Posts

Manville on Sharing Wealth of Housing Market

/0 Comments/in /by

Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in a Los Angeles Times column about the possibility of a new luxury tax on homes in Los Angeles. The housing market has rewarded many homeowners who have seen their properties quadruple in value before selling. In response, the United to House L.A. initiative has proposed an additional tax on property sales above $5 million that could then be funneled into homelessness prevention. “If the value of your house doubles, that’s not because you did a killer kitchen remodel, it’s because L.A.’s economy took off like a rocket,” Manville said. “Did you personally kickstart the L.A. economy? Impressive as you are, probably you didn’t.” According to Manville, “the community as a whole created that value, and there is no particular reason that you should mop up a big share of it while someone who rents gets punished for it, simply because you were lucky enough to own a house while it happened.”

Read the column

Yaroslavsky on Inflation’s Fallout on Local Elections

/0 Comments/in /by

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to KPCC’s “AirTalk” about the impact of Southern California’s widening economic gap on upcoming elections. Yaroslavsky cited results of the 2022 UCLA Quality of Life Index, which found a steep drop in residents’ satisfaction with life in L.A. County, largely due to concerns over inflation and public safety. “What stands out is that people are unhappy, they’re anxious, they’re angry, they’re concerned,” Yaroslavsky said. Lower-income households, hard hit by lost wages and rising inflation, have been slower to rebound from the financial shock of the COVID-19 era, the survey showed. “We are the ground zero in this country of the economic divide,” Yaroslavsky said. The Quality of Life Index also showed a decline in approval ratings of many local government officials. “Inflation, I think, is the most pernicious thing economically that we have in our society,” Yaroslavsky said. “That will have a political bite like nothing else.”

Listen to the podcast

Akee Identifies Structural Barriers Facing Indigenous Communities

/0 Comments/in /by

Associate Professor of Public Policy Randall Akee spoke to Indian Country Today about his recently published report on structural barriers that limit economic opportunity in indigenous communities. Co-authored by Akee and published by the Joint Economic Committee, a body that includes both members of the U.S. Senate and House, the report found that Native Americans are disproportionately underserved, economically vulnerable and limited in their access to pathways that build wealth. “The report puts a lot of the socioeconomic conditions of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, American Indians in perspective,” Akee said. “It does a great job of summarizing a number of different outcomes, a number of different domains, and puts it into a language that’s digestible and understandable for a broad swath of the population so that it’s not … caught up in jargonistic-type terms.” The report found that longstanding inequities have left indigenous communities more vulnerable to the negative impact of economic shocks and public health crises.

Read the article

Tilly on Gap Between Salary Expectations and Reality

/0 Comments/in /by

A USA Today story about a survey showing that college students expect to make more than $100,000 in their first post-graduation jobs cited Urban Planning chair Chris Tilly, an authority on labor markets and equity. The actual average starting salary for new graduates is $55,260, the story said. But experts say that, in some parts of the country, six-figure incomes are necessary to cover the basic cost of living, which has greatly outpaced the growth of wages and salaries over the last five decades. “The federal minimum wage is, in inflation-adjusted terms, much lower than it was in the early ’70s,” Tilly said. “Wages and salaries have not kept up with housing costs, have not kept up with higher education, tuition costs. And so that sort of disjuncture, that mismatch between the reality of costs and their reality of pay, I think is distorting the way that a lot of young people are looking at the world.”

Read the article

 

Car Access Increases Job Opportunities, Blumenberg Finds

/0 Comments/in /by

Urban Planning Professor Evelyn Blumenberg was mentioned in a Chicago Magazine article about new approaches to commuting as the suburbs expand and jobs are decentralized. Especially in areas where mass transit is lacking or unreliable and driving is expensive, many commuters are getting creative with bike-share programs and other alternatives to driving. However, many of these alternative transportation programs largely cater to the upper-middle class and leave out low-income residents who need them most. The decentralization of jobs has led to many economic opportunities being located in the suburbs, which are often poorly served by mass transit. This makes job opportunities further out of reach for central-city residents with limited transportation options. Blumenberg found that car-driving residents of the Watts section of Los Angeles have access to an astounding 59 times as many jobs as their neighbors dependent on public transit. 

Read the article

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

/0 Comments/in /by

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.

Read the article

Ong Reflects on Lack of Progress Since L.A. Riots

/0 Comments/in /by

Director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Paul Ong spoke to the Christian Science Monitor about race relations and criminal justice reform in the 30 years since the police beating of Rodney King and the resulting L.A. riots. For many people, economic and social conditions have stayed the same or gotten worse in the last three decades. In the report “South Los Angeles Since the Sixties,” Ong and his colleagues found that many of the area’s residents were disenchanted over justice delayed and persistent discrimination, racism and unequal access to economic opportunity. Ong noted that racial segregation continues in South Los Angeles today and many African Americans are migrating to the exurbs in search of better schools, jobs and more affordable housing. He also pointed out that the Latino population is growing but remains on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, while white and Asian people are moving in, along with gentrification.

Read the article

Student Debt Is a Policy Failure, Appel Says

/0 Comments/in /by

In a recent Marketplace interview, Hannah Appel, associate faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, said that “canceling student debt is the quickest way to narrow the racial wealth gap.” The Department of Education announced a plan to change the federal student loan system to make it easier for lower-income student loan borrowers to have their debt forgiven, prompting discussions about canceling all student loan debt. The vast majority of student loans are “simply uncollectable,” Appel said, adding that the impact of student loan debt falls disproportionately on people of color. She explained that student loan debt is unique because it’s held 95%-plus by the federal government. “We’ve seen the most progress and we’ve been able to build the most power around student debt, because it plainly is a policy failure for which we can hold the government accountable, and they can reverse course,” she said.

Listen to the interview

Anheier Recommends National Security Council for Germany

/0 Comments/in /by

In a new Project Syndicate article, Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Helmut Anheier urged Germany to create a national security council. For decades, Germany has received criticism for low defense spending, fence-sitting and free-riding, Anheier wrote. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a dramatic policy reorientation that would make Germany one of the top military spenders and arms exporters. However, the success of this policy change will depend on German leadership, and Anheier proposed establishing a German national security council. “Long proposed but never realized, an NSC could advance a coherent defense, security and foreign policy strategy,” he wrote. “Located close to the chancellery, it would act as a central policy coordinator, helping to overcome the fragmentation that often characterizes federal ministries’ responses to crises.” According to Anheier, a security council would be key to helping Germany align its economic and security policy with the European Union’s common defense strategy.

Read the article

Yin on Policy Changes to Reduce Medical Debt

/0 Comments/in /by

Associate Professor of Public Policy Wesley Yin was cited in a Health Care Journalism article about the burden of medical debt in the United States. Yin said that medical debt, totaling at least $140 billion, is the single largest source of consumer debt in the United States. To address this issue, the White House announced four steps to ease the burden of medical debt on health care consumers, including holding medical providers and debt collectors accountable for harmful practices and forgiving debt for low-income veterans. “Just shining a light on that type of behavior might lead to reducing the most egregious practices from providers,” Yin said. He expressed hope that the “White House’s actions to shine a light on charity care practices will have a positive effect for low-income individuals.” The policy changes may also “nudge providers to be stronger advocates for increased subsidies for health insurance and Medicaid expansion,” he said.

Read the article