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Vestal on Need to Empower the Unhoused

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Mark Vestal spoke to the Los Angeles Times about ways to prevent homelessness in Los Angeles instead of simply reacting to it. According to Vestal, one of the core problems in addressing the issue of homelessness is lack of political power among unhoused individuals. The House California Challenge Program, or AB 2817, aims to provide $5 billion over five years in rental subsidies for people who are homeless or on the brink of it, many of them families and people of color. Latinos are estimated to make up 35% of the homeless population in Los Angeles, but many prefer to stay in overcrowded housing with other families instead of going to traditional homeless shelters and encampments. “They chose the places where they want to live, even if they’re outdoors, because they have communities that are holding them together,” Vestal said.

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Leap on Emotional and Fiscal Expenses of Female Incarceration

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap was featured as a guest speaker on KCRW’s “Scheer Intelligence” podcast discussing the repercussions of the incarceration of women. “We tend to think about [people who are incarcerated] as men, [but] women are the fastest growing group of incarcerated individuals in the United States,” Leap said. Eighty percent of incarcerated women in the United States have children, so incarceration directly leads to the destruction of families, she said. Leap pointed out that “46% of incarcerated women are in jail because they can’t post bail — not because they have been found guilty, but because they are poor.” Once women are released from prison, they face a series of obstacles with virtually no support. “The need is great, but the services are limited,” Leap said. “In America, we’re in love with incarceration, and what we should be in love with are the families and the children of the people who need our help, understanding and support.”

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Karimli, Marshall Encourage Shift in Gender Norms

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Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Leyla Karimli and MPP student Emily Marshall co-authored a Medium op-ed about the complicated relationship between economic empowerment and female agency. While “economic empowerment, village savings, loans associations and poverty alleviation programs are essential to improving the lives of women around the world,” they do not necessarily result in improved agency and power, the authors wrote. Even when women earn the same or more than their partner, women disproportionately leave the workforce to care for children and relatives. “There are cultural and social norms at play and gender constraints that are typically embedded in larger patriarchal structures,” they explained. Karimli’s research shows that economic strengthening is more effective when coupled with family coaching to address gender norms. “We need to shift social norms, cultural expectations and attitudes by working with men as well as women,” wrote the authors, who are affiliated with the Global Lab for Research in Action at UCLA Luskin.

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New Paper Analyzes Impact of School Closures on Families

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor and doctoral student Kate Watson collaborated on a new paper highlighting the needs of children and families during school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper, published in Social Work, analyzed responses to a nationwide survey of 1,275 school social workers who reported on their clients, including schools, children and families, during the COVID-19 school closures in spring 2020. While other reports have focused on academic challenges facing students during the pandemic as well as the effects of online learning on academic success, the authors identified a knowledge gap in understanding the needs and difficulties of K-12 students and their families from a social work perspective. In their responses to the survey, school social workers indicated that the children and families they served had significant unmet basic needs, including for food, health care and housing. “Poverty and mental health compounded pandemic difficulties, which were associated with the sociodemographic makeup of schools,” wrote Watson, the paper’s lead author, with co-authors Astor and colleagues from Hebrew University, Cal State Fullerton and Loyola University Chicago. Based on the survey results, the authors identified several policy and practice implications for the future. They highlighted the need for “additional services for students and families, a plan to address structural inequities in our schools and communities, coordinated outreach to reengage missing students, and recognition of the strong work being done by school staff coupled with a need for additional supports and resources to combat persistent inequality.” — Zoe Day

U.S. Lags on Paid Leave, Heymann Says

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The New York Times spoke to Jody Heymann, a UCLA distinguished professor of public health, public policy and medicine, about access to family and medical leave. Congressional Democrats are proposing four weeks of paid leave, down from 12 weeks initially sought in their spending plan. If the plan becomes law, the United States will no longer be one of six countries in the world without any form of national paid leave. However, it would still be an outlier. Of the 174 countries that offer paid leave for a personal health problem, just 26 offer four weeks or fewer, according to data from UCLA’s World Policy Analysis Center, which Heymann directs. “When you look at other countries, there is evidence of what people need and what’s feasible,” Heymann said. “And by both of those measures, 12 weeks is a modest amount, and anything less is grossly inadequate. The rest of the world, including low-income countries, has found a way to do this.”

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Ong on Uncertain Future of Korean Dry Cleaners

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Research by Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, is highlighted in a Los Angeles Times article focusing on COVID-19’s impact on Korean families involved in the dry cleaning businesses, which has struggled amid the pandemic. In 2015, Ong co-authored a paper that investigated ethnic mobilization among Korean dry cleaners in the United States. Starting in the 1970s, Korean immigrants welcomed one another into the dry cleaning business with loans, moral support and training. “The children are quite often at the business … it’s a way of supervising them in terms of their education,” the researchers wrote. During the pandemic, dry cleaners lost revenue because many customers moved to virtual work, and at least a quarter of these family-oriented businesses have closed because of the pandemic, according to a representative of the Korean Dry Cleaners & Laundry Assn. of Southern California. 

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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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UCLA Report Highlights Inequality in Utility Debt Burden

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Scholars from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) and UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI) collaborated on the new report “Keeping the Lights and Heat On: COVID-19 Utility Debt,” which analyzed the burden of household utility debt for many families, especially in low-income neighborhoods. The report, co-authored by CNK Director Paul Ong and LCI Associate Director Greg Pierce, used data from Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), an investor-owned utility that provides electricity and gas service to about 40% of California residents, in order to quantify the prevalence and degree of residential past-due accounts and debt. The authors explained that utility debt levels serve as a useful proxy to track households that are facing difficulties paying their rent or mortgage, particularly during economic crises. While roughly 6% of the Northern and Central California households served by PG&E are facing financial difficulties paying for most essential services, utility debt burden is highest among Black, Latino and economically vulnerable neighborhoods, the study found. PG&E recently announced that it will extend a moratorium on utility service disconnections through September 30, although many other emergency customer protections put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic have expired. The authors of the report recommend allocating funding to debt-forgiveness programs for low-income households and severely impacted neighborhoods. They plan to replicate the study in non-PG&E service areas  to better understand the impact of energy and water bill debt across regions. — Zoe Day

Akee Highlights Benefits of Child Subsidies

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Randall Akee was featured in a New York Times article discussing the growing threat of child poverty and child allowances as a potential solution. In the United States, low-income children are bearing the weight of the pandemic, with hunger rising, classrooms closing and parental stress surging. A Duke University study found that subsidizing the incomes of poor families leads their children on average to better health, more schooling and higher earnings as adults. In North Carolina, Cherokee Indians opened a casino and began sharing the profits with every household in the tribe, creating a local version of guaranteed income. Akee published four studies of the tribal subsidies and found they improved everything from the children’s education to their propensity as adults to vote. “When you remedy child poverty, children become more productive members of society across multiple dimensions,” he explained.

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Akee Links Universal Basic Income Experiment and Family Stress

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Randall Akee was featured in a New Republic article on the impact that universal basic income has on families. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) project is providing $500 a month to a group of Stockton residents for 18 months to better understand the effectiveness of universal basic income. Preliminary data show that recipients spend a majority of the money on daily expenses. Many also report having more breathing room and more free time to spend with their children. A similar experiment that gave a portion of casino revenue to every tribal citizen in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina found improvements in relationships between parents and children. Akee explained that “extra money allows for more consistency and covering of basic living expenses, and people aren’t perhaps nearly as stressed with each other.” He said reducing a family’s stress “may have an intergenerational impact on the kids.”

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