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Fight for Housing Continues a Year After Sweep of Echo Park Lake

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A new report from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D) on the continued fight for housing a year after the sweep of a homeless encampment at Los Angeles’ Echo Park Lake has garnered widespread media coverage. The report found that, of the 183 people removed from the encampment, only 17 are currently confirmed to be in long-term housing. “Politicians very loudly claimed that all displaced residents would be in stable permanent housing within a year,” II&D Director Ananya Roy said at a news conference. “Echo Park Lake has become both the exemplar and blueprint of this kind of displacement.” The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, KCRW, KQED, CBS Los Angeles and LAist are among the outlets that covered the report. Roy told the Guardian that, when sweeps are the driving force of policy, outreach efforts are doomed to fail. “The few times we’ve seen success is when people get housing through their own community networks.”

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Luskin Housing Scholars Weigh In on California’s Crisis

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

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Monkkonen on UCLA as a Model for Affordable Housing

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen spoke to Curbed about UCLA’s new guaranteed student housing plan. UCLA is the first University of California school to offer four years of housing for first-year students and two years of housing for transfer students. Meanwhile, the city of L.A. continues to struggle to produce affordable housing. According to Monkkonen, the biggest lesson to be learned from UCLA is the power of consolidating everything from planning to financing in one department and essentially becoming a public-housing developer. “UCLA develops its own land-use plan and then executes capital programs like the construction of dorms,” Monkkonen said. “Proactively planning for housing to be built rather than setting up rules and waiting to see if developers build or not is the kind of paradigm shift we need.” He also recommended expanding affordable housing closer to schools in order to benefit students, families, teachers and staff.

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Vestal on Barriers to Addressing Homelessness

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Mark Vestal spoke to LAist about Section 8, a federal program that subsidizes housing for low-income individuals and families, the elderly and disabled. This program allows individuals experiencing homelessness to secure housing through vouchers. However, Vestal noted that about 50% of the people who get vouchers still can’t find housing. Landlords are incentivized to accept housing vouchers when they are in communities in decline and they are unable to get market-rate rent, but the incentive disappears when neighborhoods start to gentrify. “Landlords can discriminate against voucher holders and they have complete discretion,” Vestal explained. Furthermore, once an individual finds an apartment, it can still take a long time for the housing voucher to be approved. Vestal concluded that unhoused people have ideas about how they want to live with belongings and social space, and we should have a housing system that respects their needs and wants.

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Luskin Summit Draws Inspiration from Europe to Combat Homelessness

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A panel of experts from around the world joined the Feb. 23 Luskin Summit webinar “International Models of Social Housing: Lessons for California” to brainstorm strategies to address housing affordability and homelessness. California Assembly member Alex Lee welcomed attendees and kicked off the event by noting that nearly half of California residents qualify as rent-burdened as a result of the affordable housing crisis. Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen led the conversation about the successes of social housing and urban planning in Europe that could be adopted in California. Researcher Kath Scanlon from the London School of Economics noted that the goal of social housing is to solve housing affordability, but a successful social housing program will start by alleviating some of the pressure in the housing market. “For a variety of reasons, not everyone is going to be able to house themselves in the way we think they should be housed,” Scanlon said. “If California wants to step up, it will not be straightforward, but you have to start somewhere.” Helsinki’s housing program manager, Hanna Dhalmann, discussed Finland’s largest and most successful municipal housing company. “The first step is to give people real homes,” Dhalmann said. She recommended starting by investing in building affordable housing and turning housing shelters into apartments. Finally, former Deputy Mayor Jean-Louis Missika described how Paris was able to significantly expand housing production. Vivian Rescalvo, a member of the Board of Advisors of the Luskin School of Public Affairs, offered a closing statement for the event.

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L.A. Road Trip Reveals Enormous Wealth, Astounding Poverty

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In the premier episode of “On the Road to Change,” Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D), takes viewers on a drive through Los Angeles’ wealthiest and most impoverished areas to illustrate the region’s entrenched housing injustices. In the video produced by the Goethe-Institut and Thomas Mann House Los Angeles, Roy and German philosopher Rainer Forst visit a mega-mansion on the market for hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when hundreds of thousands of Angelenos face eviction as pandemic-era renter protections expire, according to II&D research. In a conversation blending policy strategies with linguistics and economic philosophy, Roy and Forst explore the complexities of providing housing relief in a place of enormous wealth and beauty but also astounding poverty and misery. Their journey ends in Skid Row, where Pete White, founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), shares the grassroots group’s strategies for bringing about housing justice.

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Manville on Opportunities Created by SB9

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

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Disadvantages Magnified by Pandemic, Ong Says

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UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Director Paul Ong was featured in a USA Today article about the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black families. Black people are more than twice as likely to rent as white people, eliminating the safety net that comes with owning a home. Furthermore, Black renters are more likely to be low-income and cost burdened, the article noted. The pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities due to racial discrimination and historic inequities in education, employment and housing. “The pre-pandemic disadvantages that were there already – paying a higher share of one’s income to afford housing, having a much more precarious economic standing, not having the same financial fallback with huge differences in wealth and assets – those disadvantages during the pandemic got magnified,” Ong explained. “During the pandemic, our research and other people’s research clearly shows that African Americans were displaced at a much higher rate.”

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Roy Fears Housing Crisis Growing Worse

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Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare Ananya Roy spoke to the New York Times about the affordable housing crisis and growing issue of homelessness in California. While the eviction moratorium has been a “safety net of sorts” for communities hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a “postponement of the crisis, rather than a solution,” Roy said in a lengthy interview. “Its disappearance will be sure to expand and expedite evictions.” Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, called for “full rental debt cancellation and public investment in housing for working-class communities.” She predicted that the economic impact of the pandemic will result in a “housing crisis worse than the Great Depression,” prompting mass evictions and exacerbating homelessness. To avoid this, Roy recommended that the government buy and convert vacant and distressed properties into low-income housing, a solution that is faster and less expensive than building new housing.

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Human Rights Over Property Rights, Vestal Says

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The Los Angeles Times spoke to Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Mark Vestal for a column about the growing issue of homelessness in Los Angeles. Experts estimate that there are at least 60,000 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles and as many as 365,000 renting households on the brink of eviction. While most Angelenos agree that homelessness is a pressing issue, they disagree on whether it is a property rights issue or a human rights issue, which makes it difficult to find a solution. “The history of homelessness testifies to the futility of trying to find solutions that average these two perspectives,” Vestal said. Enforcing property rights on people experiencing homelessness only creates more obstacles to ending homelessness. “You can’t just criminalize a condition that people can’t cure,” Vestal said. “These problems that we have created — they are all intimately tied up with the good things we thought we were making of our society.”

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