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Inequality, Not Regulation, Is Stoking America’s Housing Crisis

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A Washington Post article on the forces that drive housing prices higher cited new research by UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Michael Storper.

Some housing activists fall in the “Yes in My Back Yard” camp, arguing that building more housing — especially in dense, transit-accessible neighborhoods — will lower prices for everyone, thanks to the laws of supply and demand.

In a newly published paper, “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis,” Storper and his co-authors directly challenge the foundational assumptions of the YIMBY point of view. They call for “bold, comprehensive thinking about housing systems rather than relying on trickle-down affordability.”

The scholars recommend direct approaches such as publicly funded vouchers to help pay for housing; market protections for low-income households, including rent control and tenant protections; and housing decommodification, including cooperatives, community land trusts, and public housing.

“To put it bluntly, in America we haven’t actually been underbuilding,” Storper says. “The problem is demand is now split in a very unequal society. The supply you get is the wrong kind of supply.”

U.S. Inequality Through the Housing Lens: A Conversation with José Loya How race and policy continue to shape access to homeownership

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by Peaches Chung

Homeownership is often framed as the American dream. For José Loya, it is also one of the clearest windows into how inequality is reproduced in American society. As an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, Loya examines how race, ethnicity, and structural inequities shape who has access to opportunity — and who doesn’t.

Loya’s interest in housing was sparked as an undergraduate at Brown University during the Great Recession, when countless families faced foreclosure.

“I was trying to understand why people were going into foreclosure and potentially losing everything,” he recalls. Working with a faculty mentor who specialized in homelessness and housing instability, he encountered the question that has guided his research ever since: How do we explain, and ultimately address, racial and economic inequality in the housing market?

Loya describes himself as a social stratification scholar. The patterns he uncovers aren’t new, discrimination in mortgage lending has been proven for decades, but his methods are.

Jose Loya stands smiling in front of the Public Affairs building at UCLA.

Professor José Loya

“I’m using modern statistical tools and richer, more comprehensive datasets than previous generations of researchers had,” he explains. “The findings may not be surprising — that whites and Asians tend to be the most advantaged in the mortgage market — but the nuance is different. I can show how inequality persists today, not necessarily in the same form as 50 or 70 years ago, but still present.”

Much of his recent work examines barriers that prospective homebuyers face in the post–Great Recession era, as well as the ways Latino subgroups experience the mortgage market differently. Traditional research often treats Latinos as a homogenous category, something Loya argues conceals important differences.

“Latinos are an ethnic group, not a racial group. There is tremendous diversity,” he says. “By drilling down into subgroups, we start to see how different racialized experiences among Latinos shape their access to homeownership.”

A Wealth-Building Tool That’s Slipping Out of Reach for Many

Homeownership remains the single largest vehicle for building wealth in the United States. But Loya’s research shows that the tool is becoming increasingly out of reach for the very communities who could benefit from it most.

“In the last decade and a half, home prices have grown much faster than wages or any measure of labor success,” he says. “Middle-class and lower-income families are being squeezed out.”

Add in rising interest rates, limited housing inventory, and skyrocketing demand, and a central question emerges: If homeownership is no longer accessible, how do families achieve upward mobility?

Loya points to a paradox at the heart of U.S. housing policy. “Our banks want you to be a homeowner. The tax system incentivizes it through the mortgage interest deduction, one of the largest subsidies in the U.S. tax code. But the financial risk is growing and making it less achievable for lower and moderate-income households. Today, those subsidies are being largely utilized by higher socioeconomic households.”

According to recent data, the homeownership rate for non-Hispanic white households sits around 73–74%, while Black households own homes at roughly 45–46%, and Hispanic/Latino households at about 50–51%. “Progress has been made,” Loya says. “But the gap is nowhere near closed.”

Why Research Matters Now More Than Ever

For Loya, UCLA Luskin offers the ideal environment to confront these challenges because the school engages students in opportunities for intersectional learning, bringing together perspectives from multiple specialties to tackle social, economic, and environmental challenges.

“Society doesn’t operate in silos,” he says. “If we’re talking about access to homeownership, we’re also talking about labor market insecurity, education access, local zoning, transportation, climate change — all of it.”

“Good research doesn’t always give you an answer. It shows you how much more work is needed to get to an answer.”

At a time when federal research funding faces threats and universities nationwide are navigating political pressures, Loya is direct about why research still matters.

“Universities don’t just study the problems of today,” he says. “We’re trying to anticipate the problems 20 or 30 years from now.”

His own work, he says, is less about providing immediate fixes and more about documenting how historical patterns of inequality still shape outcomes today — and will continue to shape them in the future if left unaddressed.

Preparing Students for Real-World Challenges

When asked what he hopes his students take away from his classes, his answer is clear but hard to explain.

“Problems are complicated,” he says. “Good research doesn’t always give you an answer. It shows you how much more work is needed to get to an answer.”

Rather than rushing toward solutions, Loya encourages students to sit with uncertainty and ask better questions about the systems shaping outcomes. “In my classes, it’s not necessarily about finding the solution,” he adds. “It’s really about understanding the problem.”

For Loya, that’s often where the work begins — with examining the forces that are often hidden in plain sight — and equipping students with the tools to question them.

