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Alumnus Stephen Cheung to Lead L.A. County Economic Development Corporation

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UCLA Luskin Board of Advisors member Stephen Cheung has been named as the new president and CEO of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), succeeding longtime president Bill Allen when he retires in January. Cheung, a double Bruin who earned his master’s in social welfare at UCLA in 2007, is currently the chief operating officer at the nonprofit organization, which focuses on equitable economic growth in the region. He also leads the LAEDC-affiliated World Trade Center Los Angeles and previously managed policies and programs related to the Port of Los Angeles. “Our staff, board and I all agree that LAEDC will be in excellent hands under the leadership of our COO Stephen Cheung,” Allen said in a news release. “Stephen has been a tremendous partner to me in leading the LAEDC and WTCLA for the past seven years, and I’m genuinely excited to see where he will take the organization over the next decade.” Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors chair Holly J. Mitchell said, “Stephen has been a steadfast champion to crush the digital divide and to ensure an economy that works for all county residents. We are indeed grateful for Bill Allen’s 17 years of service and look forward to working with Stephen Cheung in the years ahead.”  An active alumnus who has been a member of the Board of Advisors at the Luskin School since 2018, Cheung helped conceive the School’s annual Luskin Summit event and continues to serve on its organizing committee.

 

Storper on the Counterintuitive Truth About Global Investment

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Urban Planning Distinguished Professor Michael Storper co-authored an article about the impact of international investment on domestic employment levels for the London School of Economics’ Global Investments and Local Development blog. “The world over, public policies for recovery from COVID-19 have cherished the idea of curbing foreign activities of domestic firms in order to boost domestic employment and wages. This represents a fundamental misconception about outward foreign direct investment,” Storper wrote with scholars Riccardo Crescenzi and Roberto Ganau. The authors conducted an in-depth analysis of U.S. local labor markets, detailed in a paper recently published in the Journal of Economic Geography. They found that firms with direct investment in other countries create jobs at home, a counterintuitive fact in an era of populism and calls for curbing global economic integration. The authors noted, however, that there is a downside in the form of increasing intra-regional inequalities between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.

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Storper Research Points to Roots of L.A.’s Problems

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A Zocalo Public Square column on the urgency of fixing Los Angeles’ longstanding economic and equity problems cited research by Michael Storper, distinguished professor of urban planning. Storper studied the different trajectories of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, two big regional economies that were at parity in 1970, with similar education levels and numbers of engineers. The Bay Area’s leading institutions in education, business and government became highly networked and planned collaboratively. The Los Angeles region remained a collection of separate, siloed communities that competed with one another. Today, the Bay Area is 30% richer than the L.A. region, Storper found. Noting that COVID-19 made the depths of Los Angeles’ problems undeniable, the column called on leaders to build real foundations that allow people to find stability and health in the short term, while reducing inequality to spread prosperity in the long term. 

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Millard-Ball on Twin Concerns of Fire Safety and Housing Access

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Adam Millard-Ball spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle about housing developments planned for parts of California that are prone to wildfire. The state Attorney General’s Office has opposed some of these developments, arguing that they pose grave danger in an era when uncontrolled wildfires threaten the state. The article notes that devastation in places like Santa Rosa, Paradise and Redding, in the so-called wildland-urban interface, has underscored how suburban sprawl is not only a target of fire but fodder for it, hastening the speed and intensity of blazes. Limiting development, however, can frustrate growth plans of small towns and cities and undermine progress on the state’s housing crunch. “There are really these twin concerns coming into conflict now,” Millard-Ball said. “The state’s housing crisis makes it an imperative to make it easy to build housing. At the same time, there’s the threat and tragedy of wildfires.”

