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Annual Survey of Los Angeles County Residents Finds Lowest Satisfaction Ever Anger over fast-rising costs and worries about crime and the quality of education are among key factors driving down the latest Quality of Life Index

By Les Dunseith

Los Angeles County residents are not happy.

They don’t like paying more for gasoline, fresh eggs or electricity. They’re worried about their family’s health and their children’s education. They don’t like hearing that homelessness and crime are up, and their confidence in public officials to solve such problems is down. And COVID-19? They just want to be done with it. 

Those are some of the key takeaways from the latest Quality of Life Index, or QLI, a project of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs that measures county residents’ satisfaction levels in nine categories. The overall rating fell sharply, from 58 last year to 53 on a scale from 10 to 100, marking the first time it fell below the survey’s 55-point midpoint since the index launched in 2016. That means a majority of respondents are dissatisfied with the overall quality of their lives.

“For the first time since the inception of this survey, respondents’ ratings dropped in each of the nine categories, and eight of the nine fell to their lowest rating ever,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative, who oversees the index. 

Researchers noted that overall satisfaction had remained relatively stable, between 56 and 59, throughout the survey’s first six years, despite drought, fires and the profound societal changes of the pandemic. But that changed as prices of food, gasoline and public utilities spiked in recent months — a trend that accelerated in the weeks after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in late February.

“What the pandemic couldn’t do over the last two years, inflation and increases in violent and property crime succeeded in doing,” Yaroslavsky said. “It appears that the dam has burst this year.” 

This year’s QLI is based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with 1,400 county residents over 30 days beginning on March 5. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6%.

Scores declined in all nine of the survey categories, but the issues that were most responsible for the overall decline were cost of living, education and public safety.

“These three issues contributed heavily to the overall drop in our respondents’ satisfaction,” Yaroslavsky said. “Clearly, they are driving the political debate in this year’s city and county elections.”

Among the other results:

  • The largest decline was the cost-of-living score, which dropped to 39 from 45 last year.
  • The public safety score declined to 56 from 60 last year (and 64 in 2020), shaped largely by growing concerns over property crime and violent crime.
  • The score for transportation and traffic fell to 51, from 56 last year.
  • The score for jobs and the economy dropped to 56, from 60 in 2021.
  • The score for education dropped to 46, a new low, from 48 last year.

Most respondents, 69%, said life has been fundamentally changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 28% said that life would return to the way it was before. 

“COVID has taken its toll on our society in profound ways,” Yaroslavsky said. “This finding — that life has been permanently altered — may be the most profound.”

Of survey respondents who are employed, 55% said they always leave home to go to their workplace, 18% always work at home and 25% have a hybrid schedule.

Many respondents said their income declined during the pandemic, with 15% saying it went down a lot and 16% saying it went down a little. Among those whose income declined, 33% said they fell behind on their rent or home mortgage, and 7% said they had to move for financial reasons.

One potentially lasting consequence of the pandemic relates to education. Seventy-one percent of parents of school-age children said they feel their kids have been substantially hurt either academically or socially by having to learn remotely. That figure was only slightly lower than it was in the 2021 survey, even though most students had returned to in-person instruction by the time the 2022 study was conducted. The parents who were most concerned were those who leave home to work (79%) and those with incomes under $60,000 (76%).

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The survey also examined approval ratings for local elected officials. Mayor Eric Garcetti was viewed favorably by 45% of respondents, down from 62% in 2020.  

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva received mixed ratings: 37% very or somewhat favorable and 33% very or somewhat unfavorable, with 30% having no opinion or being unfamiliar with Villanueva. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón’s perception declined markedly from 2021. He was viewed very or somewhat favorably by 22% of respondents this year, down from 31% in 2021; 44% viewed Gascón very or somewhat unfavorably in the latest survey.

The Quality of Life Index is funded by Meyer and Renee Luskin through the Los Angeles Initiative. The report was released as part of the closing event in this year’s UCLA’s Luskin Summit, held April 22 at the Luskin Conference Center at UCLA. Phillip Palmer of ABC7 in Los Angeles moderated a discussion with Yaroslavsky, followed by a Q&A in which former California governors Gray Davis and Pete Wilson discussed the “State of California” with Jim Newton, editor in chief of UCLA Blueprint magazine.

