how their work may foster transformative change.

Taylor Reed
PhD candidate, Social Welfare

Taylor Reed remembers when her childhood career goals came into sharper focus.

At age 11, she decided she’d become a medical doctor after seeing a commercial for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. “It shocked me because I didn’t know that kids got cancer. And I thought, ‘That is so sad. I need to dedicate my life to helping them,’” she recalled.

“It wasn’t until I got older when I started to realize that, yes, kids die from cancer, but Black kids in particular are more subjected to things like community gun violence and incarceration,” she said. “That is our pandemic. That is our disease. That is what we are dying from.”

Reed’s desire to change that fate led her to UCLA Luskin Social Welfare, where she is one of a select few to be accepted into a fast-tracked MSW/PhD program. “I have been intentional,” she said, “because this work is urgent.”

Reed’s area of study lies at the intersection of race, housing and incarceration — in particular the policies that keep young Black adults from successfully reentering society after serving time.

“The first thing that you think of when you leave prison or jail is, ‘Where am I going to sleep?’

“You’re not necessarily thinking of a job. You’re not thinking of mental health. You’re thinking about where you’re going to sleep,” she said.

Policies in place around the country make it difficult for people with past convictions to find a stable place to live, but fair chance housing ordinances are now on the rise, with the aim of dismantling those barriers.

Reed researches how these ordinances are being structured and enforced, who stands to benefit the most, and how to educate and empower housing applicants who face discrimination.

Along her academic journey, Reed says she has been buoyed by parents who met in law school and always made education a priority, by the work ethic of her Jamaican ancestors, by a boyfriend who acts as a sounding board for her work, and by her incredibly diverse and supportive cohort of fellow scholars.

Reed has made the most of UCLA’s opportunities, conducting research for the Initiative to Study Hate and the BRITE Center for Science, Research and Policy. She also joined the Hip Hop Scholars Working Group, which bridges her interests in research and music.

Her first opportunity to work closely with top UCLA faculty came in 2016 as a New York University undergraduate with plans to spend the summer in Los Angeles. Reed sent a cold email to UCLA’s Vickie Mays, a noted professor of psychology and public health, asking if she could use some research help. Mays said yes and Reed joined a project centering on incarceration and the Black community, the seeds of her current scholarship.

“That has been something I’ve kept close to my heart,” she said. “I do this scholarship for people who are impacted by incarceration and particularly the Black community, which has struggled since we were brought to this country to make things easier for the next generation to come.”

outdoor photo of person wearing purple t-shirt

Fariba Siddiq

Fariba Siddiq
PhD candidate, Urban Planning

From Bangladesh to Utah to Southern California, Fariba Siddiq has studied the vastly different ways that people move from place to place.

She grew up in Dhaka, one of the densest cities on the planet, where only a fraction of the population owns private cars, and witnessed the perils, particularly for women, of crowded buses and trains.

As a master’s student at the University of Utah, she experienced Salt Lake City’s enviable public transit network before moving west to car-centric Los Angeles to join the urban planning PhD program at UCLA Luskin.

Along the way, Siddiq has made it her mission to identify planning choices and policy decisions that could ease the hardships endured by travelers with limited resources.

“One of the reasons I came to UCLA is its focus on transportation equity, on how to make things more equitable and just, and what that means in the international context,” she said. “I’ve seen systems that are falling apart, and I want to help make things right.”

Much of Siddiq’s work in the doctoral program and as a graduate student researcher with the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies has focused on gender and mobility.

Siddiq won a scholarship to study how women in Dhaka and Los Angeles navigate ride-hailing amid concerns about safety and security. She worked with the World Bank to help develop a tool that could inform gender-conscious transportation policies across the globe.

Her dissertation assesses COVID-19’s long-term impact on travel patterns. How should the changing nature of work — more opportunities for flextime, hybrid schedules and the like — be factored into future transportation decisions and investments?

Transit officials and regional planning agencies rely on this type of evidence-based forecasting.

“None of it would have been possible without the support of my professors,” both personally and professionally, Siddiq said. “They have inspired me and encouraged me.”

woman poses in art gallery as others in background view photos on the walls

Kate Watson

Kate Watson
PhD candidate, Social Welfare

The images lining the art gallery at UCLA’s Kerckhoff Hall told a deeply personal story.

Taken by young people who had spent time in foster care, the photographs captured moments in time intended to offer a glimpse into the artists’ experiences in the system.

On a rainy Monday evening in January, a large crowd lingered over images of street art, family portraits, pill bottles, a gray cat — all part of the “Fostering Photovoice” exhibit spearheaded by Social Welfare PhD candidate Kate Watson.

