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Roy on L.A. Ban on Homeless Encampments Near Schools

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Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, spoke to the New York Times about the Los Angeles City Council’s decision to prohibit homeless people from setting up tents within 500 feet of public and private schools and day care centers. The new law, passed on a vote of 11-3, would bump the number of banned sites from 20 to 2,000, one councilman estimated. “It’s not an effort to alleviate poverty. It’s an effort to manage visible poverty and get it out of sight,” said Roy, a professor of social welfare, urban planning and geography. As more people begin living on the streets, “liberal cities are doing everything in their power to get around Martin v. Boise,” she said, referring to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 ruling that prosecuting people for sleeping in public amounts to cruel and unusual punishment when no shelter beds are available.

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Taking the Measure of L.A.’s ‘Cool Pavement’ Experiment

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A CNN story on the climate adaptation strategies used by eight world cities described research conducted by V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. The article described Los Angeles’ use of cooling paint on city streets as part of a pilot project to measure the effect on surface and ambient temperatures. Turner, an assistant professor of urban planning, and research partner Ariane Middel of Arizona State University collected data from the project and found that treated street surfaces were cooled by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. However, they also found that heat radiating from the streets elevated temperatures immediately above the surface. Another type of paint could yield different results, and the city is continuing the program to see what methods work best. 

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Informing Equitable Stormwater Investments in L.A. County

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In a drought-prone area like Los Angeles, rainwater provides tremendous potential to boost local water supply, as well as provide multiple other ecosystem and community benefits. That’s why in 2018, L.A. County voters approved Measure W, a tax that raises about $280 million annually to capture, clean and reuse water runoff. Measure W and the program it created, the Safe Clean Water Program, funds projects to clean and strengthen the local water supply and build community resilience. Research by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and Stantec is helping to ensure that these investments benefit all Angelenos, especially residents of disadvantaged communities, as the program already calls for. A new report provides advice to the county to strengthen the impacts of the program over time. The study analyzed 116 projects funded by the program — projects like converting open spaces into wetlands and adding rain gardens along transit lines. Researchers explored the program’s selection process and how projects are geographically distributed in disadvantaged communities. The team also conducted workshops with nonprofit, community-based, and public and private sector stakeholders to understand neighborhood needs and anticipated benefits from each project. “It’s crucial that members of disadvantaged communities have the opportunity to identify those benefits for their own communities. It can’t just be a top-down process,” said Jon Christensen, co-author of the report and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Innovation. This project builds upon the center’s research on local water resilience, environmental equity and urban greening, as well as L.A.’s voter-approved infrastructure measures. 

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Vestal on Law-Enforcement Approach to Homelessness Crisis

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Marques Vestal, assistant professor of urban planning, spoke to Capital B about a Los Angeles ordinance designating thousands of locations off-limits to homeless encampments. The law has divided the city, with supporters calling for increased public safety around schools and opponents arguing that a law-enforcement approach to homelessness will push vulnerable people deeper into poverty. The article noted that Black people make up nearly 45% of the unhoused population in Los Angeles County. Vestal, co-author of the UCLA report “The Making of a Crisis: A History of Homelessness in Los Angeles,” said the policy of policing the homelessness crisis has burdened Black people for decades. “The housing system has created an institutional process that makes us more vulnerable to getting money taken away from us and more vulnerable to violence,” he said.

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Turner on the Urgent Work of Chief Heat Officers

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V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, co-authored a CalMatters opinion piece offering guidance to chief heat officers, the government officials tasked with coordinating a strategic response to extreme heat. Los Angeles appointed its first chief heat officer in June, and a statewide position is also under consideration. Turner and co-author David Eisenman of the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions wrote that heat waves are becoming longer and hotter and the most vulnerable people need cooling immediately. They urged policymakers to base their interventions on science, pointing to research that shows the effectiveness of urban cooling tools such as tree canopies and reflective roofs. And they urged heat officers to act with urgency to coordinate heat-action efforts across many agencies. “We cannot wait for extreme heat policies to evolve across bureaucracies over decades,” they wrote. “Chief heat officers must get many pieces moving quickly. They must convene, collaborate and cajole.”

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Crenshaw Project Stresses Community Voice

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Urban Planning chair Chris Tilly and three graduate students appeared on the radio program “Everything Co-Op” to share their experiences working with residents of Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District on a community development strategy. As part of the UCLA Urban Planning Community Collaborative, the master’s students partnered with Crenshaw residents to research and report on their top priorities. “Their No. 1 concern was increasing community control and Black self-determination, Black sovereignty, over a predominantly Black community,” Tilly said. In a conversation that touched on gentrification, environmental equity, food and housing insecurity, and the creation of high-quality jobs, Tilly and students Eliza Jane Franklin, Geoff Gusoff and Ernest Johnson stressed the importance of letting community members lead. During the collaboration, the students learned about cooperatives, affordable housing, community land trusts and other resources, Tilly said, but “the most important thing that students should be learning in this kind of project is how to work with people in the community.”

