Director’s Message

The multiple crises facing our region — the dual COVID-19 and racism pandemics — highlight the need for both knowledge and action in achieving regional equity and our responsibility to do more in the fight for racial justice.

This year, as a center, we’ve been investing in our future. We launched the Randall Lewis Housing Initiative, developed the groundwork for research and programming on the role of transportation in accessing regional opportunities, and hosted a series of policy-relevant events. All of our efforts are made possible by the growing number of committed faculty, staff, students, and external partners with whom we work.

I invite you to engage with us as we tackle the monumental challenges ahead.

Evelyn Blumenberg
Director

By the Numbers

In 2019-20, the UCLA Lewis Center continued to advance research and knowledge on how people live, move and work in the Los Angeles region.

New reports and briefs

Students supported

Funding provided to students through fellowships, research grants and center projects

Community events

Growth in reach

Additional support

Initiative

This year, we launched an initiative to produce and promote research on how to make housing more affordable. And we hit the ground running — hiring a manager, producing work on rent control, affordable housing preservation, vacancy, housing policy priority shifts due to COVID-19, and much more. Our Housing, Equity & Community event series further highlighted these issues, in addition to homeownership and eviction. Our current health and policing crises have laid bare our country’s failure to value Black life, and given the central role of housing in exacerbating these failures, our work feels more urgent than ever.

Michael Lens
Associate Faculty Director

Leading: Single-family homes exacerbate inequality, undermine efficiency

In a peer-reviewed journal article, Michael Manville, Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Lens called for an end to single-family zoning. They write that single-family zoning has exacerbated inequality and unsustainable practices in most American cities, and call for its demise. The researchers examine defenses for single-family zoning and argue the majority are weak and based mostly on concerns over aesthetics and preferences. As such, planners should be morally compelled to abolish this form of zoning. After reactions to the initial article, the researchers published a follow-up rebuttal to address elements in contention.

Advocating: Prioritizing housing assistance during COVID-19

The pandemic has thrown hundreds of thousands of Angeleno households into financial turmoil, with low-income renters among the most vulnerable. In a brief, the Lewis Center lays out why investing in housing for long-term tenants of rent-stabilized units should be a priority during the post-COVID-19 recovery. Data suggest that these tenants are more vulnerable than other renters in the city. They tend to be among the poorest households in the city, and yet the assistance costs for them are low.

Explaining: What does “affordable housing” mean?

This primer breaks down categories of affordable housing and affordability levels. It includes information on how they’re regulated, what they accomplish, and who they serve in order to help decision-makers develop better-informed policy that improves affordability and protects against displacement.

Impact

Select Impact Stories

Spotlighting Aging Adults
Evelyn Blumenberg and colleagues received the 2019 TRB Pyke Johnson Award for research on mobility needs of aging adults, marking the third time UCLA Luskin has won since the prize’s inception.

Data for Democracy
With UCLA’s Center X, this brief helps K-12 students think critically about inequality and access to public parks and open spaces.

Golden Age Park
The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust designed the city’s first senior-oriented park. In November 2019, LA welcomed a “little oasis in the city” designed from a Lewis Center blueprint of senior-friendly open spaces.

Science of CicLAvia
With colleagues in the Fielding School of Public Health, we participated in the UCLA Centennial Celebration, CicLAvia – Heart of LA showcasing past event research and real-time interactive, fun data collection.

How Women Travel
Lewis Center researchers conducted the literature review for LA Metro’s seminal report on women’s mobility needs, travel patterns, commute demands and safety concerns.

Research Spotlight
Report sheds light on harassment and travel. Fear leads female students to take precautions, including not using transit: 10% do not use the bus after dark.

Routes to Opportunity
From auto access to congestion pricing and decision-making power, the 29th Annual UCLA Arrowhead Symposium centered the role transportation plays in maintaining and addressing inequities — and the sheer amount of work and learning we still need to do.

Housing and the Pandemic
The COVID-19 crisis provided an opportunity to delve into housing inequities — eviction protections, overcrowding, challenges for unsheltered Angelenos — in the era of coronavirus and how today’s challenge might shape future policy.

From LA to Osaka
UCLA alumna Kimiko Shiki, MA UP ’01 PhD ’08, is back in LA as a visiting scholar from Ritsumeikan University researching housing choice vouchers, residential mobility and access to opportunities.

Bruin on the Move
Sam Speroni, MURP ’20, analyzed school-bound trip data from HopSkipDrive for his capstone and found the mobility service provides essential transportation for foster youth.
Up Next: Sam will stay at UCLA to pursue a PhD in urban planning.

Select Research

Influence

Research in Action

Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin introduced a motion to update the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, reflecting suggestions from a Lewis Housing Initiative brief. Over the past decade, rent increases have outpaced inflation and Bonin’s motion would tie future increases to a percentage of the consumer price index, instead of the current model that includes a 3% minimum.