“Photography is a very powerful medium,” Watson said. “I knew of photovoice as a research method, and over time the idea evolved of working with foster youth to capture their experiences and give them a voice in a creative way.”

The project tapped into many of Watson’s strengths and interests. From a young age, she has volunteered as a Big Sister and with other organizations helping youth. While working as a manager of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, she became certified as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate, providing one-on-one guidance for children in foster care.

“It’s a volunteer position, but it gave me a clear understanding of how that system worked and what the pain points were,” she said. “A lot of information is kept from different people, from birth parents, foster parents, the schools.

“Foster care and foster youth are really where my heart is, so I was looking at that and asking, ‘How can I really make an impact on this system?’”

That question led Watson to UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

“I wanted to go to the best program I could, one that didn’t just focus on clinical work but also included macro perspectives and research methods,” said Watson, who also earned her MSW at UCLA.

Her overarching goal is to help any organization — schools, courts and government agencies, among others — become more supportive and caring, and to reduce the chance they will retraumatize people who need their help.

To that end, Watson created a trauma-informed climate survey that organizations can use to make healthy changes. It’s centered on a trusting and transparent ethos in the workplace, at every level, she said.

“In order to create a safe environment, both physically and psychologically, you need to be able to see people in their entirety and for the strengths they bring to the environment and not just the deficits.”

young man wearing glasses speaks into a microphone he holds in his right hand

Gus Wendel

Gus Wendel
PhD candidate, Urban Planning

Understanding the complexities of urban space requires a spirit of openness and an eye for aesthetics.

That’s the creative ethos that drives the research goals of Gus Wendel, candidate for the PhD in urban planning.

For Wendel, this means leaving the library, lab or studio and venturing out into public spaces, viewing the city with a fresh eye and connecting with its people.

UCLA offers ample opportunities to do just that. As he earned his MURP in 2017, Wendel became involved with the Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA’s cityLAB and now runs the program. Since then, he’s helped establish an emerging global network of urban humanists, all eager to share experimental ideas for making public spaces more livable.

And Wendel is one of the UCLA doctoral students behind the (Un)Common Public Space Group, which brings researchers, practitioners and community members together to advance spatial justice goals and simply share and appreciate the L.A. environment. At one event, a celebration of the new Golden Age Park in the Westlake neighborhood, Wendel welcomed the crowd, then took his spot playing cello with the Heart of Los Angeles Intergenerational Orchestra.

“Taking a creative, place-based approach through activities like festivals and performances is one way to connect research goals with community goals, and have greater impact,” he said. 

For his dissertation, Wendel is conducting interviews and scouring historical archives chronicling West Hollywood’s incorporation in 1984 to tell a larger story about urban planning’s role in the formation of sexual space in Los Angeles.

Widely seen as the “first gay city,” West Hollywood was quick to pass nondiscrimination ordinances, beautify urban spaces and prioritize economic growth, Wendel said. But he is also unearthing planning policies that reveal entrenched gender, race and class hierarchies.

“West Hollywood consolidated a dominant gay identity, one that branded itself as inclusive of all LGBTQ people,” he said. “I’m interested in planning’s role in shaping this identity, and the degree to which the process was inclusive of diverse gender and sexual minority communities.”

As he looks toward the future, Wendel plans to continue research that makes the planning profession more inclusive of diverse LGBTQ+ populations. And he hopes to spread the message that artistic approaches more commonly practiced in the humanities can transform the field of planning.

“My goal is to support the next generation of planning scholars and practitioners interested in advancing justice, and share creative methods to study and shape the city.”

The Long Road to Success After decades of persistence, parking reforms championed by Professor Donald Shoup are taking hold around the country

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By Les Dunseith

When the “parking cash-out program” became law in California, Donald Shoup had done it! Surely, this would launch a wave of legislation to reform all those nonsensical parking regulations he’d been writing about since the 1970s.

Or so it seemed in 1992.

Shoup’s idea was that any employer that offers subsidized parking for its workers should also offer employees the option of taking the cash value if they opt out of parking. Within a year of getting the attention of a state assemblyman, it was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor.

“And I thought, well, this is easy! I just have to be clear and explain what I’m doing,” Shoup recalled. “But [parking reform] has taken a very long time to really sink in.”

man in dark suit rests one arm on a huge stack of books on a folding table

Planning Commission official Chris Meyer stands with a huge stack of Don Shoup’s book “The High Cost of Free Parking” weighing down a folding table during a news conference in Minnesota that was held to launch a parking reform effort in the state. The books were distributed to all members of the Legislature.

