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Manville on Urban Design Impact of Caruso Properties

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A Los Angeles Times article on the origins of developer Rick Caruso’s real estate empire included comments by Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning. Caruso, who is running to become Los Angeles’ next mayor, has deployed his political instincts, force of personality and sizable resources to sway constituencies to support high-end shopping centers and residences, the article noted. Manville spoke about malls such as the Grove and Americana at Brand, manicured outdoor centers where visitors are enticed to hang out. From the inside,“this is a very nice urban environment, but from the outside, it’s not,” he said. “They’re often surrounded by vast quantities of parking, and that is bad urban planning in many ways.” Manville asked, “What would a Mayor Rick Caruso bring to the public realm? Would he bring what he has tried to do within his properties, or would he bring what his properties suggest to the city from the outside?”

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Wray-Lake Finds Differences in Youth Development During Trump Era

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Associate Professor of Social Welfare Laura Wray-Lake spoke to PsyPost about the findings of her recent study “Youth are watching: Adolescents’ sociopolitical development in the Trump era.” Wray-Lake and her colleagues gathered survey data from 1,433 students over five years to better understand how the Trump era may have affected youth’s political development differently depending on their political orientation, as well as how historical moments shape adolescents’ development in lasting ways. “The Trump era was a volatile and highly politically polarizing time for the country,” Wray-Lake said. She found that adolescents who disapproved of Trump exhibited increases in race consciousness, deliberation skills and awareness of inequality. Adolescents who approved of Trump, in contrast, exhibited declines in awareness of inequality and race consciousness but increases in voting intentions. “These findings may be reflective of growing political divides, especially around acknowledging racism and other inequalities,” Wray-Lake said.

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Ong on Lack of Socioeconomic Mobility in South L.A.

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Director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Paul Ong was featured in a Los Angeles Times article about long-standing barriers to socioeconomic mobility in South Los Angeles. For decades, residents of South Los Angeles have faced lack of employment opportunities, housing and labor discrimination, and subpar education access. “If you look overall and compare it over a half-century, it’s rather depressing that we have not made the progress that people have hoped for,” Ong said, noting a particular lack of significant improvements in public education. Now, an influx of new commercial and residential development is threatening to displace current residents of the area. Ong’s research found that the racial disparities in income among South L.A. households are even more stark than in the rest of L.A. County. White households in South L.A. had a median income of $84,000, compared with $48,000 for Latino households and $36,000 for Black households.

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Loukaitou-Sideris on Gentrification Near Transit

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Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris was featured in a Smart Cities Dive article about the growth of transit-oriented development in cities across the country. As transit ridership has declined and housing costs increase, cities have looked to mixed-use projects near bus and rail stations. This type of transit-oriented development aims to provide more housing and retail while making it easier for people to take trips on public transportation instead of by car. However, Loukaitou-Sideris pointed out that such developments sometimes replace affordable housing with luxury units where residents don’t use transit. According to her research, neighborhoods with transit stations are more likely to be gentrified than neighborhoods without. “What we are arguing is not to stop transit-oriented development because it can bring along the positives, but finding ways through policy to protect existing residents of these neighborhoods from displacement,” Loukaitou-Sideris said. She suggested anti-displacement measures such as rent control and eviction assistance for tenants.

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Luskin Housing Scholars Weigh In on California’s Crisis

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A UCLA Newsroom article on how to tackle California’s affordable housing crisis cited several scholars from UCLA Luskin. Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen sees the housing crisis as a combination of “unaffordability, instability and inability to house” and has urged the state to “use many levers to push cities to allow more new housing.” Los Angeles Initiative Director Zev Yaroslavsky has cautioned against changes that fundamentally undermine the character of neighborhoods. He suggested increasing zoning capacity but allowing the city to decide where it should take place. “You don’t need to destroy communities,” Yaroslavsky said. Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Michael Lens highlighted the urgent need for more money for permanent supportive housing. The article was written by Jim Newton, editor of UCLA’s Blueprint magazine, who concluded that the competing arguments “reflect and shape California’s ongoing and urgent search for ways to adequately house every resident of the state.” 

