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Yaroslavsky Calls SB 50 an Overreach

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Director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA and former LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to NBC 4 about the implications presented by Senate Bill 50. The bill would allow cities to rezone along transit lines in order to increase the amount of high-density housing in California. Yaroslavsky said this would be an overreach without a middle ground. Many single-family neighborhoods would be rezoned to develop multifamily housing because SB 50 extends to virtually every bus line in L.A. County, he said. As the bill currently stands, it exempts small, affluent cities. “Don’t exempt the affluent cities. Treat everybody the same,” Yaroslavsky said.

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Manville on Efforts to Relax Parking Requirements

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to KPCC’s AirTalk about parking requirements for new housing developments in California. Manville was surprised to see that San Diego succeeded in eliminating minimum parking requirements for new housing developments. While this would be tough to implement in Los Angeles, he said, he believes it would be a good idea because parking requirements have been harmful to the city. Parking requirements for new housing do not promote the city’s stated goals of encouraging transit use, sustainability and more housing development, Manville said. More parking demands additional land or capital to build expensive underground parking, which results in smaller developments, he said. Manville also discussed proposed legislative solutions that would reduce local jurisdiction of land zoning in order to build more densely near public transit.

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Koslov on ‘Climate-Change Gentrification’

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Liz Koslov spoke to The Daily Beast about “climate-change gentrification,” which occurs when the effects of climate change cause residents to relocate to another area, driving up property prices. In Los Angeles, Koslov said, people are likely to move only small distances due to climate change-related issues in order to stay near their social and professional networks. She noted that the complexity of climate change makes predicting where Americans will go extremely difficult. For example, some may try to escape extreme heat and find themselves in a flood zone. “Governments, policymakers and city planners are increasingly anticipating climate change in the projects that they take on and are building protective infrastructure or deciding not to fund the protection of certain areas,” Koslov said. “Their actions in anticipation of climate impacts and in response to disasters … have the potential to displace a lot of people or make places more habitable.”

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Roy on Decolonizing the University

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Ananya Roy, director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Next City about the institute’s efforts to link the university’s research and resources with social movements and racial justice activism. “We call this decolonizing the university. Turning the university inside out,” said Roy, a professor of urban planning and social welfare. Roy said the institute is not a movement itself but stands in solidarity with community residents and organizers. “They’re telling us where the gaps in knowledge are and how our research should address those gaps,” Roy said. The article mentioned the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities network launched by the institute and the Activist-in-Residence program, which creates space for activists, artists and public intellectuals.

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Monkkonen on Housing Affordability Near UCLA

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Urban Planning Vice Chair Paavo Monkkonen spoke to Los Angeles Magazine about the formation of the North Westwood Neighborhood Council. For decades, single-family homeowners in neighborhoods surrounding UCLA worked against the interests of students, said Monkkonen, associate professor of urban planning and public policy. Before the new council was formed, the Westwood Neighborhood Council was the voice of the area and would often object to housing construction. “West L.A. has extremely high rents, and there is not enough housing for students. In the extreme, we have students sleeping in cars but, more commonly, they just have to commute very far,” he said. As Monkkonen concluded in a paper for the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, “The vocal advocacy of a handful of neighbors is often framed as local democracy, but many of these processes exclude the majority of a neighborhood’s residents and explicitly favor those with more money and time.”

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