To understand Shoup’s research on parking, it helps to have read his landmark book with the wry title: “The High Cost of Free Parking,” first published in 2005. But it’s not required. Don Shoup is adept at boiling his crusade down to four key reforms:

1. Parking cash-out.

2. Eliminate requirements that force real estate developers to accommodate a minimum number of parking spaces per construction project, a practice that Shoup viewed almost as “an established religion” in the planning profession.

3. Charge drivers for parking on city streets and in city lots, setting the price to ensure one or two open spaces on every block.

4. Make the practice of paying for parking politically popular by dedicating the revenue to additional public services. “So, if anybody puts a dollar in a parking meter, it comes right out the other side to clean the sidewalk or repair the street or plant trees,” Shoup explained.

Shoup sees previous parking practices as a flimsy house of cards. “They were assembled over decades by officials who were arbitrarily adding a parking requirement,” he said. “And it was all a pseudoscience.”

Decades later, the wave of policy change Shoup always envisioned may finally be arriving. A spry octogenarian who still comes to campus regularly almost a decade after retiring, the distinguished research professor of urban planning is seeing his ideas being implemented in city halls, statehouses and government offices far and wide:

  • Buffalo, San Francisco and San Diego are among numerous cities that have rethought parking policies.
  • Two years ago, California abolished parking minimums within a half-mile of transit. Other states are looking to do the same. And a bill introduced in Congress could take the idea nationwide.
  • Dynamically priced curb parking continues to spread at the municipal level, and the federal government has spent millions looking into the practice.
  • Several international locales have acted on Shoup’s ideas or studied their feasibility.

A central focus for Shoup is the practice of devoting immense amounts of valuable land primarily to free parking for cars. It’s all those places where cars sit, unmoving, 95% of the time. Surely, everyone can understand that having too many cars contributes to exhaust-filled, unwalkable cities plagued by traffic jams? We know about carbon emissions and how automobiles contribute to climate change, right?

Professor Michael Manville is one of Shoup’s former students and now chair of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin. He wrote an essay for the Journal of Planning Education and Research in 2022 that extols Shoup’s vision:

“Transformation requires reform, reform requires action, and actions can’t be ambiguous. Actions are clear and specific — what exactly should we do?

“Don Shoup is clear and specific: Price the curb. Abolish the parking requirements. Invest in the neighborhoods.”

stylized poster of Donald Shoup's face with text below that integrats is name with the word "hope"

Isaiah Mouw hosts The Parking Podcast, and Shoup was a guest. So, Mouw had a friend create artwork that the professor has since adopted as his signature image on social media. It shows Shoup’s face in a style made famous by artist Shepard Fairey. Mouw said, “I saw the Obama ‘Hope’ poster and thought parking reform could use a ‘Shoup’ poster.

Among Shoup’s followers are government officials and planning consultants, plus environmentally conscious cyclists and fans of public transit. Shoup’s observations can be an epiphany for many people. Some become devotees. They call themselves “Shoupistas.”

Patrick Siegman was the first.

He never took a class from Shoup. He never even took a class at UCLA. Siegman discovered Shoup’s research while an undergraduate at Stanford. And that discovery has had more influence on his life and career than anything in a class he did attend.

“Professor Shoup managed to make the apparently dry topic of parking economics and regulation not only worth studying, but compelling, fascinating and, at times, hilarious,” Siegman wrote in an essay for Streetsblog.

How did Siegman become the original Shoupista?

“I was at a beer garden here in San Francisco,” Siegman said in an interview. He had just finished an outing with friends. It was sometime in the 1990s.

“We’re hanging out and talking — a whole bunch of bicycle advocates — and I started yammering away about my thoughts, and Shoup’s research and the importance of parking reform. I’m with Dave Snyder, who was the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which has a lot of your classic San Francisco radicals. He just looked at me and said, ‘Man, you’re just a Shoupista!’” Siegman remembers it getting a big laugh. He and his friends got the reference immediately because they’d grown up during the 1980s when revolutionaries were taking on right-wing dictatorships across Latin America. In Nicaragua, the rebels were known as Sandinistas.

What’s it like being the first Shoupista?

“Well, it’s an honor,” Siegman said. “It also surprised and delighted me how that term took off. It has taken on a life of its own.”

Siegman was the first of many. Kevin Holliday was enlightened by Shoup’s ideas while pursuing the MA UP degree he earned at UCLA in 2014. Four years later, he formed a Facebook group, The Shoupistas, for “the followers of Professor Donald Shoup.” It now has more than 8,000 members.

“Today, there is still a lot of traffic on that group,” Holliday said. “People are obviously interested in it.”

