Posts

Loukaitou-Sideris on Benefits, Consequences of New Rail Line

/0 Comments/in /by

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, was cited in a Los Angeles Times article about how the construction of rail lines in South L.A. will serve as both a curse and a blessing to locals. While the railway system will benefit communities by de-isolating South L.A. from the rest of the city, it poses economic challenges as current residents find that increasing rent prices are driving them out of the well-established communities many grew up in. In her past studies, Loukaitou-Sideris found that census tracts closest to stations had the highest likelihood of gentrification. However, she is not opposed to the construction of the railway line. “It is not that we should not have transit stations. It is that we really need strategies for people to avoid displacement,” she said.

Read the article

 

Yaroslavsky Assesses Candidates’ Plans for Tackling Homelessness

/0 Comments/in /by

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about plans to combat homelessness put forth by Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, who are vying to become L.A.’s next mayor. With Election Day two months away, the candidates have offered details about their ambitious proposals for sheltering the city’s unhoused, including cost estimates and strategies for clearing bureaucratic hurdles. “I don’t think either of those plans will accomplish what they say they are going to accomplish in a year … but I think it’s good to set the goal,” said Yaroslavsky, who served as a city councilman and county supervisor in his decades of public service. Yaroslavsky proposed a single, countywide homelessness executive empowered to budget money and make land-use decisions. “Let the city and the county create a new paradigm, set a new template of political collaboration and cooperation and effectiveness,” he said.

Read the story

Manville on L.A.’s Reluctance to Crack Down on Reckless Driving

/0 Comments/in /by

A Los Angeles Times column on rising anger over speeding, stunt driving and street racing in L.A. cited Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning. In the wake of a high-speed crash in South Los Angeles that killed five people, residents from across the city are weighing in with stories of unchecked reckless driving in their neighborhoods. In mid-city Los Angeles, residents’ pleas for street safety improvements that would protect pedestrians, cyclists and motorists have gone unanswered, Manville said. On Melrose Avenue, “almost every weekend, we have burnouts and stunt bikers and all sorts of people driving dangerously,” he said. “We should enforce speed limits, but the best speed limit is a road that doesn’t let you speed. But our city engineers and City Council members for some reason think we need to have highways running through our neighborhoods.”

Read the column

 

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

/0 Comments/in /by

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.

Read the article

 

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

/0 Comments/in /by

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. 

Read the article

 

Informing Equitable Stormwater Investments in L.A. County

/0 Comments/in /by

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. 

Read the full story

Vestal on Law-Enforcement Approach to Homelessness Crisis

/0 Comments/in /by

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.

Read the article

 

Turner on the Urgent Work of Chief Heat Officers

/0 Comments/in /by

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.”

Read the op-ed

 

Crenshaw Project Stresses Community Voice

/0 Comments/in /by

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.”

Listen to the podcast

 

UCLA Teams Up With LADWP for Equitable Energy Solutions

/0 Comments/in /by

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

Read the full story