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In Support Social justice, equity and diversity are among the priorities for new gifts, fellowships and other initiatives

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SHAH IS FIRST RECIPIENT OF GILLIAM CHAIR IN SOCIAL JUSTICE

When the Luskin School formally presented its fifth and newest endowed chair to Professor Manisha Shah in November, former Dean Frank Gilliam and benefactors Meyer and Renee Luskin were in attendance.

The Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Chair in Social Justice, which was created by the Luskins as part of their naming gift to the School in 2011, is now fully funded. It will provide financial support for Shah’s research throughout her five-year term as holder of the chair.

Gilliam, who is the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said he was honored to have his name attached to an award focusing on social justice.

“Meyer and Renee have ambitious goals about how to change the world and how to make it a better place,” Gilliam said. “At the core of that commitment is social justice: What, in a democracy, are you going to do about vast inequality?”

He pointed to a statement by sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois that the so-called color line is the great American dilemma. “Whether it’s African Americans or Muslims, Latin Americans or Asian Americans, it’s about integrating all people into the society and determining the rules upon which entry to society will be considered legitimate,” Gilliam said.

Dean Gary Segura credits Gilliam with codifying social justice as a unifying theme among the disparate departments that were rolled together decades ago into one school of public affairs.

“Frank is very much the dean that put the social justice stamp on the School,” Segura said. “The Luskin School we know today came into existence as a social justice-oriented entity because of his ingenuity.”

The Luskins have also endowed three other chairs benefitting professors at UCLA Luskin, Segura noted. One provides funding to research projects under his direction as dean. Another funds the research endeavors of the director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, a position held by Ananya Roy since it was founded five years ago. The third supports the director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, a position held by JR DeShazo prior to his departure in August to become a dean at the University of Texas. A search for DeShazo’s permanent replacement is underway. The fifth endowed chair at UCLA Luskin is the Marjorie Crump Chair in Social Welfare, currently held by Ron Avi Astor.

Segura said all these chairs were funded with gifts of $2 million to $3 million to provide funding in support of academic research endeavors. UCLA Luskin does not currently have any endowed chairs of another type offered at UCLA in recognition of gifts at the $5 million level. Those chairs include salary support for a recipient.

Shah is a professor of public policy who joined the UCLA Luskin faculty in 2013. Her scholarship tends to focus on issues of health equity and exploitation of disadvantaged people around the world, and she is the director of Global Lab for Research in Action at
UCLA Luskin, which she founded in 2019.

So, what is it like to have one’s name attached to an endowed chair?

“As with any sort of institutionalized thing like this, the naming of a school or a professorship or a scholarship is significant because it goes on in perpetuity,” Gilliam said, smiling broadly. “If somebody has the misfortune of asking one day who Frank Gilliam was, and they go back and discover who I was and what my connection was to the Luskin School, then that story gets told again.”

Jacqueline Waggoner, left, and Lourdes Castro Ramirez will co-chair a newly created Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee on the UCLA Luskin Board of Advisors.

FUNDING CAMPAIGN TIED TO EQUITY LAUNCHES AS BOARD WELCOMES NEW MEMBERS

The UCLA Luskin Advisory Board welcomed six new members to start the academic year: Lourdes Castro Ramirez, Andy Cohen, Brien Kelley, Travis Kiyota, Alex Rose and Wendy Wachtell. Castro Ramirez and continuing board member Jacqueline Waggoner are urban planning alumnae, and they will co-chair a newly created Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee. The committee will focus on confronting disparities, driving equity and creating greater access in the field of public affairs. To kick off this initiative, Castro Ramirez and Waggoner created a matching gift campaign to encourage others to join them to support this cause. Funds raised during the campaign will go toward the Urban Planning Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Fund. The fund seeks to diversify the field of planning, providing two kinds of support: funded internships with nonprofit community organizations that otherwise could ill afford to provide a paid internship; and student fellowships, allowing students to devote more time to learning instead of having to hold down a job or being saddled with an unsustainable debt load. For more information, contact Nicole Payton at npayton@luskin.ucla.edu.

