About the Podcast

UCLA Housing Voice is a podcast hosted by UCLA Lewis Center’s Shane Phillips, housing initiative manager, and co-hosted alternately by professors Mike Lens, Mike Manville, and Paavo Monkkonen. Research on housing affordability, displacement, development and policy is a fast-moving field, with important implications for policy and people. But research findings don’t often get shared with those beyond academia. In every episode, our hosts talk to a different housing researcher to help make sense of their work and how it can be applied in the real world.

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Meet the Hosts

Housing Initiative Project Manager

Shane Phillips
Associate Faculty Director

Michael Lens
Professor

Paavo Monkkonen
Professor

Michael Manville
Housing Initiative Project Manager

Shane Phillips

Shane Phillips manages the Randall Lewis Housing Initiative for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. In this role, he supports faculty and student research, manages events, and publishes research, policy briefs, and educational materials. His work covers a wide range of housing topics including tenant protections, housing production policies, and government revenue and financing reforms. Shane is also the author of “The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping it There),” in which he argues for an “all of the above” approach to housing policy and outlines 55 strategies for improving affordability and household stability.

Areas of Work:Housing Affordability

Associate Faculty Director

Michael Lens

Michael Lens is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy and Associate Faculty Director of 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. Professor Lens regularly publishes this work in leading academic journals and his research has won awards from the Journal of the American Planning Association and Housing Policy Debate.

Areas of Work:Housing Affordability

Professor

Paavo Monkkonen

Paavo Monkkonen is 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

Professor

Michael Manville

Michael Manville is Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. 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.

Areas of Work:Housing Affordability

Episode Summaries and Show Notes

2512, 2024

Encore Episode: Family-Friendly Urbanism with Louis Thomas

In most of the U.S., cities are for singles, roommates, and childless couples, and the suburbs are for raising kids. That’s not true of much of the rest of the world. Louis Thomas discusses the nearest example of family-friendly urbanism in Vancouver, British Columbia.

1610, 2024

Episode 79: Who Pays For Inclusionary Zoning with Shane Phillips

Inclusionary zoning policies use the market to produce affordable housing, but nothing comes for free. So who pays? Shane takes the guest seat to discuss his analysis of IZ in Los Angeles, making the case that it’s not developers or high-income renters who bear the cost, but all renters — poor, middle income, and wealthy alike.

2108, 2024

Episode 77: Upzoning With Strings Attached with Jacob Krimmel and Maxence Valentin

Changing zoning rules to allow taller and denser buildings may cause land values to go up, and public officials may try to “capture” this added value by requiring affordable units in new developments. Jacob Krimmel and Maxence Valentin join to discuss what happens when costs and benefits are out of balance, offering Seattle as a cautionary tale.

2407, 2024

Episode 75: Segregating the Built Environment with Ann Owens

We often talk about residential segregation by race or income, but we rarely explore it in the literal sense — as in segregation of residences: of one kind of housing from another. Ann Owens joins to discuss her research on how segregation manifests itself in our built environment in cities and neighborhoods across the U.S.