InterActions LA 2023

From Housing Crossroads to Transportation Connections

Friday, April 28

Across California, people in metropolitan areas are facing an acute housing shortage, driving up rental prices and pushing home ownership further and further out of reach. The California Legislature has taken an increasingly active role in increasing housing production and protecting tenants. But, at the same time, to achieve state climate goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, these housing advances must be coupled with transportation approaches that ensure new housing development does not continue to favor car-based mobility. Progress toward connecting housing and transportation priorities requires advancing state, regional, and local approaches. This year’s InterActions LA event will discuss the past and future housing and transportation goals, building on panels from the 2022 UCLA Arrowhead Symposium: California’s Housing Crossroads.

Back in person at The California Endowment, InterActions LA will include presentations and discussions covering legislative updates, research, case studies, and organizing approaches. As California continues to invest significant time in advancing housing legislation and large amounts of financial resources in transportation, what are these investments yielding in terms of results, and what still needs to be done? In particular, we will discuss challenges and solutions around the most promising recent legislative efforts at the state, regional, and local levels. What are the limitations of state-led planning on advancing housing and transportation goals? What are harmonious approaches?

Resources

Schedule

Keynote | Mike Bonin, former Los Angeles City Councilmember

Panel 1 | Legislative Updates: Housing & Transportation Progress

California is introducing new housing and transportation strategies through recent legislation and grants. The aim is to increase housing production and improve transportation outcomes. However, until fully implemented, the burden of long commutes and unaffordable housing prices persists. What changes are most promising and when will they positively impact communities?

Speakers:

  • Evelyn Blumenberg, Lewis Center Director and Professor, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
  • Amar Cid, Deputy Director of Community Investments, Strategic Growth Council
  • Megan Kirkeby, Deputy Director of Housing Policy Development, California Department of Housing and Community Development
  • Madeline Brozen (moderator), Deputy Director, Lewis Center

Panel 2 | Examples From the Field: Case Studies on New Approaches

We examine three new strategies to accelerate housing and transportation progress, including funding programs and streamlined processes. What can be learned from the early results of the California Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program, the City of Los Angeles Transit-Oriented Communities program, and CEQA exemptions for transportation projects? And how can these lessons be applied in the future?

Speakers:

  • Annie Fryman, Director of Special Projects, SPUR
  • Alejandro Huerta, Senior Program Director, Enterprise Community Partners
  • Michael Manville, Associate Professor, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
  • Paavo Monkkonen (moderator), Professor, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs

Panel 3 | Finding the Paths Ahead: Organizing, Implementing & Next Steps

We explore two key components of creating change: communicating change to the public and implementing it. Speakers will share their efforts to advance housing and transportation through effective messaging and establishing a framework for partners to accelerate project delivery.

Speakers:

  • Laura Hughes, Director of Narrative Strategies, PolicyLink
  • Tommy Newman, Vice President of Engagement and Activation, United Way of Greater Los Angeles
  • James Shahamiri, Director of Engineering, LA Metro
  • David Levitus (moderator), Executive Director, LA Forward Action

Speakers

Mike Bonin

Keynote Speaker

For the past decade, Mike Bonin has been a leader on regional transportation and housing issues. As a member of the Los Angeles City Council and Board of Directors of LA Metro from July 2013 to December 2022, Mike fought to provide “Mobility for All” and pushed a multi-modal transportation strategy that was forward-thinking and focused on safety, convenience, reliability and equity. He pushed for new rail lines, expanded bus service, micro transit, protected bike lanes, and walkable neighborhoods. On housing, Mike earned a reputation for insisting on affordable housing, even in the wealthy communities he represented. He led successful fights to expand tenants rights and to build supportive housing for people who are unhoused. 

Evelyn Blumenberg

Speaker

Evelyn Blumenberg is the director of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and a professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research examines the effects of urban structure — the spatial location of residents, employment, and services — on economic outcomes for low-wage workers, and on the role of planning and policy in shaping the spatial structure of cities. Her recent projects include analyses of the residential location and travel behavior of low-wage workers, child care access and travel, driving cessation among older adults, and automobile finance and expenditures. Blumenberg was honored in 2014 as a White House Champion of Change for her research on the links between transportation access, employment, and poverty.

