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Brozen Discusses Traffic ‘Safety Crisis’ in Some L.A. Neighborhoods

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In a recent newsletter distributed by the Los Angeles Times, UCLA Luskin’s Madeline Brozen says the lack of safety at an intersection where a 4-year-old was struck and killed in October 2019 “speaks to a lack of streamlined approach” by the city. Conditions in the predominantly non-white, low-income neighborhood of Koreatown where Alessa Fajardo died highlight the race- and class-based inequities of traffic violence. Black and brown residents are disproportionately killed in traffic collisions in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States. “In the last five years, one of every three traffic deaths in L.A. is a Black or Latino pedestrian, up from one in four in 2013-2017,” said Brozen, deputy director of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, who cites a policy brief she co-authored this year. “This is a safety crisis and we need a city process that brings improvements to communities as quickly as possible and doesn’t spend more on settlements than infrastructure,” Brozen said.

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Luskin Up-Close Office of Student Affairs and Alumni Relations emphasizes connectedness to UCLA Luskin at every stage.

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By Mary Braswell

Supporting students’ career goals, caring for their well-being and keeping them engaged after graduation are responsibilities of the Office of Student Affairs and Alumni Relations. In its second year after a staff reorganization, OSAAR emphasizes connectedness to UCLA Luskin at every stage.

Signature initiatives that offer the opportunity for mentorship and networking include the Senior Fellows program, which pairs graduate students with leaders in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. And the Bohnett Fellowship, which places students in roles at Los Angeles City Hall, this year included a trip to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C.

In its 18th year, the annual UCLA Luskin Day at Los Angeles City Hall brings Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning graduate students together with government and civic leaders. This year’s focus: How will the city prioritize first- and last-mile transportation investments ahead of mega-events including the 2026 World Cup, 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Summer Olympics?

The Paint & Sip session in February was a wellness event offering a chance to build community. Photo by Mary Braswell

OSAAR also hosts career fairs, panels with employers and alumni, and special offerings like a LinkedIn photo shoot — 204 professional headshots taken this year!

And wellness programs relating to housing support, navigating conflict, dealing with stress and managing finances are offered all year long, as are referrals to UCLA’s array of student services.

This year’s events included a “Paint and Sip” organized in partnership with the UCLA RISE Center (Resilience In Your Student Experience). Students came together to re-create their “happy place,” turning the Public Affairs Building’s 3rd Floor Commons into a safe space for relaxation, creative expression and community-building.

After graduation, alumni bonds are strengthened at gatherings around the country and during informal Cafecito and Aperitivo meetups around Los Angeles.

Thriving at 25 Founded amid budget turmoil as an experiment in policy education, UCLA Public Policy is now among the country’s top programs

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By Stan Paul

UCLA Luskin Public Policy has grown from upstart to leader among programs of its kind in just 25 years by stressing world-class scholarship and an interdisciplinary teaching approach.

Archie Kleingartner, the founding dean of what is now the Luskin School of Public Affairs, said it was the first new professional school at UCLA in over three decades. It merged existing Social Welfare and Urban Planning departments with a fledgling program in public policy at a time when teaching programs in public policy and related fields were flourishing elsewhere.

The School emerged from what Kleingartner describes as a complex, four-year process of deliberations and restructuring to serve a mandate to make deep cuts from UCLA’s professional schools amid a budget shortfall. As UC’s systemwide vice president for academic staff and personnel relations, Kleingartner chaired the committee that determined the need to restructure the professional schools.

“The centerpiece of this effort needed to include a robust expansion of the commitment to public policy,” Kleingartner recalled. The result has proven successful. “What the Chancellor and Board of Regents hoped to achieve when they approved the new school has in fact exceeded all expectations.”

Kleingartner served as dean from 1994-96, followed by the first permanent dean, Barbara J. Nelson. He praises today’s high research output and the quality of the faculty in policy fields, plus the School’s public service contributions — all visions that have transformed into actions.

“A growing cadre of alumni and recognition among experts and decision-makers add to the School’s prestige,” Kleingartner said. “UCLA is making a clear and visible contribution toward the public good through the Luskin School of Public Affairs.”

Emily Williams MPP ’98, the 2005 Alumna of the Year, would agree. As part of the School’s first class, she often had to explain at first what a Master of Public Policy was and had even developed an elevator pitch.

“Nobody knew what it was, let alone the acronym MPP. I mean, even among policymakers. It just wasn’t a term of art at the time,” Williams said. “I remember every single job interview, I had to explain it.”

Williams, who is now chief executive officer at UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN), said, “Looking back 26 years after I graduated, what’s so great is I don’t have to explain what public policy is, and what that carries in this region is enormous.”

woman gestures in front of monitor showing dataGabriela Solis Torres MPP/MSW ’19 was among the accomplished alumni who returned to UCLA to speak about their career journeys. Photo by Les Dunseith
woman gestures in front of monitor showing data
woman gestures in front of monitor showing data
closeup of African American woman who is smiling
closeup of African American woman who is smiling

Marking 25 years since the first cohort of Master of Public Policy students graduated, a series of speaker events and alumni panels highlighted the program’s accomplishment during a monthslong commemoration. The speaker series featured four Alumni of the Year honorees who shared insights on the state of policymaking and the value of their Luskin educations.