Holliday spent about 18 years working as a planning professional, then more recently started his own company, Bright Triangle, which provides process improvement consulting services.

He was involved in implementing pricing for parking based on demand in San Francisco, which saw roughly half of its meter prices decline.

People who wind up focused on parking reform arrive unexpectedly, he said. “No one grows up thinking they’re going to work in parking.”

Shoup himself came to parking reform by surprise, and that’s part of his legacy, Holliday said. Shoup’s dogged determination is also a marvel to Holliday: “How many other people in this world can get folks to read an 800-page book?”

map of North American shows dozens of red dots to represent cities where parking reforms have been instituted

The Parking Reform Network tracks the progress of policy changes on an interactive map. For five years, the network has been educating the public about Shoup’s work, and President Tony Jordan says their database is increasingly a go-to resource for people wanting to make parking changes a reality.

So far, the parking reforms have taken hold mostly in left-leaning places. But Shoup and others don’t see the issue as being conservative or progressive. Both the Obama and Trump administrations came out in opposition to minimum parking requirements.

“Getting rid of parking requirements appeals to the right because it gets the government out of business,” Shoup said. Not having to provide a fixed amount of parking makes life easier for housing developers, reducing their costs.

“So, you can imagine why Trump … he’s a developer. He knows what parking requirements demand. He thinks he should be in charge of how many parking spaces he provides!” Shoup said with a chuckle.

“Getting rid of parking requirements appeals to the left because it reduces traffic congestion, air pollution and carbon emissions. It can be part of the war on cars,” he said.

Shoup himself is purposefully nonpolitical. “I recommend parking reforms that will benefit almost everyone regardless of their politics.”

One reason that Shoup’s ideas have taken hold and spread is that his writing is very clear. Manville and Holliday are among the many students and colleagues who’ve assisted him over the years and continue to do so as co-writers and editors. They see Shoup’s approach as different from most professors.

“There’s a model of academia that says you must publish lots of articles, and every few years the dean counts up those articles and you get a raise,” Manville said. “And so you sort of do the minimum to get it published, and then you move on to something else.

“He always wrote, and still does write, articles with a mindset of not just getting them published in academic journals, but also to be available to anyone who cares to read them,” said Manville, noting that Shoup strives to write in a manner that will appeal to students.

“He always had a very good understanding that one of the most powerful things you could do from a policy perspective is have a publication end up on someone’s syllabus,” Manville explained. “Because then the future planners of the world have no choice but to read it.”

man with white beard holds hands about a foot apart

Donald Shoup holds his hands close together to show the actual size of the statue in a photo enlargement that fills one wall of his office. Photo by Les Dunseith

Shoup embraces every means that will spread the word. He’s active on social media. Interviews with him can be found on YouTube and TikTok. And as an in-person marketer of parking reform, he is relentless.

“Anywhere he goes, he’s going to grab somebody and start talking about parking,” Manville said. He recounts a story of Shoup discovering on a flight to Sacramento that a member of the Assembly was a few rows ahead.

“And he connived to switch seats with the person next to that guy, and then just harangued the poor man about parking on the whole flight,” Manville said. “That’s Shoup in a nutshell.”

Shoup tends to downplay his accomplishments, citing luck and longevity. He notes that he first used the word “parking” in an academic article in 1970 and began focusing on the reforms in earnest in 1978.

“THAT is perseverance,” he said.

Shoup also credits the support he received at UCLA and the freedom he felt within Urban Planning to keep saying what he believed even when others dismissed it.

Most people would have tired of the crusade long before 40-plus years. Not Donald Shoup.

“He just keeps going and going and going,” Holliday said. “And I think that’s a testament to not only how deeply he believes these things, but how much he wants to convince someone else to believe them.”

 

RV Life as an Affordable Housing Option

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Urban Planning Professor Adam Millard-Ball spoke to Florida public media outlet WUFT about the growing number of people who live in RVs by choice or necessity. Housing research into the estimated 1 million Americans who live full-time in RVs has focused more on people pursuing a highly mobile and leisurely “Van Life” than on stationary, low-income residents, the article noted. “Some people like the nomadic existence, but for many people it’s the lesser of two evils,” Millard-Ball said. “It’s better than couch surfing or being in a tent.” Large urban centers can support this option by converting excess space on public roads and in parking lots into areas with access to basic utilities such as water hookups and garbage collection, where residents of campers and RVs can live legally. The average residential street is more than twice as wide as the functional minimum of 16 feet, Millard-Ball’s research shows, and some of that extra space could be used to accommodate housing.

