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Manville Says Removing Parking Mandate Will Bolster State’s Affordable Housing Stock

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, writes about California’s recent reduction of parking requirements at many housing developments in the November newsletter about real estate and economic issues distributed by UCLA Anderson Forecast and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. He says that Assembly Bill 2097 is an important step in addressing how parking mandates undermine housing affordability and encourage people to drive more, while discouraging them from walking or using public transit. AB 2097 is unlikely to result in a wave of new housing being built without parking. Instead, eliminating mandatory parking requirements will allow for housing to be built on some parcels where it would have previously been infeasible. “Losing a few housing units here and there, or even the occasional parcel, may not seem like a big deal,” Manville writes. “Multiplied over many years and many thousands of parcels, however, these small losses add up.”

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UCLA Luskin Social Welfare Alumnae Elevated to Public Office

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Caroline Menjivar and Nikki Perez, two members of UCLA Luskin’s Master of Social Welfare Class of 2018, have turned their background in social work into successful bids for public office. Menjivar has been elected to the California State Senate, and Perez will join the Burbank City Council, results from the Nov. 8 election confirmed. The two alumnae will bring a broad range of perspectives into the halls of government. Menjivar, a Marine Corps veteran and the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, will be the first out LGBTQ legislator to represent the San Fernando Valley. She told CalMatters that she plans to use her personal experiences and background as a social worker to advocate for mental health services and housing solutions. While at UCLA Luskin, Menjivar worked in the office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as a David Bohnett Fellow. Perez was the top vote-getter in the Burbank council race. She told the Burbank Leader, “As the first Indigenous and openly LGBTQ woman elected to council, it’s a tremendous honor to bring a unique perspective and representation to our city government.” A lifelong Burbank resident and graduate of its public schools, Perez said she will be a voice for the city’s underrepresented populations, including renters, working-class families, union members and the Latino community. Since graduating from UCLA Luskin, Perez has worked as a nonprofit program manager and staff member with the California Legislature.

 

Diaz on Fair Representation and Latino Voting Power

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Sonja Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute, spoke to media outlets following the midterm elections, weighing in on issues including fair representation and the impact of the Latino vote at the local, state and national level. A Los Angeles Times article on the reelection of Sen. Alex Padilla emphasized the significance of a Southern Californian in the powerful position after three decades of Bay Area Democrats holding the state’s Senate seats. Diaz noted that Padilla brings greater urgency to issues facing urban communities of color, including immigration and the environment. She was also cited in an L.A. Times column on Latinos’ party preferences and an editorial calling for an increase in the size of the Los Angeles City Council. On KCRW’s “Press Play,” Diaz described the Latino electorate’s alliance with other diverse voting blocs, harkening back to the broad coalition that propelled Barack Obama into the presidency.

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Pierce on Misconceptions About Prop. 30

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Gregory Pierce, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke to Vice about Proposition 30, the measure to fight climate change by taxing the rich, which was defeated at the polls. The California initiative, which would have added a 1.75% tax to income over $2 million to fund the transition to electric vehicles and fight wildfires, was opposed by a coalition that called Prop. 30 a scheme by the ride-hailing company Lyft to secure a huge taxpayer subsidy. Pierce said that characterization was inaccurate. “There’s nothing about Lyft drivers or Lyft, or anything in particular benefiting them except that Lyft drivers have vehicles like other folks who might benefit from a lot more money for EVs,” he said. Pierce noted, however, that the measure’s lack of clarity on how revenues would be spent was a legitimate concern. The need to reduce emissions is urgent, but money spent on the wrong programs would not help the crisis.