The speakers and honorees included Assemblyman Isaac Bryan MPP ’18, who also participated in two other Luskin School events highlighted elsewhere in this issue of Luskin Forum.

Additional alumni speakers included Regina Wallace-Jones MPP ’99, CEO and president of ActBlue, a technology nonprofit that facilitates online donations to progressive organizations and candidates; and Sandeep Prasanna MPP/JD ’15, a senior legal advisor who served as investigative counsel on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“The thing they say about law school is that they teach you how to think like a lawyer,” Prasanna told the audience in February. “What I feel I learned at Luskin was how to do.”

Prasanna received his alumni award from UCLA Luskin’s newest chair of Public Policy, Robert Fairlie.

Commenting on his role, Fairlie said, “Teaching in the MPP program and being involved in alumni events has been extremely rewarding and inspiring. It is exciting to see what amazing things our graduates are doing.”

Also playing a key role has been Maciek Kolodziejczak, the department’s graduate advisor in 1996 when the first cohort arrived in Westwood. Although officially retired from the university since 2017, he has continued to participate in and influence the department, playing a major role in organizing the anniversary events.

“I started with the first class, so I didn’t recruit them — I received them,” Kolodziejczak said. “They were a class of 18, and I got to know each of them … [that’s] the fun part and the exciting part,” he said.

He described the first class as entrepreneurial trailblazers for taking the leap into “an unknown program with no reputation, no alumni and no track record.”

Kolodziejczak continued, saying, “They were just very willing to take the risk, and so there was just a kind of an esprit de corps among the class.”

UCLA Public Policy graduates now serve throughout the local, national and international levels. Among them is 1999 MPP alumna Nathalie Rayes, whose appointment as ambassador to Croatia is covered on page 4 of this edition.

In a UCLA Daily Bruin story, Rayes commented, “The importance of service is something that is part of my DNA. And so when the president calls you and says, ‘You know, I have a job for you: Would you like to be ambassador to Croatia?’ you say, ‘Yes.’”

Longtime UCLA Luskin Professor Mark Peterson also has seen Public Policy develop from over the years, calling it “the little engine that could.” Its high national standing “is remarkable given the fact that all of the top-ranked programs are older, most by decades, and almost all of them have vastly larger faculties than we do.”

Master of Public Policy — and MPP — now garner an immediate reaction, said Williams, who now also teaches a class at the Luskin School.

“I don’t even have to say UCLA, people know what the Luskin School of Public Affairs is, and that carries so much weight and merit. The Luskin name has really made the brand.”

Doctorates in the House Four UCLA Luskin PhD candidates use equity as a guide in their research on incarceration, transit, foster care and urban spaces

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By Mary Braswell

In 1970, UCLA began sending PhDs in social welfare and urban planning into the world to serve as catalysts for change for a society in turmoil. Today, scholars are still drawn to UCLA Luskin as a place where research is turned into action.

“We’re known for our focus on social justice and equity,” said Professor Evelyn Blumenberg, who received her urban planning PhD from UCLA in 1995 and now chairs the doctoral program.

“Being in L.A. is a draw as well. There are so many opportunities for fieldwork and data collection here in Los Angeles.”

Not only is UCLA a top research university, it prizes collaboration across disciplines — a rich learning environment for PhD students, said Professor Todd Franke, chair of the doctoral program at UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

Both Blumenberg and Franke stressed the importance of “mentor matching” — pairing doctoral students with diverse and highly collaborative faculty members who will stretch their capacity to think critically and systematically to solve real problems in their community.

“The quality of the scholars here, and the support for interdisciplinary work among faculty and students, is exceptionally strong at UCLA,” Franke said.

Here’s a look at four current doctoral students, what led them to UCLA Luskin, the research they have spearheaded and how their work may foster transformative change.

Taylor Reed
PhD candidate, Social Welfare

Taylor Reed remembers when her childhood career goals came into sharper focus.

At age 11, she decided she’d become a medical doctor after seeing a commercial for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. “It shocked me because I didn’t know that kids got cancer. And I thought, ‘That is so sad. I need to dedicate my life to helping them,’” she recalled.

“It wasn’t until I got older when I started to realize that, yes, kids die from cancer, but Black kids in particular are more subjected to things like community gun violence and incarceration,” she said. “That is our pandemic. That is our disease. That is what we are dying from.”

Reed’s desire to change that fate led her to UCLA Luskin Social Welfare, where she is one of a select few to be accepted into a fast-tracked MSW/PhD program. “I have been intentional,” she said, “because this work is urgent.”

Reed’s area of study lies at the intersection of race, housing and incarceration — in particular the policies that keep young Black adults from successfully reentering society after serving time.

“The first thing that you think of when you leave prison or jail is, ‘Where am I going to sleep?’

“You’re not necessarily thinking of a job. You’re not thinking of mental health. You’re thinking about where you’re going to sleep,” she said.

Policies in place around the country make it difficult for people with past convictions to find a stable place to live, but fair chance housing ordinances are now on the rise, with the aim of dismantling those barriers.

Reed researches how these ordinances are being structured and enforced, who stands to benefit the most, and how to educate and empower housing applicants who face discrimination.