Rethinking Rent Control in California

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Luskin’s Michael Manville discussed rent conrol on the California Insider Show, examining its effects on tenants and landlords across California. While rent control can help limit year-to-year increases, housing costs have continued to outpace inflation, underscoring the need for alternative solutions to affordability in Los Angeles.

“The more you turn the clamps with the rent control law, the more you give people incentives to be the worst version of themselves,” Manville says. While rent control laws can provide temporary aid for certain renters, housing costs have not kept up with inflation in California.

“Rent control can be a reliable way to prevent big rent increases from happening year to year, but it isn’t necessarily a good path to actually make housing affordable,” Manville explains.

Manville also argues that population growth is not effective to infer need for more housing. He suggests approaching housing the same way businesses look at prices to assess demand.

UCLA Housing Voice Podcast Celebrates 100 Episodes Hosted by Shane Phillips, the podcast continues to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world housing solutions.

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The UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, produced by the Randall Lewis Housing Initiative at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, will release its 100th episode on October 22. The podcast, a biweekly program managed by Shane Phillips and joined by UCLA Luskin professors Michael Lens, Paavo Monkkonen, and Mike Manville as occasional co-hosts, aims to translate emerging housing research into practical insights for practitioners, policymakers, and the broader public.

Each episode features conversations with housing researchers on topics such as affordability, displacement, land-use policy, and tenant protections. The Randall Lewis Housing Initiative supports this work by producing research and public programming to shape public discourse. 

As a recent review from HousingForward Virginia put it, “What makes this podcast particularly valuable is how Phillips and his co-hosts translate academic jargon into practical insights. They don’t just present findings—they dig into what the research means for practitioners, policymakers, and communities.” 

Since its debut, the podcast has explored a wide range of topics, from California’s Senate Bill 9 duplex law and inclusionary zoning policies to comparative housing laws in countries such as Japan and New Zealand. Across its first 99 episodes, the series has traced the evolving global conversation on housing equity and policy innovation. 

The 100th episode will be available October 22 on all major podcast platforms. 

UCLA’s Master of Real Estate Development Program to Receive $2.5 Million Gift The pledge from Standard Communities’ Jeffrey Jaeger and Scott Alter will support innovative approaches to affordable housing

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By Kate Shirley

The new Master of Real Estate Development Program (MRED) at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs has received a $2.5 million commitment to support its affordable housing program. The pledge comes from Jeffrey Jaeger and Scott Alter, co-founders and principals of Standard Communities, a Los Angeles–based real estate company dedicated to building and preserving affordable and workforce housing nationwide. In recognition of the gift, the program will be known as the UCLA Jaeger Alter Standard Communities (JASC) Affordable Housing Program. Participating students would earn a Certificate in Affordable Housing.

Launched in fall 2025, the UCLA MRED is a one-year graduate program designed in collaboration with industry leaders. Students gain hands-on experience through case studies, site visits and competitions, preparing them to address pressing housing, environmental and equity challenges. The JASC Affordable Housing Program will ensure UCLA MRED graduates enter the real estate field with the skills, networks and vision to create lasting social impact.

headshots of two men in dark suits

Scott Alter, left, and Jeffrey Jaeger

“This enduring gift enables us to develop new coursework focused on innovative approaches to building affordable housing — drawing on emerging capital market solutions that can scale production far beyond what traditional public subsidies can support,” said Greg Morrow, executive director of the UCLA MRED program. “Through this effort, UCLA MRED is helping to pioneer new ways of addressing the affordable housing crisis.”

Standard Communities has built a reputation as a national leader, delivering innovative, high-impact housing solutions that expand access to safe, dignified and affordable homes. By leveraging creative financial structuring and public-private partnerships, Standard Communities preserves and develops communities that uplift residents, strengthen neighborhoods and help address the country’s urgent affordability crisis.

As part of the UCLA MRED focus on industry partnerships and collaboration, Jaeger and Alter plan to provide guest lectures, mentorships and internships with the goal of strengthening the pipeline of talent committed to addressing housing affordability.

“We’ve seen firsthand how access to safe, stable, dignified, affordable housing can transform lives,” said Alter. “This gift is an investment in the leaders who will emerge from the UCLA MRED program and will carry that mission forward — building stronger, more resilient communities for generations to come.”

Standard Communities was founded during the 2008 housing crisis, and this gift aligns with the company’s mission, which reflects a belief that affordable housing is not only central to thriving communities but also a meaningful and rewarding career path for young professionals.

“What makes the affordable housing industry so powerful is that it allows us to have a profound impact in our communities and in the world at large, while offering meaningful and financially rewarding careers,” said Jaeger. “By supporting the program, we hope to expand the pipeline of talented professionals who will bring fresh ideas, energy and commitment to this space, ultimately helping to deliver housing solutions that are sustainable, equitable and capable of transforming lives.”

The JASC program underscores UCLA MRED’s dedication to offering specialized skills through several certificate programs, including sustainable development, property technology and asset management, as well as affordable housing.

“Affordable housing is among the most urgent needs in our region and beyond,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, interim dean of UCLA Luskin. “This gift enables us to train a new generation of real estate leaders who can design, develop and manage housing that is both affordable and sustainable. We are deeply grateful to Jeffrey Jaeger and Scott Alter for their foresight and generosity.”

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.”

Read the story

 

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.”

Read the op-ed

 

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