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UCLA Teams Up With LADWP for Equitable Energy Solutions

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More than 20 UCLA faculty and researchers have entered into a $2.6 million agreement to conduct research for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to help the city achieve its goal of producing all of its energy from carbon-free and renewable energy sources by 2035 and doing so in ways that benefit all Angelenos equitably. The Luskin Center for Innovation, Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and Latino Policy and Politics Institute are among several UCLA research entities collaborating with the LADWP’s LA100 Equity Strategies, which will guide the department as it creates the first justice-focused, carbon-free energy transition of any major city. The effort builds upon interdisciplinary work already being done across campus, including the Center for Innovation’s research on energy affordability. “It takes careful intent to ensure that the costs associated with the transition to renewable energy get translated equitably through rates, and to protect low-income households in disadvantaged communities from bearing too much of that cost,” said Gregory Pierce, co-director of the center. “Historically, sustainability investments have not been equitable, so in some ways this project is trying to tackle that transition.” Recommendations from Pierce’s team could include enhanced rate discounts, speeding up energy efficiency and solar programs, and adjusting what criteria would trigger the shutoff of a household’s water or energy if it falls behind on payments. The university’s participation was made possible through an existing agreement between the LADWP and the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge. — Jonathan Van Dyke

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$1.5 Million Grant Will Support Institute’s Social Justice Mission Marguerite Casey Foundation's award to Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy will bolster efforts that link academic pursuits to community organizing

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By Les Dunseith
The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has received a $1.5 million grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation to bolster the institute’s ongoing programs in support of social justice movements in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

The institute is among four recipients of grants totaling $6 million from the foundation, which are intended as a bridge between social justice scholarship and social movements.

“We believe that bold investments in ideas about how to shift power in society must be matched with bold investments in organizing efforts that help bring them to life,” foundation President and CEO Carmen Rojas said in announcing the grants.

The new funds will help the institute, launched in 2016 and based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, continue to advance social justice in cooperation with colleagues and community partners, said Ananya Roy, the institute’s founding director and a UCLA professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography.

“We have been building an interinstitutional space connecting university-based and movement-based scholars in the shared work of research and scholarship to analyze and challenge dispossession and displacement in U.S. cities and communities,” Roy said.

As part of that work, Roy and her colleagues and partners are seeking to ensure that increased government spending on public programs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic benefits those most in need rather than further entrenching race and class inequality, exploitation and oppression.

Rojas, who, like Roy, earned a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley, stressed that organizing efforts supported by the grants “should be multiracial and durable in nature to ensure that their impact reflects the character of the communities they aim to serve and leaves those communities changed, more informed, more free and better able to shape our democracy and economy.”

In applying for the grant, the institute pledged to support efforts to “advance the collective power of those who have been excluded, evicted, criminalized, banished and disappeared by liberal democracy, from the unhoused to climate refugees.”

The institute’s grant-related plans include:

  • Expanding its signature activist-in-residence program.
  • Hosting a distinguished speakers series focused social and racial justice movements, with particular attention on scholars based in the global South. To this end, the series will use both in-person and virtual formats.
  • Organizing “freedom schools” that bring together movement-based and university scholars for theoretical and methodological training related to social justice.
  • Initiating a program to unite leading university and movement-based scholars around a shared vision and narrative of housing justice that reaffirms housing as a reparative public good.
  • Creating doctoral student and faculty seed grants to support research at the intersection of ideas and organizing.

Also receiving $1.5 million grants from the foundation were the Portal Project of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago; Haymarket Books, a nonprofit publisher based in Chicago; and the Highlander Research and Education Center, a grassroots organizing and movement-building organization active in Appalachia and the American South.

MPP/MD Student Wins Health Equity Challenge

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The inaugural Health Equity Challenge, a competition among UCLA graduate students aimed at developing community-based solutions to health equity issues in California, has given one of two grand prizes to Alma Lopez, who is pursuing a dual master of public policy and doctor of medicine degree. Lopez partnered with the South Los Angeles nonprofit SHIELDS for Families to develop a proposal to provide online peer support, in English and Spanish, for mothers of color who are experiencing perinatal depression. Thanks to the Health Equity Challenge, made possible by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the MolinaCares Accord, SHIELDS will receive $50,000 to implement the pilot program. “If successful, this could serve as a model for group interventions to address maternal mental health conditions in other urban communities of color,” said Lopez, an aspiring OB-GYN. The competition invited graduate students to submit applications proposing innovative interventions to address health equity issues in the state. Ten finalists received $2,500 stipends and 10 weeks of mentorship to develop a full project proposal. The two grand prize winners, Lopez and UCLA medical school student Angelica Johnsen, were announced in June. Other finalists with connections to UCLA Luskin include Lei Chen, a social welfare doctoral student whose proposal sought to meet the needs of older immigrant adults seeking health care and social services; and Annalea Forrest MSW/MPH ’22, who proposed building an integrated health platform to bring psychotherapeutic services, trauma-informed exercise and nutritional counseling to marginalized communities Los Angeles.

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Manville on Car-Free Zones for L.A.

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the temporary closure of a road in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park to stop drivers — about 2,000 a day — from cutting through the park and to improve safety for cyclists, runners, hikers and equestrians. “It is good to make it easier for people to recreationally cycle and walk and feel safe in our own parks,” Manville said. “But the fact is that people also should be able to bike and walk safely throughout the city.” Los Angeles has historically prioritized car travel, as evidenced by projects to widen streets to accommodate more traffic and requirements that new developments include ample parking. The Griffith Park pilot program “accentuates the park’s original purpose as a respite away from the noise and activity of the city. … The city should be much more willing to consider things like [car-free stretches] on its actual streets,” Manville said.

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