Category: Urban Planning

Category: Urban Planning Archive for category: Urban Planning Former U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler brought a message of resiliency and resolve to more than 400 scholars, students, community leaders, and elected officials who came together at UCLA last week to take on California’s most entrenched problems. “Too many Californians, too many Angelenos, are not OK,” Butler told the crowd gathered for the eighth annual UCLA Luskin Summit on April 15. But she added, “The people in this room, the communities that you serve, have already proven that change is possible. … “I keep returning to this one thing that sustains me: It’s that hope is not a joyful feeling. Hope, UCLA, is hard work.” Butler, who served as a labor leader, political advisor and UC regent before joining the U.S. Senate in 2023 to complete the term of the late Dianne Feinstein, delivered the keynote address following a morning centered on strengthening resilience and equity at the local level. Sharing Research and Solutions Researchers from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs teamed up with difference-makers in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to share the latest advances in four areas of concern: California’s housing strategy, including the state’s new zoning rules aimed at making shelter more affordable Environmental health and justice, including the impact of extreme heat as L.A. hosts a series of mega-events, and the toll plastic pollution takes on vulnerable communities Transportation security, including new strategies for elevating security, trust, and comfort among public transit riders Socioeconomic vulnerability, including strategies to bridge intergenerational inequities, and regulatory tools that can be used to promote more inclusive growth Launched in 2019, the UCLA Luskin Summit provides a bridge between academia, policymakers, and civil society, with the goal of finding evidence-based solutions to California’s most pressing concerns. This year’s gathering highlighted recent research from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies , and departments of Public Policy Social Welfare , and Urban Planning Master of Urban Planning student O’Philia Le said she chose to attend the summit to learn how UCLA Luskin research is put into practice in the world. “A key takeaway for me was that large-scale racial justice and global environmental impacts really start with local solutions. However, those solutions don’t just happen on their own,” she said. “They require political pressure, community engagement, and an intentional push to actually move forward. As an aspiring planner, I believe that this is key to the work that we do.” From left, ABC7’s Josh Haskell, Miguel Santana of the California Community Foundation, and Zev Yaroslavsky of UCLA Luskin’s Los Angeles Initiative review results from the 2026 Quality of Life Index. Photo by Michael Troxell Quality of Life Index Reveals Growing Strain The summit also hosted the release of this year’s UCLA Quality of Life Index (QLI), a project of the Luskin School’s Los Angeles Initiative, directed by Zev Yaroslavsky . The survey found that Los Angeles County residents’ satisfaction with their lives has hit the lowest level in the QLI’s 11-year history. “We’ve been through a lot in the last five years: COVID; punishing increases in the cost of living; last year’s catastrophic fires, the worst natural disaster in the history of this city; tariffs; and this year the destabilizing implementation of the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps, which started right here in our own back yard,” he said. “All of these have taken their toll on virtually every aspect of our lives in every part of our region.” Cost of living continues to be the single biggest driver of residents’ quality of life, though its rating declined from 2025, according to the survey. Among the 1,400 Los Angeles County residents polled in March, housing affordability remained the dominant concern, while rising costs for utilities, groceries, and taxes were cited more frequently than in prior years. Ratings fell across nearly every category compared with last year, with six areas reaching their lowest levels since the survey began in 2016: education, transportation and traffic, jobs and the economy, public safety, neighborhood conditions, and relations among different races, ethnicities, and religions. A Call to Action for the Next Generation In her remarks, Butler also addressed the sobering results of the QLI. “Every year the Quality of Life Index holds up a mirror to Los Angeles County,” she said. “And every year, it asks us to be brave enough to look in that mirror.” She stressed, however, that “alongside every data point of strain, there’s a counter story, one that doesn’t get enough attention — the story that happens when people organize, when coalitions hold, when accountability is real.” To the service-minded students in the room, she issued a call to action, echoing the summit’s theme of empowering local communities. Some of them would go to Washington and some to Sacramento, where they are desperately needed, she said. “But some of you — hear me — need to go to places that don’t make headlines. To neighborhoods where the data actually lives, to communities where the stakes are immediate, not to study them but to be accountable to them. … “The communities most impacted by vulnerability are also most engaged in building solutions. … Survival demands participation.” UCLA Luskin professor Veronica