‘A Decent Home’ Documentary Screening

The UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and Luskin Center for Innovation invite you to a screening of A Decent Home, a feature-length documentary addressing class and economic inequity that features the lives and challenges of mobile home park residents in securing affordable housing. We will provide food and light refreshments for our guests during the movie. Afterward, we will hold a moderated discussion and Q&A with film director Sara Terry, Miguel Miguel of Pacoima Beautiful, and Assistant Professor Jose Loya. The Luskin Center’s Greg Pierce will moderate the discussion. The conversation will touch upon the film’s contents and research on equitable home financing, mortgage disparities, and barriers to homeownership for communities of color in Los Angeles.

Sara Terry is the director and producer of the award-winning PBS documentary, A Decent Home, about mobile home parks and the wealth gap. A Sundance Documentary Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography, her films have been supported by Ford Foundation, Sundance, Cal Humanities, IDA/Pare Lorentz, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation and many others. She is a mid-career director whose work explores how we define our humanity and the role community plays in helping us understand how we live that humanity. Her first film, Fambul Tok, premiered at SXSW in 2011 and her second film, FOLK, premiered at Nashville Film Festival in 2013.

José Loya is an assistant professor in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and faculty affiliate with the Chicano Studies Research Center. His research addresses Latino issues in urban areas by connecting ethno-racial inequality and contextual forces at the neighborhood, metropolitan, and national levels. His research discusses several topics related to stratification in homeownership, including ethno-racial, gender, and Latino disparities in mortgage access. José received his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology and holds a master’s degree in Statistics from the Wharton School of Business at Penn. Prior to graduate school, José worked for several years in community development and affordable housing in South Florida.

Miguel Miguel, a native of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, was raised in a predominantly Latino community faced with constant environmental injustices. Armed with a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA’s Luskin School, he has dedicated over 6 years to various roles, including chairing the land use committee for his local neighborhood council, serving as a cultural resource consultant, and contributing as a researcher at UCLA. Miguel’s research centers on the intersectionality between housing access and environmental injustices faced by BIPOC communities. His exploration of alternative homeownership models, like manufactured housing, seeks to establish more inclusive land ownership structures to empower marginalized communities and address environmental disparities. As the Policy Director at Pacoima Beautiful, Miguel aims to holistically and systemically establish channels for community decision power. With the integration of community members as the sole decision-makers on policy platforms, Miguel will help establish the necessary changes to cement the principles of environmental justice..

Moderator:
Greg Pierce (he/him) is faculty in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning, the research and co-executive director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, and the director of the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab. He is also an affiliate of the Lewis Center for Regional Studies. Greg’s research examines how infrastructure planning and policy efforts perpetuate or address service inequities and demonstrates how communities cope with and overcome them. One of his focus areas is environmental inequities in U.S. mobile home parks.