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It’s Time to End Parking Requirements Statewide, Manville Argues

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville wrote a Streetsblog California op-ed arguing for a statewide ban on minimum parking requirements in areas near public transit. Most California cities currently mandate that newly constructed buildings include a certain amount of parking. Manville argued that these rules get in the way of meeting the state’s housing, transportation and climate goals by reinforcing our driving culture and making it harder and more expensive to build housing. He called for passage of AB 2097, which would lift minimum parking mandates in areas near public transit all across the state. Ending these requirements would not ban parking but would simply mean that the government cannot dictate the quantity and location of parking spaces in certain areas. “California has some of the most valuable land on earth, but parking requirements force us, despite a dire housing shortage, to squander that land on the low-value use of storing empty cars,” Manville wrote. 

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Manville on Lag in Building Affordable Housing

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to Courthouse News about the lag in building affordable housing in California cities despite the availability of hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding. An expensive and time-consuming process requires cities to meet several criteria in a stiff competition for state and federal funding. Many cities must make strategic policy changes if they really want to tackle their housing crises, Manville said. “If housing prices are high and no one is coming to you with a proposal, you are probably sending the message that you are not accommodating to development,” he said. Another challenge is the limited land available for traditional public housing. Senate Bill 9 — which among other things allows homeowners to turn their single-family parcels into multiple units — was a good start, Manville said, but officials should also free up land to accommodate larger complexes with denser housing.

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Turner on the Urgent Work of Chief Heat Officers

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V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, co-authored a CalMatters opinion piece offering guidance to chief heat officers, the government officials tasked with coordinating a strategic response to extreme heat. Los Angeles appointed its first chief heat officer in June, and a statewide position is also under consideration. Turner and co-author David Eisenman of the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions wrote that heat waves are becoming longer and hotter and the most vulnerable people need cooling immediately. They urged policymakers to base their interventions on science, pointing to research that shows the effectiveness of urban cooling tools such as tree canopies and reflective roofs. And they urged heat officers to act with urgency to coordinate heat-action efforts across many agencies. “We cannot wait for extreme heat policies to evolve across bureaucracies over decades,” they wrote. “Chief heat officers must get many pieces moving quickly. They must convene, collaborate and cajole.”

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Pierce on Failing Water Systems in California

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Gregory Pierce, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke with Courthouse News about a new state audit that found that nearly 1 million Californians lack access to safe water. The audit classified 418 local water systems as “failing,” meaning their water supply exceeds the maximum allowable contaminant levels for safe drinking water. This could expose customers to a range of health dangers, including an increased risk of cancer as well as liver and kidney problems. Complicating efforts to improve water quality is the state’s decentralized patchwork of local agencies composed of roughly 7,400 “drinking water systems,” some private, some public. “Every state has way too many drinking water systems, compared to other utilities,” said Pierce, who leads the UCLA Human Right to Water Solutions Lab. He said the state water board has been trying to consolidate these systems to improve accountability and performance, but “it’s slow going. It takes a long time. And it’s political.”

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Manville on Airbnb Boom, Affordable Housing

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The New York Times spoke to Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville for a story about local restrictions on Airbnb and other short-term rental companies. Limits on short-term rentals, usually defined as a stay of 30 days or fewer, are often framed as a way to maintain affordable housing in California, but some local officials are revisiting these rules after demand for the rentals exploded during the pandemic. Manville noted that if communities are truly interested in affordability for renters, “there’s a solution to that: build more housing.” He added, “If you believe that the available supply influences the price renters face, the surest way to address that is to build apartments. The most uncertain way is to limit short-term rentals.”

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Terriquez on Mobilizing Young Latino Voters

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A Sacramento Bee article on efforts to mobilize Latino voters ahead of the fall midterm elections featured California Freedom Summer, an outreach effort led by Urban Planning Professor Veronica Terriquez, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. California Freedom Summer promotes the engagement of youth to increase overall voter turnout. College students trained in the spring are spending the summer mentoring other youth leaders. In the weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 midterms, when Latino turnout could be critical in determining the outcome of several California races, they will participate in bilingual and bicultural workshops and other community events. “We know that young people get together around culture, around the arts, and they’re excited to build community,” Terriquez said.

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Guidance for an Effective, Equitable Heat Strategy in California

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While California is planning for rising temperatures with its new Extreme Heat Action Plan, the state has not historically treated extreme heat as a social equity and public health crisis — a crisis that requires targeted and robustly funded action to save lives. The UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation has released two policy briefs that can help inform upcoming policy and budget decisions leading to an equitable and effective state strategy:

  • Protecting Californians From Deadly Heat summarizes five recommendations to advance an equitable, evidence-based approach to heat mitigation and adaptation, including an “all-of-government” approach that coordinates California’s current patchwork of regulations and funding sources.
  • Protecting Californians With Heat-Resilient Homes spotlights three recommended actions to protect people at home, including policies and programs to make residential cooling strategies more accessible and expansion of community resilience centers to protect the unhoused and other vulnerable populations.