The QLI was prepared in partnership with the public opinion research firm FM3 Research.

View the full report and other information about this year’s study, plus previous Quality of Life Indexes, on the website of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

Watch a recording of the session on Vimeo.

See additional photos from both April 22 sessions on Flickr:

Luskin Summit 2022 Closing Sessions

Diaz Discusses Invisibility of Latino Voters

Sonja Diaz, founding director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, joined a conversation with KQED about the role of Latino voters in the 2020 elections. Diaz explained that the “invisibility of Latinos is not simply a political issue but goes across all parts of our institutions in society,” including media, entertainment, academia and philanthropy. She pointed to a general lack of understanding about Latinos as the source of this invisibility. According to Diaz, Latinos are often misconceived as having singular policy preferences, but polls show that they care about bread-and-butter issues such as jobs and health care. The Latino electorate showed up in force in 2020, said Diaz, whose research estimates that 16.6 million Latinos cast a ballot in a pandemic, despite misinformation and widespread voter suppression. These voters will be included in the system moving forward, getting mail and door knocks that will motivate them to show up and vote, she said.


Yaroslavsky Explains Drag on Quality of Life in L.A.

Los Angeles Initiative Director Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the recently released UCLA Luskin Quality of Life Index. Poll respondents in Los Angeles County expressed satisfaction with health care, the economy and community relations. However, cost of living, particularly for housing, ranked lowest on the index. “This survey is important to our region and its communities in that it helps capture at a point in time what county residents consider most important to them, personally,” Yaroslavsky said. The study was also featured on media outlets including KABC7, NBC Los Angeles, The Patriot LA 1150, AM870 and LAist. In a KNX In Depth radio interview, Yaroslavsky said the rising cost of living is spurring residents to leave Los Angeles. “People who are economically on the margins and can’t afford to rent an apartment or buy a home are going to places where the costs are cheaper,” he said. 


Dean of UCLA Luskin Takes the Long View on Political Rhetoric Gary Segura sees parallels between California history and current national debate over immigration. He tells crowd at UCLA Advocacy event that Latino voters will again be key to a resolution.  

By Les Dunseith

Gary Segura, dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, thinks that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric may seem all too familiar to Latinos and others in California who endured a similar campaign against undocumented residents a couple of decades ago.

The current effort could backfire on Trump and his supporters, suggested Segura, an internationally recognized expert on the Latino electorate, during a presentation March 21, 2017, to a packed room of citizens, policymakers and fellow educators. The UCLA Advocacy event, co-hosted by UCLA Government and Community Relations and the Luskin School, featured introductions by Chancellor Gene Block and Keith S. Parker, assistant vice chancellor for government and community relations.

Segura reminded the crowd at Cross Campus in downtown Los Angeles that a GOP-backed ballot initiative in 1994 known as Proposition 187 sought to establish a citizenship screening system in California and prohibit undocumented immigrants from using many public services. It passed, but soon was found unconstitutional and never took effect.

The lasting result? “It created a tidal wave of Latino registrants” that tipped the balance in California elections strongly toward Democrats. “It’s known as the Prop. 187 phenomenon,” Segura told the enthusiastic audience of more than 100.

“What’s less known is that between 1980 and 1994, if you looked at the California Field Poll, the share of Latinos identifying as Republican went up in every year,” Segura noted. Latino voters had been trending toward the Republican party for a decade and a half before Proposition 187 sent waves of Latinos to the Democratic side. For the GOP, the measure amounted to “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” he said.

It’s too soon, of course, to know whether California’s pivot away from anti-immigrant policies will repeat itself nationwide. But providing this type of perspective about modern-day political controversies is an important role that Segura has embraced as the recently installed dean at UCLA Luskin.

“It’s a dazzling school that needs extraordinary leadership, and that’s what we have here,” Block said of Segura during his introductory remarks. The event served as a first opportunity for many of those in attendance to meet and hear from Segura, who relocated to Los Angeles in January after serving as a professor of political science and former chair of Chicana/o-Latina studies at Stanford University.

“We are introducing a true partner with Government and Community Relations and the university’s greater engagement with Los Angeles,” Parker said. “When Chancellor Block came to UCLA, one of his priorities was to increase our engagement with Los Angeles. In our discussions with Dean Gary Segura, that’s one of his priorities as well.”