Along her academic journey, Reed says she has been buoyed by parents who met in law school and always made education a priority, by the work ethic of her Jamaican ancestors, by a boyfriend who acts as a sounding board for her work, and by her incredibly diverse and supportive cohort of fellow scholars.

Reed has made the most of UCLA’s opportunities, conducting research for the Initiative to Study Hate and the BRITE Center for Science, Research and Policy. She also joined the Hip Hop Scholars Working Group, which bridges her interests in research and music.

Her first opportunity to work closely with top UCLA faculty came in 2016 as a New York University undergraduate with plans to spend the summer in Los Angeles. Reed sent a cold email to UCLA’s Vickie Mays, a noted professor of psychology and public health, asking if she could use some research help. Mays said yes and Reed joined a project centering on incarceration and the Black community, the seeds of her current scholarship.

“That has been something I’ve kept close to my heart,” she said. “I do this scholarship for people who are impacted by incarceration and particularly the Black community, which has struggled since we were brought to this country to make things easier for the next generation to come.”

outdoor photo of person wearing purple t-shirt

Fariba Siddiq

Fariba Siddiq
PhD candidate, Urban Planning

From Bangladesh to Utah to Southern California, Fariba Siddiq has studied the vastly different ways that people move from place to place.

She grew up in Dhaka, one of the densest cities on the planet, where only a fraction of the population owns private cars, and witnessed the perils, particularly for women, of crowded buses and trains.

As a master’s student at the University of Utah, she experienced Salt Lake City’s enviable public transit network before moving west to car-centric Los Angeles to join the urban planning PhD program at UCLA Luskin.

Along the way, Siddiq has made it her mission to identify planning choices and policy decisions that could ease the hardships endured by travelers with limited resources.

“One of the reasons I came to UCLA is its focus on transportation equity, on how to make things more equitable and just, and what that means in the international context,” she said. “I’ve seen systems that are falling apart, and I want to help make things right.”

Much of Siddiq’s work in the doctoral program and as a graduate student researcher with the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies has focused on gender and mobility.

Siddiq won a scholarship to study how women in Dhaka and Los Angeles navigate ride-hailing amid concerns about safety and security. She worked with the World Bank to help develop a tool that could inform gender-conscious transportation policies across the globe.

Her dissertation assesses COVID-19’s long-term impact on travel patterns. How should the changing nature of work — more opportunities for flextime, hybrid schedules and the like — be factored into future transportation decisions and investments?

Transit officials and regional planning agencies rely on this type of evidence-based forecasting.

“None of it would have been possible without the support of my professors,” both personally and professionally, Siddiq said. “They have inspired me and encouraged me.”

woman poses in art gallery as others in background view photos on the walls

Kate Watson

Kate Watson
PhD candidate, Social Welfare

The images lining the art gallery at UCLA’s Kerckhoff Hall told a deeply personal story.

Taken by young people who had spent time in foster care, the photographs captured moments in time intended to offer a glimpse into the artists’ experiences in the system.

On a rainy Monday evening in January, a large crowd lingered over images of street art, family portraits, pill bottles, a gray cat — all part of the “Fostering Photovoice” exhibit spearheaded by Social Welfare PhD candidate Kate Watson.

“Photography is a very powerful medium,” Watson said. “I knew of photovoice as a research method, and over time the idea evolved of working with foster youth to capture their experiences and give them a voice in a creative way.”

The project tapped into many of Watson’s strengths and interests. From a young age, she has volunteered as a Big Sister and with other organizations helping youth. While working as a manager of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, she became certified as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate, providing one-on-one guidance for children in foster care.

“It’s a volunteer position, but it gave me a clear understanding of how that system worked and what the pain points were,” she said. “A lot of information is kept from different people, from birth parents, foster parents, the schools.

“Foster care and foster youth are really where my heart is, so I was looking at that and asking, ‘How can I really make an impact on this system?’”

That question led Watson to UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

“I wanted to go to the best program I could, one that didn’t just focus on clinical work but also included macro perspectives and research methods,” said Watson, who also earned her MSW at UCLA.

Her overarching goal is to help any organization — schools, courts and government agencies, among others — become more supportive and caring, and to reduce the chance they will retraumatize people who need their help.

To that end, Watson created a trauma-informed climate survey that organizations can use to make healthy changes. It’s centered on a trusting and transparent ethos in the workplace, at every level, she said.

“In order to create a safe environment, both physically and psychologically, you need to be able to see people in their entirety and for the strengths they bring to the environment and not just the deficits.”

young man wearing glasses speaks into a microphone he holds in his right hand

Gus Wendel

Gus Wendel
PhD candidate, Urban Planning

Understanding the complexities of urban space requires a spirit of openness and an eye for aesthetics.

That’s the creative ethos that drives the research goals of Gus Wendel, candidate for the PhD in urban planning.

For Wendel, this means leaving the library, lab or studio and venturing out into public spaces, viewing the city with a fresh eye and connecting with its people.

UCLA offers ample opportunities to do just that. As he earned his MURP in 2017, Wendel became involved with the Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA’s cityLAB and now runs the program. Since then, he’s helped establish an emerging global network of urban humanists, all eager to share experimental ideas for making public spaces more livable.