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As Election Nears, LPPI Hosts Roundtable With Philanthropic Leaders About Latino Agenda

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Working with Hispanics in Philanthropy, the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, or LPPI, hosted a virtual conversation Oct. 1 with 29 philanthropic leaders about shaping a political agenda for Black and brown people. Titled “Juntos Ganamos,” or “Together We Win,” the discussion centered on “Shaping a 21st Century Latino Agenda,” a blueprint recently created by UCLA LPPI for policy reforms on issues that include climate change, health, economic opportunity and voting rights. The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened existing inequities, and the agenda seeks to address systemic racial injustices and chart a path forward. The roundtable was the first in a series in which Latinx foundation presidents, CEOs and trustees will examine the role of philanthropy amid a global pandemic, ongoing economic inequality and a renewed focus on violence involving police. “There is importance in building unity and coalition among all communities of color, while recognizing the efforts, lives and leadership of our Black peers,” said María Morales MPP ’20, who helped put together the roundtable. Speakers included Sonja Diaz, founding director of the initiative, who said Latino workers often experience “invisibility” in the workplace. “Essential should not be interchangeable with disposable,” Diaz said. Roundtable attendees also learned about research that demonstrates that Black, brown, Asian and Indigenous people combine to make up America’s new majority, potentially influencing policy for years to come. Mobilizing such voters is essential for both parties in the November elections, presenters noted, and philanthropy can play a key role in helping to build solidarity among ethnic communities. — Eliza Moreno

Parking Is a Money Pit, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to The Real Deal, a real estate news site, about a Los Angeles Planning Commission proposal to eliminate required parking spaces in new downtown housing developments, with the goal of creating more room for housing and decreasing the number of cars on the road. Manville said this policy is in line with cities such as San Francisco and Portland, which have begun easing downtown parking requirements. If eliminating parking requirements becomes the standard, business would improve for developers, he said. “As a conservative lender – and most institutional lenders are conservative – you might not loan on something that’s not the market standard,” he explained. But a developer with non-institutional funding who builds housing without parking spaces would spur more of this kind of development, he said. In the long term, eliminating parking requirements would lower the cost of development because “parking is a money pit,” Manville said.

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Climate Funds Create Jobs Luskin Center for Innovation releases study that quantifies statewide employment benefits from billions of dollars in California Climate Investments

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By Colleen Callahan

Amid debate over extension of California’s cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions released into the environment, researchers from the Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI) at UCLA studied and quantified the number of jobs supported from the statewide initiative known as California Climate Investments, funded by cap-and-trade revenues. 

The Luskin Center for Innovation has now released the new study as California considers the job training and workforce development needed in a lower-carbon economy under 2017’s Assembly Bill 398, which extended the state’s cap-and-trade program. 

The report “Employment Benefits from Climate Investments” focuses on the $2.2 billion appropriated between 2013-14 and 2015-16 to support 29 programs created to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while providing local economic, environmental and public health benefits. The programs include investments in public transit, clean vehicles, transit-oriented affordable housing, clean energy for low-income communities and ecosystem restoration.

Many of these programs also induce consumers, businesses and government entities to contribute matching funds. The largest example of induced co-investment is the $3 billion in federal funding for California’s high-speed rail project, which would not be available without the state’s match in cap-and-trade auction proceeds, according to the researchers.

“We found that the $2.2 billion in California Climate Investments supports about 19,700 jobs, and $6.4 billion in induced co-investment supports an additional 55,900 jobs, for an estimated total of more than 75,000 jobs in California,” said JR DeShazo, the principal investigator of the study and director of LCI.

Jobs supported by California Climate Investments are diverse and cut across many different industries and economic sectors, ranging from the manufacture of clean vehicles to the restoration of degraded wetlands, according to the study.

“Given their diversity, California Climate Investment-related jobs can serve as a sample of the types of jobs supported by California’s transition to a lower-carbon economy,” said researcher Jason Karpman MURP ’16, lead author of the report. “Since California Climate Investments are one component of the state’s broad suite of strategies for addressing climate change under Assembly Bill 32 [the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006], the jobs reported in the study represent a fraction of the total jobs supported by the state’s effort to decarbonize.” 

