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Shedding Light on ‘How America Chose Homelessness’

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Research from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D) forecasting mass evictions and homelessness amid the COVID-19 pandemic was featured in the latest issue of the Nation. The pandemic amplified a crisis that dates back generations but was exacerbated during the 1980s, when social safety nets were dismantled in favor of trickle-down economic theories, said Professor Emeritus Gary Blasi of UCLA Law, one of the authors of the II&D research. In addition to immediate action to protect people forced from their homes during the pandemic, Blasi called for longterm solutions to address the structural causes of mass homelessness. “We could ramp up a wartime production of manufactured housing,” Blasi said. “It’s just a question of will and money.” In addition to the Nation cover story, “How America Chose Homelessness,” media outlets in the United States and abroad have highlighted II&D’s research to provide context to their reporting about the impending eviction and homelessness crisis.

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Center for Neighborhood Knowledge on L.A.’s Housing Crisis

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A New Yorker article on homelessness and the affordable housing crisis in California cited data from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK). The article focused on Weekend Warriors, a company that hires individuals facing housing insecurity to house-sit vacant homes in gentrifying neighborhoods. Weekend Warrior employees live in properties that are being flipped, guarding them through the renovation, staging, open-house and inspection periods. CNK research shows that Los Angeles has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city. As for rental units, Los Angeles has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country and the average rent is $2,200 a month. The housing shortage, caused in part by restrictive zoning laws and NIMBYism, has exacerbated homelessness in Los Angeles, with about 66,000 individuals sleeping in cars, in shelters or on the street on any given night.

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CNK Documents Racial Inequalities Among Homeowners Due to Pandemic

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A new report by the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) at UCLA Luskin highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected homeowners’ inability to pay mortgages, signaling an unprecedented housing crisis and revealing huge racial disparities among homeowners. Researchers from the center, led by Paul Ong, research professor and CNK director, partnered with the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and Ong & Associates to produce research as part of a series of COVID-19 policy briefs documenting the systemic racial inequalities of the pandemic. The new report, “Systemic Racial Inequality and the COVID-19 Homeowner Crisis,” analyzes data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey, collected between April and July 2020, to examine the magnitude, pattern and causes of the housing crisis. The authors report that about 5 million, or 8%, of American homeowners were unable to pay their mortgage on time. In comparison, during the Great Recession, there were approximately 3.8 million foreclosures; early-stage delinquent mortgages (for 30 to 59 days) peaked at 3%. “Compared with non-Hispanic whites, Black people and Hispanics (or Latinx) had two to three times higher odds of experiencing housing hardships,” the researchers noted. “This systematic inequality is produced by pre-existing income and educational inequalities, and reinforced by the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on the labor market,” according to the report. The rising number of homeowners currently struggling to pay their mortgages is an ominous indication that this may lead to more foreclosures, housing instability and homelessness, the researchers wrote.

Lens on Increasing Demand for Rent Control Measures

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Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, was featured in an LAist article discussing a Burbank rent control measure headed for the ballot in November. Supporters collected 7,749 signatures to put the measure on the ballot, but it has been met with resistance by Burbank’s elected officials. “Calls for rent control in more places have probably gotten louder and more consistent,” Lens said. “Policymakers are paying more serious attention to [rent control] as kind of an emergency response to these various rental affordability crises.” He explained that politicians often look less favorably on rent control measures than their constituents because landlords have more political power than their tenants. According to Lens, rent control is considered a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type of solution.

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The Data Behind a Worsening Black Housing Crisis

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A study by UCLA Luskin’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge was featured in a Los Angeles Times article about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Black housing crisis. Before the pandemic, Black people faced the greatest housing insecurity across the United States, with the highest unemployment rate and lowest income of any racial group. COVID-19 has exacerbated the crisis, with Black and Latino workers facing the greatest job losses. Experts explain that systemic racism has hindered Black households from accessing higher-paying jobs and building wealth through homeownership. The article discussed the displacement of longtime Black communities in South Los Angeles and cited a study by the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, directed by research professor Paul Ong. The study showed declining Black population percentages in Leimert Park, Jefferson Park and West Adams compared to a growing white population, and also found that median income growth in those communities outpaced that of the county.