And Wendel is one of the UCLA doctoral students behind the (Un)Common Public Space Group, which brings researchers, practitioners and community members together to advance spatial justice goals and simply share and appreciate the L.A. environment. At one event, a celebration of the new Golden Age Park in the Westlake neighborhood, Wendel welcomed the crowd, then took his spot playing cello with the Heart of Los Angeles Intergenerational Orchestra.

“Taking a creative, place-based approach through activities like festivals and performances is one way to connect research goals with community goals, and have greater impact,” he said. 

For his dissertation, Wendel is conducting interviews and scouring historical archives chronicling West Hollywood’s incorporation in 1984 to tell a larger story about urban planning’s role in the formation of sexual space in Los Angeles.

Widely seen as the “first gay city,” West Hollywood was quick to pass nondiscrimination ordinances, beautify urban spaces and prioritize economic growth, Wendel said. But he is also unearthing planning policies that reveal entrenched gender, race and class hierarchies.

“West Hollywood consolidated a dominant gay identity, one that branded itself as inclusive of all LGBTQ people,” he said. “I’m interested in planning’s role in shaping this identity, and the degree to which the process was inclusive of diverse gender and sexual minority communities.”

As he looks toward the future, Wendel plans to continue research that makes the planning profession more inclusive of diverse LGBTQ+ populations. And he hopes to spread the message that artistic approaches more commonly practiced in the humanities can transform the field of planning.

“My goal is to support the next generation of planning scholars and practitioners interested in advancing justice, and share creative methods to study and shape the city.”

The Long Road to Success After decades of persistence, parking reforms championed by Professor Donald Shoup are taking hold around the country

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By Les Dunseith

When the “parking cash-out program” became law in California, Donald Shoup had done it! Surely, this would launch a wave of legislation to reform all those nonsensical parking regulations he’d been writing about since the 1970s.

Or so it seemed in 1992.

Shoup’s idea was that any employer that offers subsidized parking for its workers should also offer employees the option of taking the cash value if they opt out of parking. Within a year of getting the attention of a state assemblyman, it was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor.

“And I thought, well, this is easy! I just have to be clear and explain what I’m doing,” Shoup recalled. “But [parking reform] has taken a very long time to really sink in.”

man in dark suit rests one arm on a huge stack of books on a folding table

Planning Commission official Chris Meyer stands with a huge stack of Don Shoup’s book “The High Cost of Free Parking” weighing down a folding table during a news conference in Minnesota that was held to launch a parking reform effort in the state. The books were distributed to all members of the Legislature.

To understand Shoup’s research on parking, it helps to have read his landmark book with the wry title: “The High Cost of Free Parking,” first published in 2005. But it’s not required. Don Shoup is adept at boiling his crusade down to four key reforms:

1. Parking cash-out.

2. Eliminate requirements that force real estate developers to accommodate a minimum number of parking spaces per construction project, a practice that Shoup viewed almost as “an established religion” in the planning profession.

3. Charge drivers for parking on city streets and in city lots, setting the price to ensure one or two open spaces on every block.

4. Make the practice of paying for parking politically popular by dedicating the revenue to additional public services. “So, if anybody puts a dollar in a parking meter, it comes right out the other side to clean the sidewalk or repair the street or plant trees,” Shoup explained.

Shoup sees previous parking practices as a flimsy house of cards. “They were assembled over decades by officials who were arbitrarily adding a parking requirement,” he said. “And it was all a pseudoscience.”

Decades later, the wave of policy change Shoup always envisioned may finally be arriving. A spry octogenarian who still comes to campus regularly almost a decade after retiring, the distinguished research professor of urban planning is seeing his ideas being implemented in city halls, statehouses and government offices far and wide:

  • Buffalo, San Francisco and San Diego are among numerous cities that have rethought parking policies.
  • Two years ago, California abolished parking minimums within a half-mile of transit. Other states are looking to do the same. And a bill introduced in Congress could take the idea nationwide.
  • Dynamically priced curb parking continues to spread at the municipal level, and the federal government has spent millions looking into the practice.
  • Several international locales have acted on Shoup’s ideas or studied their feasibility.

A central focus for Shoup is the practice of devoting immense amounts of valuable land primarily to free parking for cars. It’s all those places where cars sit, unmoving, 95% of the time. Surely, everyone can understand that having too many cars contributes to exhaust-filled, unwalkable cities plagued by traffic jams? We know about carbon emissions and how automobiles contribute to climate change, right?

Professor Michael Manville is one of Shoup’s former students and now chair of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin. He wrote an essay for the Journal of Planning Education and Research in 2022 that extols Shoup’s vision:

“Transformation requires reform, reform requires action, and actions can’t be ambiguous. Actions are clear and specific — what exactly should we do?

“Don Shoup is clear and specific: Price the curb. Abolish the parking requirements. Invest in the neighborhoods.”

stylized poster of Donald Shoup's face with text below that integrats is name with the word "hope"

Isaiah Mouw hosts The Parking Podcast, and Shoup was a guest. So, Mouw had a friend create artwork that the professor has since adopted as his signature image on social media. It shows Shoup’s face in a style made famous by artist Shepard Fairey. Mouw said, “I saw the Obama ‘Hope’ poster and thought parking reform could use a ‘Shoup’ poster.

Among Shoup’s followers are government officials and planning consultants, plus environmentally conscious cyclists and fans of public transit. Shoup’s observations can be an epiphany for many people. Some become devotees. They call themselves “Shoupistas.”

