Posts

‘Everything Becomes Secondary to Where You Can Store a Car’

UCLA Luskin’s Michael Manville appeared on Code 53, The Apartment Podcast to explain the history, economics and politics of minimum parking requirements and argue that housing people must take precedence over housing cars. Mandating that new developments include a minimum number of parking spaces encourages driving while limiting the amount of space for housing, research shows. “If you have a situation where land is very valuable, and lots of people want to live there, and you are forcing everyone who wants to build something to put parking in at a number you have specified and a location you have specified, what you are basically saying, whether you intend to or not, is that everything becomes secondary to where you can store a car,” said Manville, chair of Urban Planning at the Luskin School. “That is not the recipe for a good city or a good life.”


 

Manville on ‘America’s Disastrous Experiment With Parking Requirements’

Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville wrote an article for The Atlantic about the disastrous impact of parking requirements in American cities. Zoning laws that require homes and businesses to include space for parking cars have created “an unreasonable, unaffordable and unsustainable city,” he wrote. “American urban history is stained with tragic missteps and shameful injustices, so parking requirements are hardly the worst policy cities have tried. But they are notable for how much needless damage they have caused, over a long period, with few people even noticing.” Manville argued that parking mandates make driving less expensive and development more so, which in effect prioritizes the needs of cars over the needs of people. He concluded, “In an age of ostensible concern about global warming, it shouldn’t be illegal to put up a building without parking and market it to people without cars.”


 

Manville on Land-Use Rules Pricing Californians Out of Housing

The Cato Institute released a video featuring Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville discussing California land-use regulations as a key factor in the state’s housing crisis. In the video, part of the institute’s Project on Poverty and Inequality in California, Manville argued that, while some limits on development are sensible, there is a certain point at which zoning “becomes an instrument for people who are currently in a neighborhood … to keep other people out.” According to Manville, inefficient land use and rising prices have pushed middle-class people out of neighborhoods, setting off a chain reaction that affects low-income people most. “We need to reform our land use so we can build a lot more housing,” he argued. “It’s true that there isn’t a lot of undeveloped land in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, but land can and should be redeveloped.”


More Lanes Does Not Mean Less Congestion, Manville Says

Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to WWJ Radio’s The Break Down: Road Work Ahead about the impact of deteriorating infrastructure on traffic congestion. Governments cannot keep up with road repairs, and adding more lanes has proven to be ineffective, the podcast noted. In Los Angeles, an additional lane was added to Interstate 405 in the hopes of alleviating congestion. This project ultimately failed, which was “actually entirely predictable,” Manville said. “Anything that you’re doing to try and add capacity will not reduce congestion,” he said, explaining that adding lanes simply attracts more drivers. “It lowers the price in time of using the road, and you can’t reduce congestion by making driving on a busy road at a busy time less expensive. It becomes fundamentally self-undermining,” he said.


 

Parking Is a Money Pit, Manville Says

Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to The Real Deal, a real estate news site, about a Los Angeles Planning Commission proposal to eliminate required parking spaces in new downtown housing developments, with the goal of creating more room for housing and decreasing the number of cars on the road. Manville said this policy is in line with cities such as San Francisco and Portland, which have begun easing downtown parking requirements. If eliminating parking requirements becomes the standard, business would improve for developers, he said. “As a conservative lender – and most institutional lenders are conservative – you might not loan on something that’s not the market standard,” he explained. But a developer with non-institutional funding who builds housing without parking spaces would spur more of this kind of development, he said. In the long term, eliminating parking requirements would lower the cost of development because “parking is a money pit,” Manville said.


 

Ong Foresees Upscaling and Displacement in Crenshaw

Paul Ong, research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, expressed his concerns about upscaling and displacement in a recent Curbed article on the community’s response to planned redevelopment in South Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district. Residents worry that the expansion of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall will lead to higher housing costs, ultimately displacing low-income residents. Last year, Ong authored a study tracking economic progress in South Los Angeles over the past 50 years that found that 42 percent of renters in the region are “rent-burdened.” He predicted that the opening of the new Crenshaw Metro station will lead to a rise in housing costs in the area. “We certainly see that there are particular interests in developing that area that would lead to upscaling,” he said. The Crenshaw Subway Coalition, led by local community leaders, aims to inform residents about six major developments in the district and educate them about gentrification.


Ong on the Undermining of Ethnic Enclaves

Paul Ong, research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the imminent departure of two Chinatown grocery stores following disputes with landlords. Such grocery stores act as anchors for ethnic communities, bringing foot traffic to barbers, bankers, restaurants, remittance businesses and other culturally specific vendors, the column noted. Ong said that ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Historic Filipinotown and Boyle Heights find themselves directly in the path of change because they’re located in the core of the city, where redevelopment is most intense. “There’s still a need for these culturally specific services in the urban core. But the question is, are we going to see these needs served?” Ong asked.

Loukaitou-Sideris Publishes New Book on Urban Design

“The New Companion to Urban Design,” the sequel to an authoritative anthology on urban form and design co-edited by UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, has just been published. The new book reflects current thinking across several disciplines, including urban studies, design, planning and geography, and widens its scope to include perspectives from the Global South. Migration, rapid urbanization, climate change and the explosive growth of digital technology are among the many trends changing the landscape of cities. Essays in the latest volume explore the new economic order fueling these trends, the search for solutions to the conflicts they create, and the role of urban design in bringing about justice, sustainability and other aspirational goals. Loukaitou-Sideris and co-editor Tridib Banerjee, chair of urban and regional planning at USC, assembled contributors from diverse backgrounds to offer original perspectives on the contemporary urban experience. The “New Companion” is a sequel to 2011’s “Companion to Urban Design,” a sourcebook for students, scholars and practitioners. “Urban design scholarship is interested not only with aesthetic issues but also with the social, political, cultural and economic forces that affect the built environment and its residents, as well as the human and environmental consequences of design interventions,” the editors wrote. Loukaitou-Sideris’ research focuses on the public environment of the city, its physical representation, aesthetics, social meaning and impact on the urban resident. The urban planning professor also serves as associate dean of academic affairs at UCLA Luskin and associate provost for academic planning for UCLA.


 

Manville on Elon Musk’s Vegas People-Mover

Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Los Angeles Times about Elon Musk’s underground people-mover for the Las Vegas convention center’s expansion. Musk’s Boring Co. secured a $48.7-million contract after the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority board approved construction of the roughly mile-long transit loop. Manville was surprised to learn that an underground plan was more affordable than a proposed elevated rail because tunneling is often more expensive. Based on the few details released by the Boring Co., Manville said it would be difficult to assess the project. “This is kind of a market test for him. Can he now build something that is more commercially viable than what he’s done with his test tunnel in Hawthorne?” Manville said. “But there’s nothing intrinsically interesting about building a tunnel to move people around. That’s what a subway is, right?”


 

Monkonnen on Rising Housing Costs in L.A.

Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning and public policy,  spoke to LAist about the root causes of homelessness in Los Angeles. Monkkonen pointed to rising housing costs exceeding income as the main contributor to homelessness. “People talk about [housing] like it’s a game of musical chairs, but I don’t think that’s really the right metaphor. Income differentials don’t matter in a game of musical chairs, but they do in this one,” Monkkonen said. Restrictive land-use policies have limited the amount of new housing available to accommodate a growing population, he said. Housing costs have increased because of a lack of supply of places to live and more high-income jobs that lead to gentrification and displacement in less affluent neighborhoods. “We’re building much less housing than we have at every other point in our history, in at least the last century or so,” he said.