A widely published author and a frequent interviewee by print and broadcast news outlets, Segura is also a principal partner in the political research firm Latino Decisions. His presentation, formally titled “Population Change and Latino Prospects in the New Era” but sarcastically dubbed by Segura as “Being Latino in Trumplandia,” drew heavily from polling results and other research gathered by Latino Decisions.

Click to listen

“Latinos became deeply involved in this election in a way that they had never been in the past,” Segura said. “This was their highest level of turnout.”

Segura said this fact strongly refutes a narrative picked up by several media outlets based on an Election Day exit poll. That poll showed more Latinos voting for Trump than would have been expected given his anti-Latino rhetoric, including repeated calls to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“There is not a shred of statistical evidence consistent with the exit poll,” Segura said. “In fact, precinct analysis shows that Latinos actually voted more Democratic than they have in past elections. From actual precinct data, we estimate that Donald Trump won about 18 percent of the Latino vote,” not the 29 percent shown by the exit poll.

Results in other races also belie the presidential results, Segura said, noting that Latino voters were critical in electing a record number of Latinos to Congress.

“The Latino surge was real,” Segura said. “There’s lots of evidence for this. And, nationally, we estimate that about 51 percent of eligible Latinos cast a ballot, up from the last two elections.”

The political views of most of those Latino voters are at odds with the conservative policies of the Trump administration, Segura said. Polling of Latinos regarding issues such as gun registration, equal pay for women, higher minimum wages and climate change consistently lean toward a liberal viewpoint.

At this point, those views do not hold sway in Washington. The right-wing — mostly Anglo voters who tipped the 2016 presidential race to Trump — tends to be an older demographic, Segura explained. But Latinos are younger, and fewer are registered to vote. “That’s a disadvantage, but it’s also an opportunity. Latino advocates could, in fact, mobilize more voters.”

In 2016, 27 million Latinos were eligible to cast a vote, and it’s estimated that about 14 million were registered to do so. If Latinos had the same registration rate as whites and African Americans (roughly 70 percent), then 19 million would have been registered voters. That’s 5 million additional Latino voters.

And the country’s evolving demographics — fed primarily by Latino birth rates, not immigration, Segura noted — will continue to swell that potential voter pool.

“The number that it is important for you to leave here with tonight is that 93 percent of Latino residents under age 18 are citizens of the United States,” Segura told the gathering, which included prominent Latino officials such as UC Regents John A. Perez and J. Alberto Lemus, as well as Francisco Rodriguez, chancellor of the L.A. Community College District.

“What that means is the passage of time alone will dramatically enlarge the Latino electorate. The Latino electorate will double in the next 20 years,” Segura said, citing estimates that 73,000 Latino citizens turn 18 and enter the eligible electorate every month.

During a question-and-answer session that followed his talk, Segura was asked by moderator and UCLA Luskin lecturer Jim Newton to address the fact that such statistics are seen as threatening by many Americans, particularly in rural America where lower-income white voters helped sway the election to Trump.

Segura expressed sympathy for those voters, acknowledging the legitimate concerns of people in communities hit hard by job losses.

“That pain is real,” but he said it’s wrong to blame illegal immigration for the country’s economic problems. “They are being told that reality is being caused by someone else. The actual evidence suggests that there is very little labor market replacement between Latin American immigrants to the United States and native-born U.S. workers.”

There are some historical exceptions, such as in the textile industry, “but as a large-scale measure, immigration really has very little to do with labor market turnover in the United States,” Segura said.

Newton also asked Segura to talk about whether the immigration issue is really of much importance to most Latinos voters. They are U.S. citizens, after all. Like other voters, aren’t they more concerned about crime, good schools and jobs?

“All of those statements are true, but the conclusion is incorrect — that immigration doesn’t matter,” Segura responded. “Both parties have gotten this wrong because they don’t understand that Latino families are mixed status. You might be a born citizen of the United States. Your wife might be naturalized. But your brother-in-law might be undocumented.”

In polls of Latino voters conducted by Segura and Latino Decisions, one-quarter of respondents know someone who has been detained or deported. “And 60 percent of Latinos who are registered voters know someone who is undocumented. In more than half of those cases, that person is a relative of theirs.”

Segura noted that “86 percent of all U.S. Latinos are within two generations of the immigration experience. So when you talk badly about immigrants, you are talking about members of my immediate family.”