Patrick Siegman was the first.

He never took a class from Shoup. He never even took a class at UCLA. Siegman discovered Shoup’s research while an undergraduate at Stanford. And that discovery has had more influence on his life and career than anything in a class he did attend.

“Professor Shoup managed to make the apparently dry topic of parking economics and regulation not only worth studying, but compelling, fascinating and, at times, hilarious,” Siegman wrote in an essay for Streetsblog.

How did Siegman become the original Shoupista?

“I was at a beer garden here in San Francisco,” Siegman said in an interview. He had just finished an outing with friends. It was sometime in the 1990s.

“We’re hanging out and talking — a whole bunch of bicycle advocates — and I started yammering away about my thoughts, and Shoup’s research and the importance of parking reform. I’m with Dave Snyder, who was the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which has a lot of your classic San Francisco radicals. He just looked at me and said, ‘Man, you’re just a Shoupista!’” Siegman remembers it getting a big laugh. He and his friends got the reference immediately because they’d grown up during the 1980s when revolutionaries were taking on right-wing dictatorships across Latin America. In Nicaragua, the rebels were known as Sandinistas.

What’s it like being the first Shoupista?

“Well, it’s an honor,” Siegman said. “It also surprised and delighted me how that term took off. It has taken on a life of its own.”

Siegman was the first of many. Kevin Holliday was enlightened by Shoup’s ideas while pursuing the MA UP degree he earned at UCLA in 2014. Four years later, he formed a Facebook group, The Shoupistas, for “the followers of Professor Donald Shoup.” It now has more than 8,000 members.

“Today, there is still a lot of traffic on that group,” Holliday said. “People are obviously interested in it.”

Holliday spent about 18 years working as a planning professional, then more recently started his own company, Bright Triangle, which provides process improvement consulting services.

He was involved in implementing pricing for parking based on demand in San Francisco, which saw roughly half of its meter prices decline.

People who wind up focused on parking reform arrive unexpectedly, he said. “No one grows up thinking they’re going to work in parking.”

Shoup himself came to parking reform by surprise, and that’s part of his legacy, Holliday said. Shoup’s dogged determination is also a marvel to Holliday: “How many other people in this world can get folks to read an 800-page book?”

map of North American shows dozens of red dots to represent cities where parking reforms have been instituted

The Parking Reform Network tracks the progress of policy changes on an interactive map. For five years, the network has been educating the public about Shoup’s work, and President Tony Jordan says their database is increasingly a go-to resource for people wanting to make parking changes a reality.

So far, the parking reforms have taken hold mostly in left-leaning places. But Shoup and others don’t see the issue as being conservative or progressive. Both the Obama and Trump administrations came out in opposition to minimum parking requirements.

“Getting rid of parking requirements appeals to the right because it gets the government out of business,” Shoup said. Not having to provide a fixed amount of parking makes life easier for housing developers, reducing their costs.

“So, you can imagine why Trump … he’s a developer. He knows what parking requirements demand. He thinks he should be in charge of how many parking spaces he provides!” Shoup said with a chuckle.

“Getting rid of parking requirements appeals to the left because it reduces traffic congestion, air pollution and carbon emissions. It can be part of the war on cars,” he said.

Shoup himself is purposefully nonpolitical. “I recommend parking reforms that will benefit almost everyone regardless of their politics.”

One reason that Shoup’s ideas have taken hold and spread is that his writing is very clear. Manville and Holliday are among the many students and colleagues who’ve assisted him over the years and continue to do so as co-writers and editors. They see Shoup’s approach as different from most professors.

“There’s a model of academia that says you must publish lots of articles, and every few years the dean counts up those articles and you get a raise,” Manville said. “And so you sort of do the minimum to get it published, and then you move on to something else.

“He always wrote, and still does write, articles with a mindset of not just getting them published in academic journals, but also to be available to anyone who cares to read them,” said Manville, noting that Shoup strives to write in a manner that will appeal to students.

“He always had a very good understanding that one of the most powerful things you could do from a policy perspective is have a publication end up on someone’s syllabus,” Manville explained. “Because then the future planners of the world have no choice but to read it.”

man with white beard holds hands about a foot apart

Donald Shoup holds his hands close together to show the actual size of the statue in a photo enlargement that fills one wall of his office. Photo by Les Dunseith

Shoup embraces every means that will spread the word. He’s active on social media. Interviews with him can be found on YouTube and TikTok. And as an in-person marketer of parking reform, he is relentless.

“Anywhere he goes, he’s going to grab somebody and start talking about parking,” Manville said. He recounts a story of Shoup discovering on a flight to Sacramento that a member of the Assembly was a few rows ahead.

“And he connived to switch seats with the person next to that guy, and then just harangued the poor man about parking on the whole flight,” Manville said. “That’s Shoup in a nutshell.”

Shoup tends to downplay his accomplishments, citing luck and longevity. He notes that he first used the word “parking” in an academic article in 1970 and began focusing on the reforms in earnest in 1978.

“THAT is perseverance,” he said.

Shoup also credits the support he received at UCLA and the freedom he felt within Urban Planning to keep saying what he believed even when others dismissed it.

Most people would have tired of the crusade long before 40-plus years. Not Donald Shoup.

