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Tilly on Working Conditions in the Retail Sector

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Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly spoke to Boston Globe Magazine about working conditions in the retail sector, particularly at supercenters that attract consumers with discount prices made possible in part by keeping employee wages low. “In the 1960s into the early 1970s, working in retail really was a decent job,” said Tilly, co-author of “Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies.” That changed due to a number of factors, including the increasing desirability of part-time positions. “Retailers figured out they could offer half the wages and none, or some, of the benefits,” Tilly said. Now, “the dominant model has been a low wage, high turnover, low benefits and increasingly crazy schedules.” Market forces, including pandemic-era labor shortages, have pushed retailers to improve working conditions, but those gains could be reversed if employers regain the advantage.

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Tilly Comments on Rise of Instacart Services

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly was featured in a New York Times article about the increasing popularity of online grocery shopping services like Instacart. In 2020, online grocery sales rose 54%. The technology needed to fulfill orders is costly for stores, and the workers who pick customers’ items off the shelves often feel the pressure of being timed and tracked to monitor their efficiency. “The guinea pig for this is warehouse workers,” said Tilly, explaining that many of the technologies for online grocery shopping and picking are adapted from warehouses. He predicted that facilities designed specifically for online orders will eventually be expanded as the current system is creating an additional financial strain for grocers. “There is a constant search for how to make this cheaper, more efficient and, in many cases, as a transition to something longer term,” Tilly concluded.

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Ling Describes Healthy Housing Market Indicators

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Urban planning lecturer and policy analyst Joan Ling spoke to WalletHub about how to better understand the housing market. The COVID-19 pandemic has had unique effects on the housing market as mortgage rates hit record lows. While it’s difficult to tell how the pandemic will impact the market in the upcoming months, Ling predicted that interest rates will remain low for at least the next year. She attributed low homeownership rates among millennials to the disconnect between wages and prices and the need for a sizable down payment, which create a high barrier for first-time buyers. She also highlighted the top five indicators she looks for in evaluating the healthiest housing markets: affordability, monthly cost equivalency between renting and owning, healthy vacancy rate, housing production, and good public infrastructure and services. Ling’s expert advice guided an analysis of 300 U.S. cities to determine the best local real-estate markets.

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DeShazo Remarks on Rise of CCAs in Future of Clean, Cheap Energy

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J.R. DeShazo, director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI),  is featured in a Comstock’s article assessing publicly owned electric-power-purchasing organizations in a transient energy market. The growth of so-called Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs) as an alternative to municipal and investor-owned utilities is transforming the energy market. CCAs offer cheaper and cleaner power, but their future hinges on their ability to navigate regulatory and market changes. DeShazo, who is also chair of Public Policy at UCLA Luskin, is cautious about predicting the long-term success of CCAs, citing past bankruptcies of large utilities as a result of “wrong conditions and bad policy by the legislature.” Climate change and the resulting shifts in environmental policy make electricity and the energy market as a whole competitive arenas. If they are able to overcome the obstacles in their path, “CCAs may serve the majority of the state’s consumers now served by the big three investor-owned utilities within 10 years,” the article stated, citing a July report from LCI.

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