Herrera introduces a session on plastic pollution before a standing-room-only audience. Photo by Mary Braswell View more photos from the 2026 UCLA Luskin Summit on Flickr. California remains one of the nation’s most expensive states to live in, with communities like San José, San Francisco, and Orange County demanding six-figure incomes for comfortable living. A recent SmartAsset study shows that a single adult in San José needs nearly $160,000 annually, while a family of four requires over $400,000, far outpacing local median incomes. Los Angeles ranks 16th, where single adults need $120,307 and families over $280,000. Housing costs are the primary driver of this gap, compounded by rising grocery and gas prices and stagnant wages. The study underscores the broader housing affordability crisis in California, highlighting how daily necessities continue to climb while wages lag behind. “It’s a problem that we created very slowly over a long period of time,” said Paavo Monkkonen , UCLA professor of urban planning and public policy, in a Los Angeles Times article. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board recently voted on whether or not to approve the K Line northern extension project that will connect San Vicente to Fairfax. The project is expected to boost ridership by nearly 100,000 daily users while linking key job centers and destinations, further strengthening the region’s growing light rail network. Experts say the expansion could reshape how Angelenos navigate the city. Jacob Wasserman of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies shared with Los Angeles Times that the project could help create a more interconnected rail grid, allowing riders to travel across Los Angeles with fewer transfers. “It’s really going to change people’s geography of L.A.” Wasserman said of the K line extension. “It’s creating this nice grid network of rail, so that you can get anywhere in the city with ideally just one transfer at most by rail. … It’ll change people’s mental model of the city where they live or work.” The project has faced opposition from some residents concerned about tunneling beneath residential neighborhoods. Transit officials have emphasized that the tunnels will be constructed deep underground and are not expected to impact surface properties. Part of the project’s first phase is not set to begin for nearly 15 years, in 2041. Associate professor of city planning at San Diego State University and Luskin alum AJ Kim has been named the 2026 recipient of the Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award , presented by the Urban Affairs Association and SAGE Publishing . The annual award recognizes scholars whose research bridges academic inquiry with on-the-ground community activism, honoring the legacy of political scientist Marilyn J. Gittell and her commitment to community-engaged urban scholarship. Kim, an associate professor of city planning at San Diego State University , has spent more than two decades working with immigrant rights and environmental justice organizations in the United States and internationally. Kim also leads the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation–funded project “Geospatial Mapping for Alternative Health Assets” and created an interactive ICE Detention Tracker that maps detention facilities and resources for affected communities. Reflecting on the project, Kim said, “I saw the need for a broader, nationwide, accessible visualization of the re-opening of detention centers and where they are located. Maps, particularly counter-maps, are uniquely powerful community and participatory tools that offer an alternative narrative: counter-maps can challenge narratives of criminalization by documenting policing (instead of crime, for example).” In the latest podcast episode of It Turns Out , host Kara Miller sat down with urban planning professor Michael Manville to tackle one of the most familiar frustrations in modern life: traffic congestion. Rather than accepting traffic as an inevitable part of city living, Manville explains that traffic isn’t just a nuisance—it “robs you of time, health, and sometimes sanity.” What’s striking, he argues, is that many of the “obvious” solutions people and policymakers reach for, like widening freeways or building new transit lines, often fail to make traffic better in a meaningful way. The episode delves into the underlying causes of congestion, including how underpriced road space and urban design choices contribute to persistent delays and bottlenecks. Manville highlights transportation research showing that smarter pricing mechanisms — such as congestion pricing that adjusts fees based on demand — can reduce gridlock by encouraging more efficient use of infrastructure. “People oppose it when it’s first proposed. After it’s implemented in the area, people like it. And yet after that happens, it’s uniquely uncontagious,” he notes. Reflecting on his early experiences in the field, Manville adds, “When I first started studying congestion pricing back in grad school, occasionally we’d get called by a government entity or an elected official who wanted to talk about ideas for reducing traffic. Their reaction when we proposed congestion pricing then was, ‘Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, and don’t ever come back.’ But now, people at least talk about it and even consider it. We’ll take progress.” Watch the podcast episode on or listen to the episode on Spotify Madeline Brozen , deputy director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Oaklandside about new legislation that would give transit agencies across the country more flexibility in how they use federal crime prevention funds. U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon, who represents East Bay cities in Congress, introduced a bill that would permit these funds to be used for “transit support specialists” rather than exclusively law enforcement officers. The unarmed civilian forces collaborate with sworn officers to aid riders, deter and report disruptive behavior, assist with medical emergencies, and handle minor, noncriminal conflicts. Many have a background in social services, with experience in providing referrals to the unhoused. “Agencies need the flexibility and confidence to use federal funds to pay for this new type of role,” said Brozen, who co-authored a December 2025 study of LA Metro’s transit ambassador program. Washington Post article on the forces that drive housing prices higher cited new research by UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Michael Storper Some housing activists fall in the “Yes in My Back Yard” camp, arguing that building more housing — especially in dense, transit-accessible neighborhoods — will lower prices for everyone, thanks to the laws of supply and demand. In a newly published paper, “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis,” Storper and his co-authors directly challenge the foundational assumptions of the YIMBY point of view. They call for “bold, comprehensive thinking about housing systems rather than relying on trickle-down affordability.” The scholars recommend direct approaches such as publicly funded vouchers to help pay for housing; market protections for low-income households, including rent control and tenant protections; and housing decommodification, including cooperatives, community land trusts, and public housing. “To put it bluntly, in America we haven’t actually been underbuilding,” Storper says. “The problem is demand is now split in a very unequal society. The supply you get is the wrong kind of supply.” UCLA graduate student Nick Giorgio MURP ’25 has been named a recipient of the Council of University Transportation Centers’ (CUTC) Neville A. Parker Award, marking the fourth consecutive year a UCLA student has earned the national honor. The award, presented Jan. 10 in Washington, D.C., recognizes outstanding master’s research in transportation, and Giorgio’s win brings UCLA’s total recipients to 15 since 2002. “This award means a great deal to me, especially considering how strong many of the other capstone projects were,” Giorgio said. “It was a tough competition.” Giorgio earned the recognition for his capstone project, Intersection Traffic Calming Treatments: A Comparative Analysis , which evaluated residential intersection improvements across Los Angeles in partnership with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Examining more than 30 intersections, Giorgio analyzed how all-way stop controls, traffic circles, and mini-roundabouts affect vehicle speeds and safety outcomes. His findings emphasize that context and design matter—and that no single solution fits every neighborhood. “Roads are the largest share of public space in Los Angeles, and how we design them reflects our values,” Giorgio said, underscoring the link between traffic safety, equity, and livability. Faculty advisor Brian Taylor praised the work’s practical impact, noting, “Nick’s analysis brings much-needed clarity to the question of what types of intersection treatments actually make neighborhoods safer.” Read the full Institutes for Transportation Studies article on UCLA student Nick Giorgio’s national transportation award. by Peaches Chung Homeownership is often framed as the American dream. For José Loya, it is also one of the clearest windows into how inequality is reproduced in American society. As an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, Loya examines how race, ethnicity, and structural inequities shape who has access to opportunity — and who doesn’t. Loya’s interest in housing was sparked as an undergraduate at Brown University during the Great Recession, when countless families faced foreclosure. “I was trying to understand why people were going into foreclosure and potentially losing everything,” he recalls. Working with a faculty mentor who specialized in homelessness and housing instability, he encountered the question that has guided his research ever since: How do we explain, and ultimately address, racial and economic inequality in the housing market? Loya describes himself as a social stratification scholar. The patterns he uncovers aren’t new, discrimination in mortgage lending has been proven for decades, but his methods are. Professor José Loya “I’m using modern statistical tools and richer, more comprehensive datasets than previous generations of researchers had,” he explains. “The findings may not be surprising — that whites and Asians tend to be the most advantaged in the mortgage market — but the nuance is different. I can show how inequality persists today, not necessarily in the same form as 50 or 70 years ago, but still present.” Much of his recent work examines barriers that prospective homebuyers face in the post–Great Recession era, as well as the ways Latino subgroups experience the mortgage market differently. Traditional research often treats Latinos as a homogenous category, something Loya argues conceals important differences. “Latinos are an ethnic group, not a racial group. There is tremendous diversity,” he says. “By