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What If NIMBYs Got Paid to Become YIMBYs?

Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA Luskin, weighed in on the notion of paying people to accept the expansion of affordable housing in their neighborhoods, an idea laid out in a Boston Globe commentary. Offering financial incentives to community members could turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs and increase the housing stock, which is in desperately short supply in many parts of the country, the author argued. Public support for more construction could also lead to new zoning laws permitting denser housing in some neighborhoods. The proposal, cast as creative brainstorming for a solution to the affordable housing crisis, raises questions about the logistics of making payments as well as issues of fairness and equity. “We should continue to think about ways to more evenly and equitably distribute the benefits of urban development,” Monkonnen said.


 

Seeking Safe Spaces for People Whose Cars Are Their Homes

Madeline Brozen, deputy director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA Luskin, appeared on an episode of KQED’s Forum devoted to the growing number of people who are using their cars for shelter. Brozen shared research showing that nearly 19,000 people in Los Angeles County are living in their vehicles, many of them women living with children, or older Americans, or people who are employed yet cannot afford rent. Some municipalities have set aside areas for safe overnight parking, but Los Angeles has only 500 such parking spots. While these sites provide a short-term solution at best, Brozen called on Los Angeles to act with creativity and flexibility to allow more of its vast stretches of paved spaces to be used to keep the vehicular homeless population safe. “The more rational and compassionate approach would be to allow a space for people to really have safety and security on a path to being housed,” she said.


 

Lens on the Population Exodus in Northern California

Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about a stark population decline in California, specifically in cities in Northern California. Factors such as the Bay Area’s tech-rich economy have led to an increase in remote work, resulting in an exodus of employees to less expensive locales. “Hundreds of thousands more people would desire to live in the Bay Area — if not millions — and Southern California if we made it easier to accommodate those people through more housing units and presumably more affordable housing,” Lens said. Many remote areas saw an influx of people, but Lens noted that an increase in housing is mostly needed in major cities. Urban centers can grow more efficiently, he said, adding that moving to places with lower population densities could also lead to longer commutes.


 

Monkkonen on How Tech Companies May Cause Gentrification in Culver City

Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about Culver City residents who are fighting back against gentrification. As tech giants and streaming studios including Apple, Amazon, HBO and TikTok enter the city, neighborhood tensions flare as locals worry that they may be pushed out. “You have this kind of collective action problem where every small neighborhood or every municipality wants the jobs but not the new housing,” Monkkonen said. “So that pushes people out [with] farther commutes or gentrifying formerly lower-income neighborhoods nearby.” Culver City officials said they are attempting to address the housing issue by zoning for over 3,000 additional housing units by 2029 and enacting rent control ordinances like one from 2020 that caps annual rent increases to 5% for certain residential buildings.


 

Manville on Bay Area’s Housing Dilemma

Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to Courthouse News about the current housing crisis in the Bay Area. Affordable housing for middle- and low-income families is scarce, especially in the East Bay, in part because investors are outbidding traditional homeowners to buy multiple single-family homes. In addition, cities are simply are not building enough housing to meet demand. Manville commented on the city of Berkeley’s report on housing, saying, “Institutional investors like to buy in the Bay Area because the Bay Area doesn’t build housing. These companies feed off scarcity.” He added, “Berkeley needs more housing. The main way to keep it affordable is to build new housing so rich people don’t buy it up.”


 

Roy on Lessons From the Echo Park Lake Eviction

Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D), co-authored a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed on lessons from the clearing of Los Angeles’ Echo Park Lake encampment a year ago. “The ruse of forcing people off the streets and into so-called housing is becoming a blueprint for displacement in California cities,” the authors wrote, cautioning San Francisco’s leaders to learn from grave mistakes made in Los Angeles. The op-ed is part of widespread media coverage of a recent II&D report on the aftermath of the mass eviction at Echo Park Lake. On Spectrum News’ “Inside the Issues,” Roy spoke about how to work toward solutions to L.A.’s crisis of homelessness. “We can move forward by recognizing that the criminalization of poverty does not help,” she said, adding that building permanent housing and keeping people in their homes after pandemic-era renter protections expire are also crucial.

Vestal on History of L.A.’s Black Homelessness Crisis

Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Mark Vestal spoke to LAist about the role of racial inequity in the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Vestal co-authored the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy report “Making of a Crisis: The History of Homelessness in L.A.,” which explored the history of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, starting with the Great Depression and leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Black unhoused people are one of the largest groups facing homelessness in Los Angeles, and Vestal pointed out that the long history of racist housing policies has led to a discrepancy in homeownership among Black residents. “Black folks were segregated in inner cities and subject to predatory mortgage markets and home-buying schemes that continued to suck Black dollars and wealth from bank accounts for decades,” Vestal explained. Lack of federal support and mental health crises have exacerbated the issue of homelessness, he said.


Monkkonen on a Model for Affordable Housing

The Los Angeles Times spoke to Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, about the tenancy-in-common homeownership model, in which residents own a share of an overall lot and have exclusive rights to live in their unit. Some Los Angeles developers are using this model to replace single-family homes with new townhomes, adding to the overall stock of housing. Critics are concerned that investors may displace tenants in cheaper rentals to convert them into tenancy-in-common units. UCLA’s Monkkonen said it’s important to consider that demolished houses are sometimes renovated into high-end homes, which do not ease the affordable housing crunch. Tenancy-in-common units are typically cheaper than many housing options and could provide a quicker way to expand affordability than waiting for more supply to trickle down, he said.


 

Ling on Struggle to Enact Tenant Protections

A CalMatters article on the California Legislature’s failure to pass tenant protection bills included comments from Joan Ling, urban planning lecturer and policy analyst. The latest bill, AB 854, would have required landlords to keep units for at least five years before using a state law to evict renters. The bill was backed by a broad coalition but opposed by business and real estate interests, and it died in committee before reaching a floor vote in the Democratic-supermajority Assembly. Opponents argued that AB 854 would have devastated mom-and-pop landlords and stalled the demolition of older buildings to make way for additional housing units, which are sorely needed. “I support homeownership, but the question is: ‘How are you getting there?’” Ling said. “Are you going to get there by dislocating renter families that most likely are going to have to move out of the area where they are living? There’s a big public policy question here.”


 

Activist-in-Residence on Goals at UCLA

Theo Henderson, host of the podcast “We the Unhoused,” spoke to KCRW’s “Greater L.A.” about his goals as the newly named UCLA Activist-in-Residence. Hosted by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Henderson hopes to help educate “our future generation of leaders to make the right calls on dealing with the unhoused crisis.” Henderson offers a personal perspective on policies aimed at addressing Los Angeles’ growing housing crisis. “Too often, the people who are leading the conversation have little to no experience in being unhoused,” he said. “They have repeated the same disastrous solutions and the same harmful narratives.” Henderson’s podcast has given him a platform to reach a homeless population in search of information about how to find shelter and stay safe, as well as prominent L.A. officials who tune in regularly. “I wanted people to learn that the world is not the same for housed people as for unhoused people,” he said.