Of the many economic sectors directly impacted by California Climate Investments, the construction industry stands to gain the most (54 percent of total jobs), according to the report. This is because of the significant level of investment going toward the construction of public transit systems and the construction of multiunit affordable housing near transit, among other investments. The sector receiving the second-highest number of job gains due to investments is architectural, engineering and related services. 

Impacted industries employ both blue-collar and white-collar workers. For example, the architectural and engineering sector is known for creating white-collar jobs that pay middle-class salaries. Many blue-collar construction jobs funded by California Climate Investments are covered under the state’s prevailing wage law and requirements for enrollment in state-certified apprenticeship programs. This system is designed to ensure that public works construction jobs resulting from California Climate Investments support broad occupational training and provide family-supporting pay and benefits to workers. 

“The industry-level findings in this study can be a springboard for better understanding the quality of jobs that are supported by large public investments in greenhouse gas reductions,” Karpman said. 

The modeling tool used for the LCI study focuses on quantifying job flows rather than providing granular detail about job quality, training, access for workers in disadvantaged communities and other important components of employment benefits. Because the study identifies the industries involved in each California Climate Investment program, it could be used to more deeply analyze job quality metrics that characterize those industries, including pay, benefits and career advancement opportunities. 

The study found that the California Climate Investment programs that generate the most jobs in California (per million dollars invested, as determined by their employment multiplier) devoted a greater share of investment dollars to services rather than materials. In addition, the employment multiplier of a program was also positively influenced by the share of investment dollars going to firms based in California rather than to out-of-state firms. 

“The findings could inform recommendations for legislators and agency leaders interested in maximizing the number of jobs supported by California Climate Investments,” DeShazo said.  

The researchers note that state agencies could design or update programs to involve sectors with high employment multipliers, such as social services, agriculture, forestry, engineering and construction. Administering agencies could also consider incentives for grantees that contract with vendors located in California and stipulate that they purchase materials manufactured in California, when possible. The findings suggest that these considerations, along with job quality considerations, could help the state ensure multiple employment benefits from its future investments. 

The amount of California Climate Investments appropriated annually has increased significantly since the study period’s $2.2 billion, to a total of now $6.1 billion.  

‘Catalytic Communities’ with Theresa Williamson

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On Jan. 18, 2018, Theresa Williamson shared her experience as an community organizer in Rio de Janerio. In her presentation for the Global Public Affairs program at UCLA Luskin, she spoke of academic and practical ways to work with communities and empower them for positive development and change. Williamson walked through the thinking process and the lessons she learned from founding the organization. Click here to view the slides from her presentation.

View a Flickr album from Williamson’s talk:

'Catalytic Communities' with Theresa Williamson

2018 Activists-in-Residence Welcomed at Reception

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The Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D) at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center welcomed Manuel Criollo and Yvonne Yen Liu as the 2018 UCLA Activist-in-Residence Fellows during a reception held Jan. 11, 2018, at the UCLA Luskin Commons. Criollo is the Irvine Fellow on Urban Life and Liu is the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Fellow for the Winter Quarter. “Manuel Criollo is a legend in the activist and community organizing worlds of Los Angeles,” Ananya Roy, director of  II&D and professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography, told the audience of students, faculty and community partners at the standing-room-only reception. “He has not only tackled urgent racial justice issues but has also built networks of leadership that can in turn build power.” The Activist-in-Residence Program was developed by the two research centers to recognize the work of individuals working on community-led social change and to build stronger links between UCLA and the community. Fellows are encouraged to pursue research or reflect on their community work to advance racial, social and economic equity, as well as encouraging UCLA students to develop or strengthen their own commitment to social justice. During his residency, Criollo will research and document the formation of the Los Angeles School Police Department, create a timeline of community struggles against school policing, and organize an organizers exchange on UCLA’s campus. Liu will explore the history of solidarity economies in the Asian American immigrant and refugee experience to guide future community economic development and forge collective economic agency.

View a Flickr album from the reception:

2018 Activist-in-Residence Reception