Amar Cid

Speaker

Amar values and utilizes her lived and learned experiences, rooted in racial justice, the environment, and the community’s ability to thrive, to inform her professional work. She has over 15 years of transportation and community planning and policy experience across public and nonprofit sectors, including positions in affordable housing, federal surveying, youth and health advocacy, legislative analysis, and transportation planning.
Amar led the country’s first State DOT office on Race and Equity at Caltrans. Under her leadership and through meaningful collaboration, she advanced internal and external DEI efforts with a people’s centered model. The Caltrans Office on Race and Equity (CORE) launched the development of the Equity Index, the Interagency Transportation Equity Listening Sessions, and the inaugural external Interagency Transportation Equity Advisory Committee. Before managing CORE, she was an integral statewide strategist in public transportation, including implementing and cultivating the $100M+ annual CA Climate Investment Low Carbon Transit Operations Program. Amar successfully advanced local transit entities in their transition to Zero Emission service, coordinated new routes for the direct benefit of priority populations, and negotiated service-wide free fare programs for students.
Amar recently joined the Strategic Growth Council in January 2023 as the Deputy Director of Community Investments and Planning, overseeing programs including Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC), Transformative Climate Communities (TCC), Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation (SALC), and Community Resilience Centers (CRC). She earned a MA in Community Development and Planning from Clark University and a BS in Community and Regional Development at UC Davis.

Annie Fryman

Speaker

Annie Fryman is the Director of Special Projects for the San Francisco team where she focuses on passing ambitious local laws and programs in housing and transportation. She has spent her last 8 years working in San Francisco and the State Capitol, with a career spanning architecture, public policy, and housing development. Annie led housing, transportation, and land use policy for Scott Wiener at the Board of Supervisors and California State Senate, passing bills focused on streamlining housing permitting, increasing local and regional housing goals, waiving environmental reviews for sustainable transportation projects, and mandating best-in-class safe streets infrastructure on urban sections of the state highway system.

In addition to her work in public policy, Annie has also had to navigate policy as a practitioner in the field. She began her career as an architectural designer, primarily working to retrofit San Francisco’s soft-story buildings for earthquake resiliency and convert garages to accessory dwelling units. Most recently, Annie worked at housing startup Abodu, where she worked to speed up building permit times in California’s suburbs and major cities by training city officials on new state laws that impact permitting for factory-built housing and detached accessory dwelling units.

Alejandro Huerta

Speaker

Alejandro Huerta is Senior Program Director at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., where he oversees Enterprise’s Southern California technical assistance practice for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities and Transformative Climate Communities programs. Before joining Enterprise, Alejandro was a City Planner for the City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning Major Projects division.

Laura Hughes

Speaker

Laura A. Hughes, Director of Narrative Strategies, is a curious learner, change-maker, and persuasive leader with high emotional intelligence. At PolicyLink she is responsible for harnessing the power of narrative to advance racial equity and justice specific to housing for the more than one million individuals who live below 200 percent of the poverty level. Hughes has led numerous projects including the strategic alignment of corporate and philanthropic partners to layer-focused investments to dramatically influence the trajectory of a neighborhood and achieve measurable gains for children and families. Additionally, she served as a program officer with The Skillman Foundation and as the Executive Director of the Ruth Ellis Center, a homeless and runaway shelter dedicated to the needs of LGBTQ youth. Prior to her role with Gusto Partners, LLC, Laura served as the Vice President of Communications & Community for a woman-owned, $500 million IT and business services corporation with 3,000 consultants and 32 offices in the US and Europe. Laura earned a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Anthropology from Brown University and her Master in Public Health, Health Behavior Health Education, from the University of Michigan.  She was a 2016 German Marshall Fellow.

Megan Kirkeby

Speaker

Megan Kirkeby is the Deputy Director of Housing Policy Development at the California Department of Housing and Community Development, where she has served as Assistant Deputy Director of Fair Housing since 2018 and was a Senior Policy Research Specialist from 2015 to 2018. She held several positions at the California Housing Partnership from 2012 to 2015, including Policy Director and Sustainable Housing Policy Manager. Kirkeby was a Community Equity Intern at PolicyLink in 2011, analyzing infrastructure disparities in low-income unincorporated communities of color. She was also the Policy Associate at the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California from 2008 to 2010. Kirkeby earned an MPP from UCLA, with a concentration in Urban and Regional Planning, and she has an undergraduate degree from the UC Santa Cruz in Global Economics.