drilling down into subgroups, we start to see how different racialized experiences among Latinos shape their access to homeownership.” A Wealth-Building Tool That’s Slipping Out of Reach for Many Homeownership remains the single largest vehicle for building wealth in the United States. But Loya’s research shows that the tool is becoming increasingly out of reach for the very communities who could benefit from it most. “In the last decade and a half, home prices have grown much faster than wages or any measure of labor success,” he says. “Middle-class and lower-income families are being squeezed out.” Add in rising interest rates, limited housing inventory, and skyrocketing demand, and a central question emerges: If homeownership is no longer accessible, how do families achieve upward mobility? Loya points to a paradox at the heart of U.S. housing policy. “Our banks want you to be a homeowner. The tax system incentivizes it through the mortgage interest deduction, one of the largest subsidies in the U.S. tax code. But the financial risk is growing and making it less achievable for lower and moderate-income households. Today, those subsidies are being largely utilized by higher socioeconomic households.” According to recent data, the homeownership rate for non-Hispanic white households sits around 73–74%, while Black households own homes at roughly 45–46%, and Hispanic/Latino households at about 50–51%. “Progress has been made,” Loya says. “But the gap is nowhere near closed.” Why Research Matters Now More Than Ever For Loya, UCLA Luskin offers the ideal environment to confront these challenges because the school engages students in opportunities for intersectional learning, bringing together perspectives from multiple specialties to tackle social, economic, and environmental challenges. “Society doesn’t operate in silos,” he says. “If we’re talking about access to homeownership, we’re also talking about labor market insecurity, education access, local zoning, transportation, climate change — all of it.” “Good research doesn’t always give you an answer. It shows you how much more work is needed to get to an answer.” At a time when federal research funding faces threats and universities nationwide are navigating political pressures, Loya is direct about why research still matters. “Universities don’t just study the problems of today,” he says. “We’re trying to anticipate the problems 20 or 30 years from now.” His own work, he says, is less about providing immediate fixes and more about documenting how historical patterns of inequality still shape outcomes today — and will continue to shape them in the future if left unaddressed. Preparing Students for Real-World Challenges When asked what he hopes his students take away from his classes, his answer is clear but hard to explain. “Problems are complicated,” he says. “Good research doesn’t always give you an answer. It shows you how much more work is needed to get to an answer.” Rather than rushing toward solutions, Loya encourages students to sit with uncertainty and ask better questions about the systems shaping outcomes. “In my classes, it’s not necessarily about finding the solution,” he adds. “It’s really about understanding the problem.” For Loya, that’s often where the work begins — with examining the forces that are often hidden in plain sight — and equipping students with the tools to question them. The Palisades and Eaton fires in January 2025 destroyed about 13,000 homes. Despite being one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history, according to Vox , only seven homes have been rebuilt. With Los Angeles already facing a tight rental housing market and California experiencing a statewide housing shortage, the fires created significant political pressure to rebuild as quickly as possible. Despite political backing, a year later, only about 900 homes are under construction. Minjee Kim , an assistant professor of urban planning, claims that the system is ill-equipped for recovery in this Vox article . “The system structurally is not built for rebuilding and recovery,” Kim said. “You just need a whole different animal to enable comprehensive reconstruction.” The rebuilding process requires multiple permits, which take time and money to obtain. Kim said regulatory hurdles are not caused by any single agency. “When you zoom into regulation as an issue, it’s not individual departments that are delaying the process,” she said. “It’s more like the entirety of the network of reviews that needs to happen that is an impediment to a faster recovery.” Recent Posts The CPUC’s Plans for an Unprecedented Building Decarbonization April 23, 2026 Ong on Asian Surname Growth Trends in the U.S. April 23, 2026 Hope Is Hard Work: Laphonza Butler Delivered Call to Action on Building Power From the Ground Up April 20, 2026 Shane Phillips Weighs In on San Diego’s Proposed Vacancy Tax April 20, 2026 Zev Yaroslavsky Reflects on Declining Quality of Life in Los Angeles Times Report April 17, 2026 Contact UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs 3250 Public Affairs Building - Box 951656 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1656 Campus Resources Maps, Directions, Parking Directory Contact Academic Calendar Careers Diversity University of California Follow The statements on this page represent the views of people affiliated with the Luskin School of Public Affairs and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of California, or UCLA or its Chancellor. 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