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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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Lens Explores Low-Density Zoning Impact on Health

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Michael Lens published a policy brief in Health Affairs on the downstream effects of low-density residential zoning on health and health equity. Previous research on the relationship between housing and health has identified four important pathways for health equity: housing stability, housing quality and safety, neighborhood characteristics and affordability. While residential zoning ordinances are designed to address density-related concerns such as traffic and environmental harms, Lens explained that “the effect is often to artificially raise the cost of housing for everyone by limiting housing supply, as well as to exclude people who cannot afford to buy single-family homes on large lots.” As a result, low-density zoning practices have exacerbated segregation by income and race. “Safer and healthier neighborhoods tend to have the most restrictive zoning, pricing people out of those areas and increasing segregation and affordability problems,” Lens said. He acknowledged that zoning reform alone cannot fix disparities in housing or health; sufficient housing subsidy programs are crucial, as well as an increase in new housing developments that are required to set aside some units for lower-income households. “The downstream effects of exclusionary land use regulations on health should make scholars and policymakers pay more attention to reforming zoning and expanding housing subsidy programs to make housing more plentiful and affordable,” Lens wrote. Even if increasing density in more neighborhoods does not have an immediate effect on housing affordability, segregation or health, Lens argued that it is a necessary step toward a healthy and sustainable future.

Lens on Redefining ‘Home’ Amid Pandemic

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Michael Lens shared his insights into housing policies and priorities on “Home Rediscovered” on the National Geographic Channel. “We have for decades not produced enough housing to keep up with population growth, and we’re at a point in which the bill is really becoming due,” Lens said on the program, which focused on several individuals and families who have rethought where and how they want to live, now and in the future. “COVID is really present in the minds of all of us, of course. It’s driving 36% of recent home purchases,” Lens said, adding that the ability to work remotely has transformed the housing market. “If you don’t have to commute, then that changes not only the structures that people will demand, but it also changes the locations that they’re likely to inhabit,” he said.

 

Monkkonen on California’s Student Housing Needs

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen spoke to CalMatters about the $500 million in state funding allotted by Gov. Gavin Newsom for affordable student housing. The housing crisis in California has also impacted students, and the funding is meant to help public colleges and universities build affordable housing or renovate existing property through a grant process. Monkkonen noted that the housing aid is a good use of state money. “Unlike grant money or financial aid, housing is a one-time expense that pays dividends because it can be used repeatedly,” he explained. However, experts have agreed that the $500 million package will not be enough to create all of the necessary housing units for public students across California. “A better system would be one in which there’s a long-term plan to grow the stock sufficiently that everyone that wants to live there, can,” Monkkonen said.

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Mukhija on Shortcomings of Housing Relief

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Professor of Urban Planning Vinit Mukhija spoke to the New York Times about the failures of the federal housing relief packages created during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, Congress created a $46.5 billion fund for emergency rental assistance, one of the biggest infusions in federal housing aid in generations. However, resistance from landlords and difficulties navigating the informal housing market made it difficult for residents to access aid packages, and much of the aid is unspent. The relief package did not account for informal and un-permitted housing arrangements, including subletters and roommates whose claim to their space often isn’t documented. “There’s a completely hidden story about how do we access millions of tenants that are in un-permitted units,” Mukhija said. In Los Angeles County, there are an estimated 200,000 illegal housing units, highlighting the contrast between the low-income rental market and the rest of the housing market.

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Monkkonen Debunks Myths of High-Density Housing

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen was featured in a Mel Magazine article about the stigmatization and gentrification of high-density public housing areas. For years, the Cabrini-Green low-income housing project in Chicago was associated with crime and violence. Today, the complex has been renovated into a modern-looking mix of both subsidized and market-rate dwellings, but the stigma around public housing persists. According to Monkkonen, “the stigma and belief that these large complexes are doomed to fail … is a distinctly American point of view.” He pointed out that in places like Hong Kong, France and Scandinavia, government-subsidized housing is more common and culturally accepted. “The common narrative around higher-density living and public housing, and why it became untenable, is a belief that residents didn’t take care of their home,” Monkkonen explained. “But the reason it fell apart was a totally different one. The products of the policies created poor conditions.”

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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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Upzoning Won’t End Single-Family Housing, Lens Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Michael Lens was featured in a Star Tribune article about how zoning affects housing affordability. Many advocates for racial equity and housing affordability are pushing cities across the country to remove zoning requirements that restrict areas to single-family housing only. In some cases, they have been met with opposition from those who fear that removing these requirements would result in the destruction of single-family neighborhoods. Lens pointed out that upzoning does not require the addition of duplexes and triplexes but merely removes a long-standing prohibition and gives landowners more flexibility. “Ending single-family zoning doesn’t end single-family housing, and there’s no real reason why we prioritize single-family housing in such a way,” he said. “You can’t have true integration of race and income without a variety of housing types.”

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Millard-Ball on the Tradeoff of Wide Streets

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A San Francisco Chronicle article highlighted research findings by Urban Planning Associate Professor Adam Millard-Ball on the width of streets in San Francisco. In places with housing shortages, wide streets take up valuable land that could have been used to build more homes or other buildings, Millard-Ball said. While the average street in San Francisco is 50 feet wide, Millard-Ball proposed 16 feet as the functional minimum width for residential streets. In some areas of the city, streets are an average of 93 feet wide. Millard-Ball argued that in high-cost California counties like Santa Clara and San Francisco, the consequences of unnecessarily wide streets are enough to make the costs to narrow them worth it. For cities that are still growing, Millard-Ball suggested that planners build narrower streets to save land for housing. In established cities where narrowing the streets is not feasible, he proposed adapting unused street spaces into outdoor dining spaces, slow streets and other recreational spaces.

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Ong on L.A.’s ‘Web of Urban Inequality’

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A Los Angeles Times story on landlords who skirt anti-eviction rules enacted in response to the COVID-19 outbreak cited research from the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) at UCLA Luskin. A Times analysis of data from the Los Angeles Police Department revealed more than 290 instances of potential illegal lockouts and utility shutoffs across the city over 10 weeks beginning in March. The largest share of those police calls was in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods in South L.A. CNK research shows that members of these communities, who faced disproportionately high rent burdens even before the pandemic, often work in food service and other sectors with significant wage reductions and job losses due to COVID-19. “This is a web of urban inequality,” CNK Director Paul Ong said. “We could talk about housing, we could talk about jobs, we could talk about health. But the truth of the matter is all these things are interlocked.”

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