Research grant from W.K. Kellogg Foundation will seek to broaden the understanding of issues affecting Latinos.

KELLOGG GRANT WILL SUPPORT LATINO-FOCUSED RESEARCH DATABASES

The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI) was awarded a $2.5 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support a pair of new research databases that will become available to policymakers, scholars and the public as resources for broadening understanding of issues affecting the Latino community.

“As the largest nonwhite minority group in the United States,
Latinos are integral to building a prosperous future for all Americans,” said Sonja Diaz, founding director of LPPI. “Yet Latinos face significant barriers to economic opportunity, political representation and social mobility. This funding will enable us to reliably collect data that brings Latinos and the issues that impact them out of the shadows
and to create real policy solutions that build a truly inclusive economy and democracy.”

The first of two databases, the Latino Data Hub, will contain verified data on demographics, socioeconomics and civic participation that will help decision makers promote policies that benefit Latino communities. It is intended to become a go-to resource for national, state and local data, and it will also include statistics and information on climate change and the environment, economic opportunity and social mobility, education, health and housing.

The second database, the Latino Research Redistricting Hub, will help identify how the drawing of state and federal electoral maps affects Latinos. The hub will be a resource for officials engaged in redistricting decisions with a goal of ensuring fair representation in politics and government for the nation’s diverse Latino communities.

“Before we can address inequity, we must tell the truth about our conditions, and that is what data does,” said Cicely Moore, program officer at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “We are proud to invest in creating tools that help us see our biggest challenges clearly and identify equitable solutions that enable us all to thrive.”

FIRST GROUP OF YAROSLAVSKY FELLOWSHIPS AWARDED

The inaugural group of graduate fellows to receive support from the Barbara Yaroslavsky Memorial Fund recently met virtually with their benefactor, Zev Yaroslavsky, to share experiences and talk about their futures.

The fellows include students working toward graduate or doctoral degrees in public policy, social welfare or public health at UCLA, or any combination thereof. Their areas of expertise and concentration include mental health as it relates to chronic disease, refugees in connection with forced migration and human rights, family services, and health and mental health across the lifespan.

Zev Yaroslavsky, whose long career in public service included time as both a county supervisor and city councilman in Los Angeles, is now on the faculty at UCLA Luskin. He established the fellowship with support from friends and family after the death of his wife in December 2018, honoring her legacy of advocacy and commitment to health care for all.

URBAN PLANNING FELLOWSHIP CIRCLE FINDS SUCCESS

The recently created Urban Planning Fellowship Circle has raised $53,350 to benefit urban planning students impacted by the pandemic, surpassing its goal of $50,000 with more donations on the way.

Led by co-chairs Joan Ling MA UP ’82 and Nicole Vermeer MA UP ’96,  a group of Urban Planning alumni banded together to help the next generation of urban planners weather a challenging year.

Other committee members were Toni Bates ’82, Alice Carr ’95, Robert De Forest BA ’99, MBA ’06, MA UP ’06, Nancy Lewis ’77, Reagan Maechling ’05, Katherine Perez ’97, Michele Prichard ’89, Anson Snyder ’90, James Suhr ’87, Yasmin Tong ’92 and Dwayne Wyatt ’83. Staff support was spearheaded by Robin McCallum, department manager.

The UCLA Luskin Development team is looking to replicate this model for the other departments. Anyone interested in making a similar impact to benefit students from public policy or social welfare may contact Laura Scarano, associate director of development,
at lscarano@luskin.ucla.edu.

