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A System That Threatens Rights of the Unhoused

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A New Republic article on Los Angeles homelessness policies that led to the 2021 sweep of an encampment at Echo Park Lake cited UCLA Luskin faculty members Ananya Roy and Mark Vestal. The two scholars described a shelter system that often violates the rights of unhoused individuals. Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and author of a report on the fallout from the Echo Park Lake eviction, said residents of interim housing face “a constant stripping of rights in the way that in prison you’re stripped of your rights.” Before entering interim housing, residents must testify that “no tenancy is created,” effectively denying them hard-fought rights associated with being a tenant, said Vestal, an assistant professor of urban planning. He added that politicians and police often deploy the language of mental illness, “justifying the shelter system as a medical intervention,” rather than confronting the public policies that deprive people of dignified housing.

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Shoup on What to Do About L.A.’s Cracked Sidewalks

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Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, spoke with NBC4 News about Los Angeles’ backlog of 50,000 complaints about broken sidewalks. An audit last year found that the city pays about $7 million a year to settle injury claims related to sidewalks in disrepair. “In L.A., the sidewalks are a disgrace,” Shoup said. “We could use them as an obstacle course for the 2028 Olympics.” California cities including Pasadena and Oakland have passed “point of sale” ordinances that require homeowners to fix damaged sidewalks in front of their properties when they sell their homes, Shoup said. “People ought to pay for sidewalk repairs when it’s convenient for them and when they have the cash available. And that is at the time of sale.” He added, however, that the sidewalks are currently so dangerous that the city must look for a quicker fix.

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Yaroslavsky on Inflation’s Fallout on Local Elections

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to KPCC’s “AirTalk” about the impact of Southern California’s widening economic gap on upcoming elections. Yaroslavsky cited results of the 2022 UCLA Quality of Life Index, which found a steep drop in residents’ satisfaction with life in L.A. County, largely due to concerns over inflation and public safety. “What stands out is that people are unhappy, they’re anxious, they’re angry, they’re concerned,” Yaroslavsky said. Lower-income households, hard hit by lost wages and rising inflation, have been slower to rebound from the financial shock of the COVID-19 era, the survey showed. “We are the ground zero in this country of the economic divide,” Yaroslavsky said. The Quality of Life Index also showed a decline in approval ratings of many local government officials. “Inflation, I think, is the most pernicious thing economically that we have in our society,” Yaroslavsky said. “That will have a political bite like nothing else.”

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Yaroslavsky on the Importance of County Government

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Director of the Los Angeles Initiative Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to KCRW’s “Greater L.A.” about the race for Los Angeles County supervisor. The Los Angeles mayoral primary is getting most of the attention from voters and the media, but the race to represent L.A. County’s Third Supervisorial District, stretching from the Westside to the far northern San Fernando Valley, is consequential. “The County Board of Supervisors is a place where virtually every issue that matters to the general public crosses your desk every day,” said Yaroslavsky, who served as an L.A. County supervisor from 1994 to 2014. “Historically, a lot of people, especially middle-class voters, haven’t grasped the importance of county government and its services to millions of people — services that can literally mean the difference between life and death.” The Board of Supervisors oversees a $40 billion budget that acts as the human service arm of society, focusing on people who are economically marginalized, he said. 

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Pierce on New L.A. Water Restrictions

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The Los Angeles Times spoke to Gregory Pierce, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, about new watering restrictions implemented by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Due to worsening drought conditions and reduced water supplies, residents of the city of Los Angeles will be assigned two watering days a week based on their addresses — Monday and Friday for odd addresses and Thursday and Sunday for even ones. “It’s a fine way to go for now, but I would recommend not hesitating to go to one-day [watering] and seeing those plants die if necessary,” said Pierce, who leads the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab housed at the Center for Innovation.

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A Shadow Over Garcetti’s Final Months as L.A.’s Mayor

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A New York Times article on Eric Garcetti’s delayed nomination as U.S. ambassador to India cited the Los Angeles mayor’s declining favorability ratings as reported in this year’s UCLA Quality of Life Index. The nomination has been on hold during a Senate inquiry related to accusations of sexual harassment by one of Garcetti’s top aides. The Senate found that “it is more likely than not that Mayor Garcetti either had personal knowledge of the sexual harassment or should have been aware of it.” The mayor denies the claim, which the White House referred to as a “partisan hit job” meant to drag out the confirmation process. The Quality of Life Index, produced by the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin under the direction of Zev Yaroslavsky, found that Garcetti’s favorability ratings have slumped dramatically in the last two years, to 45% from 62%. The index is based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with 1,400 Los Angeles County residents.

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Roy and Henderson on Warring Perceptions of Life on the Streets

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The Los Angeles Times published an extended conversation between two key figures at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy that revealed the growing solidarity between movement-based scholars and unhoused public intellectuals as Los Angeles grapples with the crisis of homelessness. Ananya Roy, the institute’s executive director, spoke with Theo Henderson, this year’s UCLA Activist-in-Residence, about warring perceptions about life on L.A. streets. What city officials call “cleanups” of homeless encampments are actually dehumanizing sweeps of people and their belongings that do not provide lasting housing solutions, said Henderson, founder of the podcast “We the Unhoused.” “They’re doing it because the public does not want to see poor people,” he said. The two spoke of art as a tool for empowering Los Angeles’ diverse network of community advocates. “We need creative releases to be able to keep the movement going, the spirits up, the morale up and to hope for a better day,” Henderson said.

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‘COVID Compassion Is Over,’ Roy Says

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Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D), spoke about her research on urban poverty from Los Angeles to Kolkata, India, as the featured guest on the podcast “J.T. the L.A. Storyteller.” Roy spoke of the expiring protections for people who have struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s not that the pandemic is over. But COVID compassion is over,” she said. Roy also described II&D’s research partnership with activists working on behalf of the unhoused, which emerged after authorities in Los Angeles cleared an encampment at Echo Park Lake in March 2021 — “really a searing moment in L.A.’s collective memory,” she said. Roy described Los Angeles as a “battleground that makes visible the forced removal of people of color,” but she added, “L.A. has also been a place where communities have fought for their future. … That’s a very inspiring part of L.A. movement histories that continue until today.”

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Ong on Lack of Socioeconomic Mobility in South L.A.

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Director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Paul Ong was featured in a Los Angeles Times article about long-standing barriers to socioeconomic mobility in South Los Angeles. For decades, residents of South Los Angeles have faced lack of employment opportunities, housing and labor discrimination, and subpar education access. “If you look overall and compare it over a half-century, it’s rather depressing that we have not made the progress that people have hoped for,” Ong said, noting a particular lack of significant improvements in public education. Now, an influx of new commercial and residential development is threatening to displace current residents of the area. Ong’s research found that the racial disparities in income among South L.A. households are even more stark than in the rest of L.A. County. White households in South L.A. had a median income of $84,000, compared with $48,000 for Latino households and $36,000 for Black households.

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Ong Reflects on Lack of Progress Since L.A. Riots

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Director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Paul Ong spoke to the Christian Science Monitor about race relations and criminal justice reform in the 30 years since the police beating of Rodney King and the resulting L.A. riots. For many people, economic and social conditions have stayed the same or gotten worse in the last three decades. In the report “South Los Angeles Since the Sixties,” Ong and his colleagues found that many of the area’s residents were disenchanted over justice delayed and persistent discrimination, racism and unequal access to economic opportunity. Ong noted that racial segregation continues in South Los Angeles today and many African Americans are migrating to the exurbs in search of better schools, jobs and more affordable housing. He also pointed out that the Latino population is growing but remains on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, while white and Asian people are moving in, along with gentrification.

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