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Jumpstarting California’s Plan to Build Affordable Housing

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UCLA Luskin’s Paavo Monkkonen and Aaron Barrall co-authored an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about what California can do to make real progress on its ambitious goal to increase the supply of affordable housing. Despite a raft of well-intentioned laws, executive actions and lawsuits, progress thus far has proved more symbolic than substantial, and certainly “insufficient to improve affordability and stem population losses driven by the high cost of living,” wrote Monkkonen, a professor of urban planning and public policy, and Barrall, a housing data analyst at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. The authors list specific land-use regulations and policies that must be toughened if the state is to meet its goals — including a crackdown on wealthy or recalcitrant enclaves that have stalled affordable housing developments. “While these cities dawdle, the region’s residents suffer the effects of the housing shortage: high rents, overcrowding, eviction and homelessness.”

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Mukhija on Putting L.A.’s ‘Graffiti Towers’ to Good Use

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Scripps News spoke to Urban Planning Professor Vinit Mukhija about the partially built high-rise buildings in downtown Los Angeles that were covered by floor after floor of graffiti earlier this year. The tagged buildings, part of a planned luxury complex abandoned years ago after funding dried up, stoked a national debate over development priorities, including how governments can put abandoned or vacant properties to good use. “The problem does seem to exist that there are too many hurdles for the local government to come in, acquire this project — not leave it empty, stalled for five years — and build something more socially beneficial out of it,” Mukhija said. “This should be an opportunity to make it into the kind of housing we want more than luxury housing. If there’s any housing we want more than luxury housing, it is affordable, non-market-rate housing.” 

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Prospects for Progress on Affordable Housing Solutions

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UCLA Luskin’s Michael Lens spoke to the podcast Health Affairs This Week about the roots of zoning policies that have kept neighborhoods segregated by race and income, and the prospects for progress in addressing the nation’s affordable housing crisis. Efforts to change zoning laws to accommodate more housing units have historically been met with strong resistance, but Lens said the conversation has shifted just in the last decade. Now, there is widespread acknowledgment that “we need to do something somewhere” to provide residents with safe and affordable shelter. “The problem is that we have let this go on for so long, this lack of housing production and increased housing costs for people from the poor to middle class,” he said. But Lens pointed to states and cities that are upending zoning restrictions that have long kept a lid on housing development, and concluded, “This is a really good time for hope.”

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Debate Over the Best Path to Affordable Housing

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A CityWatch article about the competing academic and economic theories at play in California’s affordable housing debate put a spotlight on comments made by UCLA Luskin’s Michael Storper during a meeting with the California Alliance of Local Electeds. Housing costs reflect a mix of economic, market and cultural factors, so a complex suite of policies is needed to address interpersonal inequality in our cities, says Storper, a distinguished professor of urban planning. He takes issue with the notion that simply constructing more units will lead to lasting solutions to California’s affordable housing crisis. “I think this is one of the toughest challenges we’re facing,” he said. “In big, prosperous metropolitan areas, what would it take to build housing for the big middle or lower end of the income distribution, quality housing that people want to live in?”

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Monkkonen on L.A.’s Challenge to Meet Affordable Housing Goals

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Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA Luskin, spoke to LAist about the status of Mayor Karen Bass’ pledge to fast-track affordable housing construction in Los Angeles. Development projects in single-family neighborhoods are now ineligible for the accelerated permitting due to a rules change in June. About three-quarters of L.A.’s residential land is zoned for single-family homes, and proposing large apartment developments in those areas can lead to outcries from homeowners opposed to neighborhood change. Monkkonen said leaving suburban areas untouched brings its own risks. Under state law, the city of Los Angeles must plan for 185,000 new low-income homes by 2029 and reverse long-standing patterns of segregation by putting many new affordable homes in wealthier areas. “Once you take them off the table, it’s really hard to live up to the fair housing mandate,” Monkkonen said.

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Storper on Tug-of-War Over Senate Bill 9

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A Planetizen article on actions taken by municipalities opposed to Senate Bill 9, the California law allowing property owners to build additional units on lots zoned for single-family housing, cited research by Michael Storper, distinguished professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin. Four Southern California cities have filed suit against the state, arguing that permitting the subdivision of single-family lots violates the California Constitution by taking away the rights of charter cities to have control over local land-use decisions. Storper issued a declaration in support of the plaintiffs that included a copy of a journal article he co-authored in 2019 that challenged the theoretical underpinnings that led to SB 9, which is intended to provide affordable housing options for Californians. “Blanket changes in zoning are unlikely to increase domestic migration or to improve affordability for lower-income households in prosperous areas,” the authors wrote. “They would, however, increase gentrification within metropolitan areas and would not appreciably decrease income inequality.”

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