Read more about the Center for Innovation’s research into climate solutions.

 

$1.5 Million Grant Will Support Institute’s Social Justice Mission Marguerite Casey Foundation's award to Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy will bolster efforts that link academic pursuits to community organizing

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By Les Dunseith
The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has received a $1.5 million grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation to bolster the institute’s ongoing programs in support of social justice movements in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

The institute is among four recipients of grants totaling $6 million from the foundation, which are intended as a bridge between social justice scholarship and social movements.

“We believe that bold investments in ideas about how to shift power in society must be matched with bold investments in organizing efforts that help bring them to life,” foundation President and CEO Carmen Rojas said in announcing the grants.

The new funds will help the institute, launched in 2016 and based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, continue to advance social justice in cooperation with colleagues and community partners, said Ananya Roy, the institute’s founding director and a UCLA professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography.

“We have been building an interinstitutional space connecting university-based and movement-based scholars in the shared work of research and scholarship to analyze and challenge dispossession and displacement in U.S. cities and communities,” Roy said.

As part of that work, Roy and her colleagues and partners are seeking to ensure that increased government spending on public programs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic benefits those most in need rather than further entrenching race and class inequality, exploitation and oppression.

Rojas, who, like Roy, earned a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley, stressed that organizing efforts supported by the grants “should be multiracial and durable in nature to ensure that their impact reflects the character of the communities they aim to serve and leaves those communities changed, more informed, more free and better able to shape our democracy and economy.”

In applying for the grant, the institute pledged to support efforts to “advance the collective power of those who have been excluded, evicted, criminalized, banished and disappeared by liberal democracy, from the unhoused to climate refugees.”

The institute’s grant-related plans include:

  • Expanding its signature activist-in-residence program.
  • Hosting a distinguished speakers series focused social and racial justice movements, with particular attention on scholars based in the global South. To this end, the series will use both in-person and virtual formats.
  • Organizing “freedom schools” that bring together movement-based and university scholars for theoretical and methodological training related to social justice.
  • Initiating a program to unite leading university and movement-based scholars around a shared vision and narrative of housing justice that reaffirms housing as a reparative public good.
  • Creating doctoral student and faculty seed grants to support research at the intersection of ideas and organizing.

Also receiving $1.5 million grants from the foundation were the Portal Project of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago; Haymarket Books, a nonprofit publisher based in Chicago; and the Highlander Research and Education Center, a grassroots organizing and movement-building organization active in Appalachia and the American South.

Asian American Studies Center to Develop Free Curriculum on AAPI Experience

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The UCLA Asian American Studies Center has received $10 million in state funding to propel the development of a free multimedia learning experience that will help teachers around the country fill a curricular gap about the histories, struggles, cultures and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The AAPI Multimedia Textbook will feature an open-access, online platform with customizable chapters using visual, audio and archival artifacts that bring history to life. “The textbook will be the most comprehensive, scholar-informed, online history of AAPIs that redefines the American narrative and opens unlimited possibilities for building a just, multiracial and democratic future,” said Karen Umemoto, professor of urban planning and director of the Asian American Studies Center. The curriculum will support educators at a time when California and other states have made ethnic studies a graduation requirement for some public high schools and colleges. Umemoto was part of an academic advisory committee for the 2022 Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the U.S. Index that found the contributions of Asian Americans continue to be invisible to much of the American public. Fifty-eight percent of Americans were unable to name a prominent Asian American and 42% were unable to name a significant Asian American historical moment more recent than the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The AAPI Multimedia Textbook Project will help improve understanding of how AAPIs have influenced and shaped the United States, as well as foster a sense of belonging and acceptance of Asian Americans.

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MPP/MD Student Wins Health Equity Challenge

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The inaugural Health Equity Challenge, a competition among UCLA graduate students aimed at developing community-based solutions to health equity issues in California, has given one of two grand prizes to Alma Lopez, who is pursuing a dual master of public policy and doctor of medicine degree. Lopez partnered with the South Los Angeles nonprofit SHIELDS for Families to develop a proposal to provide online peer support, in English and Spanish, for mothers of color who are experiencing perinatal depression. Thanks to the Health Equity Challenge, made possible by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the MolinaCares Accord, SHIELDS will receive $50,000 to implement the pilot program. “If successful, this could serve as a model for group interventions to address maternal mental health conditions in other urban communities of color,” said Lopez, an aspiring OB-GYN. The competition invited graduate students to submit applications proposing innovative interventions to address health equity issues in the state. Ten finalists received $2,500 stipends and 10 weeks of mentorship to develop a full project proposal. The two grand prize winners, Lopez and UCLA medical school student Angelica Johnsen, were announced in June. Other finalists with connections to UCLA Luskin include Lei Chen, a social welfare doctoral student whose proposal sought to meet the needs of older immigrant adults seeking health care and social services; and Annalea Forrest MSW/MPH ’22, who proposed building an integrated health platform to bring psychotherapeutic services, trauma-informed exercise and nutritional counseling to marginalized communities Los Angeles.

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