“He just keeps going and going and going,” Holliday said. “And I think that’s a testament to not only how deeply he believes these things, but how much he wants to convince someone else to believe them.”

 

Democracy Challenged? The 2024 Berggruen Governance Index Updated report examines new data about the relationship between the quality of democracy, governance and life around the world over time

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The world has taken a small step backward on the path of democracy since 2010, according to a global index released this week by an international group of researchers. The 2024 Berggruen Governance Index, or BGI, shows slippage of measurable benchmarks of democratic accountability across 145 countries — from a 2010 average of 67 on a 100-point scale to 65 points in 2021, the latest year for which data is available. The global average had risen from 64 to 67 points between 2000 and 2010. The 96-page report, “Democracy Challenged,” was unveiled Wednesday by researchers at UCLA who collaborated on the project with the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute and the Berlin-based Hertie School. The report led by Helmut Anheier of UCLA Luskin examines the relationship between the quality of democracy, the quality of governance and the quality of life in over 140 countries over 20 years. The finding of slippage in the BGI’s Democratic Accountability Index is only a small setback, which “tempers some of the more dire assessments about the future of democracy,” the authors wrote. Countries with some of the largest declines in the democracy index are India, China, Venezuela, Thailand, Turkey, Yemen and Russia. In the European Union, Poland and Hungary saw significant backsliding, according to the report. The United States, which had risen from 91 to 95 points in the decade through 2010, has since fallen back to 86 on the democracy index. State capacity in the U.S. is also sliding, from a steady 79 points in 2010 to 64 in 2021. Yet on the public goods index, the country has steadily climbed from 84 points in 2000 to 87 in 2021. — Democracy News Alliance

 

Dennis Proposes Giving Citizens More Say in How Their Taxes Are Spent

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Writing for the National Civic League, UCLA Luskin lecturer Michelle Dennis draws on her decades of experience in local government to advocate for a new democratic mechanism she calls a Participatory Assembly for Budgeting, or PAB. Dennis’ idea would combine two innovations — participatory budgeting and citizens’ assemblies — into a new model that would give citizens a meaningful say in how their tax dollars are spent. In participatory budgeting, community members have a vote on the use of public funds. The citizens’ assembly model involves selecting citizens to represent the diversity of a community, then bringing them together to deliberate and make recommendations on policy decisions. Dennis details her idea in a step-by-step manner and cites clear benefits: increased public trust, a citizen voice in decision-making and services that better match people’s priorities. “A PAB has not yet been implemented by a city,” Dennis concludes. “What city will be the first?”

Read the article

 

Allow Housing Projects With Zero Parking? Shoup Says That’s a Good Thing

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In Los Angeles and other parts of California, thousands of new apartments are being developed with little to no on-site parking, causing neighbors to worry about an influx of new renters fighting for existing parking spots. That worry may be short-sighted but it’s understandable, UCLA Luskin’s Donald Shoup told LAist. “We all want to park free — including me,” said Shoup, an urban planning professor. “The problem with parking requirements is that in some cases the required parking is so expensive that the developer never even thinks about proposing a development.”  That is changing in part because of a 2022 change to state law that no longer requires housing developers to provide parking for apartment buildings within half a mile of a major public transit stop. As Shoup has long said, such parking requirements can increase construction costs to an extent that it limits the type of housing that can profitably be built on expensive urban land, thus discouraging new projects. Shoup also spoke with Colorado Public Radio about similar reforms in Colorado.

Read the LAist article
Read the Colorado Public Radio article

 

L.A. County Residents’ Satisfaction With Quality of Life Matches Lowest in Year 9 of Survey High cost of housing is the most important factor impacting the annual Quality of Life Index, particularly among renters

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By Les Dunseith

Concerns over the high cost of living pushed the satisfaction of Los Angeles County residents back to its lowest-ever level, with renters feeling especially pessimistic about their futures, according to an annual UCLA survey.

The Quality of Life Index, or QLI, is a project of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs  that measures county residents’ satisfaction in nine categories. The overall rating fell two points from last year to 53 on a scale from 10 to 100, marking the second time in three years it came in below the survey’s 55 midpoint since the index launched in 2016. That means a majority of respondents are dissatisfied with the overall quality of their lives.

fever chart shows rating change over time

The cost-of-living rating dropped from 41 to 38, the lowest satisfaction score ever observed for any category in the survey. Although all major demographic subgroups rated the cost of living negatively, the lowest scores came from women, 36 (33 from those 50–64 years old) and Latinas, 36 — as well as renters, 35.

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the study at UCLA, said renters, who make up nearly half of survey respondents, are being disproportionately affected by the economic and inflationary pressures facing the region. More than half, or 59%, cited housing as the most important factor in their rating.

“Housing costs have gone up,” Yaroslavsky said. “And incomes have not gone up anywhere near commensurate with what’s happened to housing.”

While 61% of homeowners feel optimistic about their economic future in Los Angeles County, 51% of renters report being pessimistic. Only 23% of renters think they will be able to buy a home where they would want to live at some point in the future.

pie chart shows only one in four renters expect to buy a home eventually

 

This year’s survey also produced striking results on the issue of homelessness.

“We discovered very little optimism about whether the current programs and efforts to eradicate homelessness will work,” Yaroslavsky said.