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Lens on Pandemic’s Effect on Housing Crisis

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Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to Dear Pandemic about housing market factors that are affecting how the pandemic is unfolding. Lens said he worries about the “short- and immediate-term losses of income of people who were already very tenuously housed.” For many families already spending huge amounts of their income on rent, the loss of one or two paychecks can mean being foreclosed on or evicted. While short-term policy interventions in the form of income and unemployment support and eviction moratoria have been implemented, they generally do not cancel or lower rent. Lens asked, “What happens when the eviction moratoria are lifted and people are still not able to pay?” In the short term, people must be sheltered without sinking into debt or losing their savings. In the long term, Lens said, the systemic problems of the housing crisis must be fixed.

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Stoll Comments on How Housing Crisis Affects Black Californians

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Public Policy Professor Michael Stoll commented in a CalMatters article on how California’s housing crisis is worse for Black communities following decades of systemic racism. The article shows that significant barriers continue to exist for Black communities and individuals in building and retaining wealth compared to whites and other ethnic groups within the state. Data shows that California cities are typically less segregated than in the Northeast or Midwest. In part, this is due to gentrification and displacement pressures on Black communities in urban cores, notably Los Angeles and the Bay Area. “African Americans and to a lesser extent Latinos are moving to suburban areas at the fastest clip we’ve observed since the civil rights era,” Stoll said. But patterns of segregation continue, he said, noting, “It’s hard to become a socially cohesive place if people are living in different neighborhoods and not being able to communicate and work together around common interests.”

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Ong on Evictions and the Worsening Housing Crisis

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Paul Ong, research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Fox 11 News about the impact of impending evictions on the housing crisis. A moratorium in Los Angeles prohibited landlords from evicting renters during the coronavirus pandemic, but many families fear they will lose their homes when the moratorium is lifted. The threat of eviction comes as widespread unemployment has pushed many households further into debt. After studying how the coronavirus crisis has affected different communities, Ong said that African American and Latino households in Los Angeles County are at high risk. “These are the same workers that … are on the financial edge,” he said. “By the end of the crisis, [they] will be deeply in debt.” 

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Monkkonen Research Informs New Model for Affordable Housing

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An opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times juxtaposed a Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) plan to meet housing construction requirements with recommendations from Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning and public policy. Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to combat the affordable housing crisis in California with construction of 1.3 million new units of housing. The op-ed, written by the managing director of Abundant Housing L.A., accused the SCAG plan of “disproportionately dumping housing into the sprawling exurbs” while leaving wealthy cities with massive job pools alone. Critics say the SCAG plan will create a housing and jobs imbalance that will lengthen commutes and lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Working with Monkkonen, Abundant Housing L.A. researchers built a different model for distributing housing requirements that minimizes sprawl, prioritizes accessibility to transit and creates affordable housing where people want to live and have opportunities to work, the op-ed said.

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Roy Offers Insight on Global Housing Justice

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Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography, spoke to the Goethe-Institut’s Big Pond podcast about housing justice. Through the lens of Berlin and Los Angeles, the podcast examined how old ideas of homelessness are evolving as new solutions are proposed. “We’ve got to think of the actual facts of homelessness as well as the political framing of homelessness in relation to rights and claims,” said Roy, director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. The institute is home to Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, a global research network that focuses not on the housing crisis but on housing justice, Roy said. “It is also our argument that as there is a housing crisis in many cities of the world, particularly in cities that we see to be deeply unequal, there is also in those cities tremendous mobilization,” she said. Roy participated in the Goethe-Institut’s weeklong “Worlds of Homelessness” project in Los Angeles in October.

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