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Battling Injustice With Transparency, Democracy

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Research by the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) at UCLA Luskin continues to shape conversations about justice and equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The center’s director, Research Professor Paul Ong, shared insights on the multifaceted “web of inequality” underlying systemic racism during a webinar hosted by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and covered by the Los Angeles Sentinel and Daily News. “If you think about the fight against racism as a war, you need to understand in greater detail the enemy,” Ong said. His center’s work aims to provide that information “so that we can understand the magnitude of the problems, the patterns of the problems, the trajectory of the problems,” he said. “I think transparency along with democracy is the very critical thing to make sure that institutional changes are implemented.” Recent CNK research has measured the severe economic impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, cited by NBC News and the Washington Post, and investigated the challenges in conducting a fair 2020 Census count, cited by the Los Angeles Times and ABC News Radio.

Watch the webinar

Roy on Shifting Hotels From Hospitality to Urgently Needed Housing

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Ananya Roy, director of the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, co-authored an opinion piece for the Appeal that argued for the conversion of tens of thousands of vacant hotel rooms to house Angelenos threatened with homelessness. Given the downturn in the global tourist industry, many of these rooms are expected to remain unused for years to come, said Roy and co-author Jonny Coleman of NOlympics LA. The public acquisition of hotels and motels using tools such as eminent domain is the only way the region can add an adequate number of housing units quickly and affordably, they argued. “It is worth reflecting on how the present moment of compounding crises has broken past the limits of the possible,” they wrote. The piece pointed to the institute’s recently released report, “Hotel California: Housing the Crisis,” which was also cited in media outlets including LAist, Univision and NextCity.

Read the op-ed

 

A Lesson on Housing Justice for L.A.’s Classrooms

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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.

Listen to the podcast