More than half, or 60%, of respondents said homelessness in their area has gotten worse over the past year, with only 10% saying it has gotten better. Just 20% are more hopeful than they were last year that the homelessness situation in Los Angeles County will improve.

Respondents were also asked whether they worried about becoming homeless themselves, with the highest levels of anxiety expressed by people living in households earning less than $60,000 annually at 44%, renters 37% and African Americans 33%.

“Despite the best efforts of state and local officials, the public is more negative and less hopeful about solving homelessness,” Yaroslavsky said.

In an election year, do such findings signal possible voter upheaval?

“It feeds an overall sense that things aren’t working well,” said Yaroslavsky, a former elected official. He framed this year’s results in the context of nearly a decade’s worth of research showing positive results for neighborhood quality and racial/ethnic relations, but low marks in categories commonly associated with decisions by public officials.

“A main theme over the last nine years is that Angelenos love the neighborhoods where they live. We appreciate diversity and get along with others better than some people think. And the quality of life for most of us is pretty good,” he said. “But at some fundamental level, people think our governmental institutions are letting them down.”

The QLI showed minor changes from the previous year in most categories, although satisfaction with education fell three points to 48, the second-lowest score behind cost of living. While transportation/traffic jumped eight points in importance from 2023, it remained among the three lowest categories in quality-of-life importance.

Among Angelenos who are employed, 55% are working full time at a workplace away from their home. Of those, 59% of Latinos, 64% of African Americans, 63% of men over age 50 and 63% of Latino men always work away from home.

The last year has seen a modest decline in most ratings for elected officials.

  • Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna is viewed favorably by 34% and unfavorably by 26%. Last year was 37% favorable and 21% unfavorable.
  • Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is viewed favorably by 42% and unfavorably by 32%, a drop from 46% favorable and 23% unfavorable in last year’s QLI.
  • Respondents had a slightly favorable view of the city councils in their cities: 37% favorable and 32% unfavorable. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is viewed more negatively: 27% favorable and 35% unfavorable.

Regarding the environment, 25% of respondents said climate change had a major impact on their quality of life in the last year; 38% saw a minor impact. The 2024 QLI also asked about the availability of air conditioning: 75% of Angelenos have it in their homes but with substantial variation by region, income and race/ethnicity.

  • Some of the differences likely relate to climate patterns: 48% of residents in the ocean-cooled South Bay communities have air conditioning compared to 92% in the hotter San Fernando Valley.
  • Residents most lacking in air conditioning, 40%, are at the lowest end of the income scale (under $30,000 per year), compared to just 11% for those making over $150,000 per year. And 30% of renters do not have air conditioning.

This year’s QLI is based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with 1,686 county residents from Feb. 22 to March 14. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 3%.

Funding for the Quality of Life Index is provided by Meyer and Renee Luskin through the Los Angeles Initiative. The full report is being published April 17 as part of UCLA’s Luskin Summit.

View the report and other information about this year’s study, plus previous Quality of Life Indexes, on the website of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

text with report name and a map of Los Angeles County

 

The Power of Lived Experiences Three alumni share the personal stories that impact their policy efforts on homelessness — ‘the greatest moral and humanitarian crisis of our lifetime’ 

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By Les Dunseith

Lourdes Castro Ramírez entered college as one of nine children from a tight-knit working-class family that had migrated from Mexico when she was 4. She had no idea how that background would guide her career as a policymaker focusing on housing affordability. 

“As a first-generation college graduate, I did not intend to get into this field,” Castro Ramírez recalled March 7 during a Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture Series event that included State Sen. Caroline Menjivar MSW ’18 and Assemblymember Isaac Bryan MPP ’18. “In fact, I didn’t even know that this field existed.”

Now Castro Ramírez is the point person for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on housing and homelessness, working on an issue that has reached crisis proportions after too little national policy attention for decades.

“I do feel that there is hope. We are now finally seeing housing policy in action, getting the attention that it requires,” the 1996 UCLA urban planning master’s graduate told faculty, students, alumni and others at the Luskin Conference Center.

“Homelessness is the greatest moral and humanitarian crisis of our lifetime,” Bryan said. “We’re at a crisis position even though [California has] more billionaires than anywhere in the world. But that is the Los Angeles that we have created. 

“And it didn’t just happen. I don’t want to believe it was on purpose because it would be too painful to believe that somebody wanted tens of thousands of poor and disproportionately Black people sleeping on our streets,” he said. “I don’t want to believe that it was intentional. But neglect isn’t an excuse to not make it right.”

Bryan represents a district near the 405 and 10 freeways mostly to the east and south of UCLA that includes some of the L.A.’s wealthiest neighborhoods — and some of its poorest. He talked about the irony of needing to raise money by speaking to rich donors in the mansions of Beverly Hills and then returning to his rented apartment in a modest-but-affordable neighborhood just a few miles away. 

He has experienced housing precarity first-hand, including during his UCLA education. 

“I remember walking across the stage on graduation day. I was very proud. I was very excited,” Bryan recalled. “And there was a faculty member in the audience who knew that I couldn’t pay my rent that month. And she wrote the personal check to make sure that I could stay afloat till I found a job.”