CENTER FOR INNOVATION FUND HONORS DESHAZO

JR DeShazo

A campaign has been created to seek gifts in honor of JR DeShazo to the student fellowship fund for environmental justice.

Former UCLA Professor DeShazo, inaugural director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, became the dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in August. The student fellowship fund seeks to reflect the spirit of his enduring contribution and the Center for Innovation’s long record of support for hundreds of students during his tenure, helping to shape the next generation of policy.

The effort reflects the Luskin Center for Innovation’s commitment to supporting first-generation Bruins, students of color and other emerging environmental leaders via two types of fellowship opportunities:

  • one providing paid opportunities for students to collaborate with community-based organizations to advance environmental justice;
  • the other expanding opportunities in the center for students to conduct research that shapes environmental policy.

 

The Dollars and Sense of Growth More faculty, more students, more research — yes, growth is good, but it does come with a price tag

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By Les Dunseith

The Luskin School of Public Affairs has been growing — quickly.

  • The faculty is far larger than it was just five years ago — 35 ladder faculty then, 59 now (with three more hires pending).
  • Half-a-dozen additional research centers have been added or fully funded during that time.
  • The undergraduate public affairs major has skyrocketed from zero to 428 majors and pre-majors since spring 2018. Another 167 undergraduates are working on a minor.

Make no mistake, numbers like these are very good news. But such growth comes with a price tag, and dealing with that financial reality didn’t get any easier amid the economic uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How to pay for it all?

It helps that enrollment in UCLA Luskin’s graduate degree programs is up across the board. A total of 551 master’s students, a record number, are enrolled this academic year. Revenue from fees paid by these professional school students helps offset some of the associated costs of educating more people, such as hiring additional instructors and funding more graduate research fellowships. From a budget standpoint, such fees are also beneficial because they are not part of state appropriations and thus not impacted by any cuts from Sacramento.

It’s also true that adding undergraduate students brings in revenue from tuition. Generally speaking, tuition money flows to the university as a whole, not directly to the Luskin School, but additional funding tied to the undergraduate program has been put to good use at UCLA Luskin to support educational activities in undergraduate classrooms.

A portion has also been directed toward the graduate students who act as teaching assistants.

Rowena Barlow, chief financial officer, said total support received by the Luskin School’s students has risen 72.4% over four years. Teaching assistantships include a tuition waiver in addition to salary, meaning that many graduate students today are paying less for a master’s degree than they would have if the undergraduate degree did not exist.

On the negative side of the ledger, adding the undergraduate program also led to the hiring of many new faculty, which has increased salary costs. But many of the new additions have contributed to another growing source of funding — research contracts and grants.

“Grant proposals and research awards have grown exponentially,” Barlow said, increasing up to 60% since Gary Segura became dean. In the most-recent fiscal year, UCLA Luskin was awarded 124 grants totaling $23.2 million, nearly double the 66 grants totaling $11.2 million in 2017-18. And just three months into the current fiscal year, researchers at the Luskin School had already received contracts and grants totaling more than $13.1 million.

Grants are especially important to faculty and their associated research centers, and as the number of such entities has grown, so has their funding. In the last fiscal year, academic research and advocacy entities, along with related training programs, brought in 72 awards — 58% of the School’s total. Barlow said those grants totaled more than $18.5 million — 80% of all contract and grant funding at UCLA Luskin.

“The numbers are stunning,” said Segura, who credited the dedication of Barlow’s team in Financial Services with coping with a steadily increasing workload as new research centers have come aboard.

“There’s no handbook,” Segura said. “There’s no campus resource center for new center startups.”

Another vital funding source not tied to taxpayer support is private donations, particularly endowments like the gift from Meyer and Renee Luskin in 2011 that led to the renaming of the School. The Luskins recently fulfilled the remainder of that gift and subsequent endowments totaling $54 million, and the full amount is now earning the interest that funds ongoing educational activities such as student fellowships and scholarships, some faculty research efforts and the Luskin Lecture series. A portion of the Luskin endowment is also earmarked specifically to faculty recruitment and retention, Barlow noted.