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UCLA Research Guides California Reparations Task Force

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Professor Michael Stoll and a team of UCLA Luskin graduate students appeared before the California Reparations Task Force to present research that will guide deliberations on how to compensate Black residents for generations of discrimination arising from the country’s legacy of slavery. At the Sept. 23 public meeting at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, the researchers shared their analysis of personal testimonies, interviews and survey responses collected from January through August of this year — all aimed at gathering perspectives about the Black experience from individuals across the state. The team found widespread support for financial reparations to Black Californians who can establish lineage to enslaved ancestors, as well as for programs that provide non-cash support, such as small business assistance, tax exemptions and land grants. Working under the task force’s expedited timeline, the team transcribed, codified and analyzed an enormous amount of data in less than four weeks, a fraction of the time a project of this magnitude would typically require. The task force, made of up state legislators and other distinguished leaders, will utilize the findings as they develop recommendations regarding how to atone for past harms suffered by Black Californians. Stoll, a professor of public policy and urban planning, is director of the Black Policy Project housed at the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. The graduate student researchers working on the project include Jendalyn Coulter, who is pursuing a joint MSW/MPP degree; Chinyere Nwonye, a second-year MPP student; and Elliot Woods, MPP student and chair of the Luskin Black Caucus.

 

Celebrating an End to a ‘Slow-Moving Disaster’

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Los Angeles Times about California’s new law barring local governments from mandating parking spaces as part of most development near transit stops. “This is one of the biggest land-use reforms in the country,” Manville said after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2097 into law. “Parking requirements have been an absolutely slow-moving disaster,” Manville said. “We are turning the ship around.” News outlets including StreetsBlog, Bloomberg CityLab and Mother Jones credited research by Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, with laying the groundwork for AB 2097. Shoup’s decades of scholarship pointed out the faulty and arbitrary reasoning behind parking requirements, whose unintended consequences have included raising the cost of of housing and commercial development, creating incentives to drive instead of using transit, and increasing emissions.

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Read the StreetsBlog article

 

Electric Cars Only Part of the Solution, Millard-Ball Says

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LAist spoke with Urban Planning Professor Adam Millard-Ball for a report on the history and future of the electric car. California’s plan to end the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 is expected to spur electric vehicle sales across the nation. “We’re not going to be able to resolve the climate crisis without electric vehicles,” Millard-Ball said. “And that’s mainly because transportation is such a big part of the climate problem.” The move toward emission-free cars is part of progression of automotive technology dating to the Clean Air Act of 1970, but it’s only part of the solution, Millard-Ball said. In addition to making individual vehicles more climate friendly, he called for “getting more people walking and biking and better buses, … a transit system that is a real competitor to the private car.”

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Shoup, Manville on Prospects of Statewide Parking Reform

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A Slate article on California legislation to prohibit minimum parking requirements in areas near public transit called on two land use experts on UCLA Luskin’s Urban Planning faculty: Donald Shoup and Michael Manville. The bill, AB 2097, which awaits the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom, would preempt local parking rules statewide and promises to bring down the cost of new construction. “The way you really get affordable housing is to get rid of parking requirements,” Shoup said. “That reduces the price of housing for everybody, not just low-income residents.” Experts cautioned against overnight changes if the bill becomes law. “There’s very particular circumstances in California that allow you to pull the trigger on a building with no parking, and some of those places are already free from parking rules, like San Francisco,” Manville said. Manville also co-authored a San Francisco Chronicle commentary about lessons Los Angeles can learn from San Francisco’s parking reforms.

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Read the Chronicle commentary

 

Shoup on Long Road to Parking Reform

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A Governing article on California’s move away from policies that promote car-oriented communities cited Donald Shoup, the distinguished research professor of urban planning who has spent his career studying the social, economic and environmental impact of parking policies. Shoup, author of the seminal 2005 book “The High Cost of Free Parking,” has long argued that rules mandating excess parking in new development projects add to the overlapping crises of housing affordability, urban sprawl and climate change. Influenced by Shoup’s work, cities from Buffalo to Minneapolis to San Diego have begun reducing or eliminating some of their minimum parking requirements. A new bill in California, which awaits the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom, would be a substantial acceleration of that trend — and a remarkable capstone to Shoup’s academic career, the article noted. “It’s only been 50 years,” Shoup said. “It makes me feel grateful for longevity.”

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