Mike Manville

Speaker

Michael Manville is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning as well as a Faculty Fellow of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Both his research and teaching focus on the relationships between transportation and land use, and on local public finance. Much of his research concerns the tendency of local governments to hide the costs of driving in the property market, through land use restrictions intended to fight traffic congestion. These land use laws only sometimes reduce congestion, and can profoundly influence the supply and price of housing.

Tommy Newman

Speaker

Tommy Newman is the Vice President of Engagement and Activation at the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. He is responsible for the organization’s communications, engagement, and public affairs work. Tommy’s passion is in building powerful coalitions to drive justice-centered change forward. In his time at United Way, he has had the privilege of helping to create the Everyone In campaign, which now has over 100,000 constituents, as well as push forward multiple ballot measure and legislative campaigns.

James Shahamiri

Speaker

James Shahamiri is the lead engineer for Los Angeles Metro’s Speed & Reliability program. James oversees improvements such as bus lanes, bus bulbs and boarding islands, signal priority and other operational changes to prioritize transit through congested corridors and intersections.

Madeline Brozen

Moderator

Madeline Brozen is the deputy director of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies where she works with a community of scholars understanding how people live, move, and work in the Los Angeles region. Her research focuses on the transportation needs of vulnerable populations and how transportation connects people to opportunity, most recently focusing on transportation needs to healthcare. Her previous research includes work on parklet design and evaluation, park design for older adults, and street performance metrics. Madeline is a lecturer in GIS for the UCLA Urban Planning Department, a former manager of the UCLA Complete Streets Initiative, the founding editor-in-chief of Transfers Magazine, and a member of the Investing in Place advisory board.

Michael Lens

Moderator

Michael Lens is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UCLA and Associate Faculty Director at the Lewis Center. Professor Lens’s research and teaching explore the potential of public policy to address housing market inequities that lead to negative outcomes for low-income families and communities of color. This research involves housing interventions such as subsidies, tenant protections, and production. His research on housing subsidies and crime has challenged conventional wisdom regarding the housing voucher program, showing that those who receive those subsidies live in much safer neighborhoods than those living in housing constructed with supply-side subsidies.

David Levitus

Moderator

David founded LA Forward Action with a group of his fellow Angelenos to build the progressive power we need to create a just, vibrant Los Angeles.

David got his start in politics and policy during his time as an undergraduate at New York University, where he majored in History and Economics. After working to protect tenants in NYC and to shift U.S. foreign policy in DC, he moved to Los Angeles to earn a Ph.D. in History at the University of Southern California, where he focused on patterns of metropolitan development and political power over the last century. During grad school, his volunteer work in social justice organizing and policy advocacy led him to pursue a career making change from the ground up.

David’s published long-form essays on progressive politics and urban policy in the LA Review of Books and Streetsblog Los Angeles. He’s a Board Member with LA Voice Action, a leader on the Movement Voter Project’s LA organizing team, and a member of the Social Venture Partners Los Angeles 2019-2021 Systems Accelerator cohort, as well as a former fellow with Coro Lead LA, Ashoka Emerging Social Innovators, and Starting Bloc.

Paavo Monkkonen

Moderator

Paavo Monkkonen is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, director of the Latin American Cities Initiative, the coordinator of the Regional and International Development Concentration, and a Faculty Cluster Leader for the Global Public Affairs Initiative. Professor Monkkonen researches and writes on the ways policies and markets shape urbanization and social segregation in cities around the world. His scholarship ranges from studies of large-scale national housing finance programs to local land use regulations and property rights institutions often not recognized for their importance to housing. Past and ongoing comparative research on socioeconomic segregation and land markets spans several countries including Argentina, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, and the United States. He continues to work as a consultant on national housing and urban policy in Mexico, where he has various long-term research projects.

Areas of Work:Housing Affordability

Thank You to Our Sponsor

About the Conference

InterActions LA is an annual conference dedicated to advancing regional growth and equity in Greater Los Angeles. Bringing together a diverse community from multiple sectors, this half-day event provides an opportunity to discuss and engage in the most pressing regional issues today. InterActions LA seeks to ignite conversation, exchange ideas, and provide knowledge on topics at the intersection of how people live, move, and work in the Los Angeles region.