Bryan was able to get his UCLA degree in part because he received a grant from the David Bohnett Foundation, which seeks to improve society through social activism and since 2007 has been providing awards that include a position in the L.A. Mayor’s Office for three selected fellows. Longtime adjunct instructor and UCLA Luskin Board of Advisors member Michael Fleming is the founding director of the Bohnett Foundation. He served as the moderator for a Q&A with Castro Ramírez, Bryan and Menjivar, who like Bryan is a former Bohnett fellow and a master’s degree recipient from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. All three talked about income disparity and how their personal experiences relate to affordable housing issues in California.  

Menjivar said her large family of Salvadoran immigrants struggled to make ends meet while living in one- or two-bedroom apartments in low- to middle-income communities like Tarzana. Her mother worked as a house cleaner. 

“I would commute to school and sometimes get a ride from my mom,” Menjivar recalled. “She would drop me off — her firstborn, first-generation student at UCLA, the No. 1 public university in the world — and then she would go down the street to clean a mansion.”

That perspective is never far from her mind.

“Now, I represent 1 million people in the state legislature, looking to bring more affordable housing,” said Menjivar, whose district includes Burbank and many working-class neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley. “So, when [policymakers] talk about eviction protections and housing affordability, I don’t just speak on it. I’ve lived through that.”

Their lived experiences affect the decisions that Menjivar and Bryan are making and the issues they choose to advance as elected officials in Sacramento. Both have been involved in efforts tied to their backgrounds in public policy and social services. (Menjivar noted that, like herself, Mayor Bass was educated as a social worker.) 

Lourdes Castro Ramírez spoke about her role as the chief of housing and homelessness solutions for Los Angeles.
woman in pink jacket smiles while talking with an older man whose back is to the camera
woman in pink jacket smiles while talking with an older man whose back is to the camera

In prepared remarks that preceded the panel discussion, Castro Ramírez spoke about her fondness for UCLA and why she was happy to accept the speaking invitation.

“Just walking into this space and seeing UCLA in the background, and seeing so many people I know here, just makes me really proud of my parents, where I come from and this university that invested in me,” she told an audience that included current colleagues on the Luskin School’s Board of Advisors.

It was a UCLA professor who first encouraged her to look into affordable housing as a potential career path, she said, and that led to roles as a practitioner and policymaker at the municipal level in Ventura and San Antonio, at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, and later in Sacramento as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s secretary of the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. 

“And now I’m back in L.A., back to my hometown … and working on the issues that are really important and critical to our city, to our state, and to our country as chief of housing and homelessness solutions,” she said.

Castro Ramírez spoke about harmonizing federal, state and local government efforts, a process that the mayor’s office characterizes as “locking arms” to address the housing crisis.

The overall number of people falling into homelessness continues to outpace the number who are being housed, but this is not because individual efforts have been unsuccessful. 

“In fact, there are incredible nonprofit organizations, housing authorities, housing groups who are doing amazing work,” she said, noting that a supportive housing approval process that used to take six months now takes an average of 43 days. Almost 14,000 affordable units have been approved for Los Angeles. 

“This is what the intersection of policy and programming implementation looks like, being able to move with a sense of urgency, being able to implement the idea that having a place to call home is fundamental,” Castro Ramírez said. 

Public service can be frustrating work, charged with philosophical disagreement and subject to constant second-guessing often motivated by political opportunism. Fleming asked the panel what makes the aggravation worthwhile. 

“I want to make my community, my city, my state, my country better. And that is an awesome privilege that I try to never take for granted,” said Bryan, noting that his chief of staff is another Class of 2018 UCLA Luskin graduate, Caleb Rabinowitz. “And when we walk out of the Capitol, we can kind of ask ourselves, ‘Is the state better this week because we were here?’” 

Menjivar said she is motivated by her family history. 

“My mom came to this country for a better future for her kids not knowing that the future for our family tree would lead from house cleaner to state senator in one generation,” she said.

But there have been hurdles along the way, and that’s also a motivation.

“I was born with what I call the Triple L — a lady, a Latina and a lesbian. So you can imagine I have a handful of stories around discrimination, around facing barriers and overcoming them, and I know that others helped in getting me to the point that I am now.” 

Her lived experiences are vital to her success.

“I think about every barrier that I went through to get to this point, every ‘No’ that I got, even when I was running for office. And for every “No’ that I was given, I’m here now to ensure that other people like me don’t get those ‘Nos’ anymore.”

Castro Ramírez said she is grateful to have gone “to an amazing university and to step into a role that I never thought that I was prepared to step into.”  Glancing at her fellow alumni, she continued, “And I’ve been able to see the power of our collective ability to make change and to make a difference.”

She paused for a moment, then spoke again, softly. 

“I guess the last thing — and the reason I’m hesitating is because, you know, this is a very personal reason for me — I am the mother of three children. I had a son; he was 11 years old when he passed away due to cancer. He was really an incredible, talented individual who craved … leaving his mark in this world. And that didn’t happen.

“And I feel like every day that I wake up, every day that I show up to work, show up to address the work that needs doing, I feel like I’m showing up for him.”

The UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs hosts the Luskin Lecture Series to enhance public discourse on topics relevant to the betterment of society. This presentation was also part of an ongoing series of events in the 2023-24 academic year to commemorate 25 years since the first graduating class from UCLA Luskin Public Policy was sent into the world equipped to make changes for the better.

View photos of the event. 

Luskin Lawmakers