“Competing for faculty is our biggest budget challenge,” Segura said. “Our faculty are successful. And the more successful they are, the more other schools come knocking.”

Even the generosity of the Luskins extends only so far, however. Several priority needs remain.

Jocelyn Guihama, director of administration and experiential learning for the undergraduate program, mentioned that many students reported working multiple jobs to support their families amid the economic turmoil of the pandemic.

“Since most of the internships that we provide are unpaid, removing the necessity to hold down a job or jobs — by funding more scholarships so that students can focus on their capstone and academics — would be the ideal,” she said.

Segura said gifts that benefit students are always welcomed, and he mentioned another ongoing need that potential donors might not think about — gifts that directly support doctoral students.

“Doctoral fellowships are hugely valuable,” said Segura, not only for the students themselves but indirectly for the entire School because those who earn Ph.D.s at UCLA typically go on to positions at other universities. Many refer potential students to UCLA. Some cooperate with their former professors on new research projects. And having alumni professors distributed widely within academia helps boost the School’s reputation, which drives academic rankings.

Growth at the Luskin School is ongoing, and Segura noted that two more research entities are now in the startup phase — one focusing on childhood bullying, and the other relating to the complexities of gay male sexuality. Both are looking for a benefactor.

Ultimately, today’s UCLA Luskin is a place where bold ambitions might occasionally outpace resources, and the financial challenges can seem daunting at times. Even so, managing the cost of success is a good problem to have.

Manville on Opportunities Created by SB9

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In a recent Bloomberg column, Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville weighed in on SB9, a new California law that allows people who own single-family homes to add additional units on their property by constructing a new building or turning an existing house into a duplex. SB9 creates opportunities to make land more valuable in areas where housing is in great demand by allowing small-scale projects and giving homeowners a financial stake in new housing. Manville said that many of those who oppose SB9 don’t want to see their neighborhoods change, in spite of the financial advantages of the new law. “They like their neighborhood, they are risk averse, and they don’t want to see it change,” he said. However, Manville also noted that many historic L.A. neighborhoods include attractive duplexes and fourplexes from the early 20th century. “If more of the city just looked like that, we probably wouldn’t have a housing crisis,” he said.

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Manville Weighs in on ‘Duplex Bill’

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in a Los Angeles Times article about the prospects of Senate Bill 9, which would allow for multifamily homes to be built in neighborhoods currently zoned for standalone houses only. Under the “duplex bill,” owners would be able to subdivide their properties and build up to four homes on each formerly single-family lot. According to Manville, SB 9 is a key opportunity to build housing in California, if it can survive the political process intact. “[Two recent] amendments are basically a step away from the bill’s original vision,” he explained. “A bill like SB 9 was always going to produce the most housing when there weren’t restrictions on who might occupy the housing that gets built on one of these parcels.” Manville added that in the new version of SB 9, “now you’re talking about a homeowner that wants to be a developer, and that’s very different from a homeowner that’s looking to sell their parcel.”

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Bau on Intersection of Culture and Policy

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Assistant Professor of Public Policy Natalie Bau was interviewed by the American Economic Association about her research on the effect of pension reform on traditional family arrangements in Indonesia and Ghana. Bau explained that she was curious about how traditional customs of sons and daughters living with their parents after getting married might incentivize parents to make educational investments. She found that pensions led parents to invest less in the education of children who would have traditionally supported them in old age, and it also resulted in more of those children leaving home after marriage rather than continuing to live with their parents, as was the customary practice. She noted that even though her research shows that the pension program in Indonesia is reducing female education, there are still benefits. The best solution would be to “combine the pension policy with other policies that mitigate these negative effects on female education,” she concluded.

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