Latest news with #UCLALuskinSchoolofPublicAffairs
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mayor Karen Bass' unfavorable ratings spiked following fires, survey shows
Mayor Karen Bass is significantly less popular than she was a year ago, likely because of her handling of January's devastating fires, according to a new survey of Los Angeles residents. The survey by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs found that Bass' unfavorable ratings had shot up by 17 percentage points compared with a year ago. Nearly half of Angelenos polled had unfavorable views of Bass, compared with 32% last year. At her highest levels of popularity in 2023, a few months after she was elected, she was viewed 46% favorably and 23% unfavorably. In this year's survey, 37% had a favorable opinion of Bass, compared to 42% last year. While the poll did not ask whether the fires factored into residents' views of Bass, her drop in popularity was probably related, said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former City Council member and L.A. County supervisor who runs the Los Angeles Initiative at Luskin. "Bass has taken the brunt of the criticism over the fires. That's the bad news. The good news for her is this happened overnight, and she has an opportunity to, by performing well in recovery, win back people she has lost," Yaroslavsky said. The survey of 1,400 L.A. residents, taken between Feb. 23 and March 9, follows other poor poll showings for Bass after the fires. Less than 20% of respondents to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released in March said she did an excellent or a good job in responding to the fires. More than 40% said she did a poor or very poor job. Bass has defended her leadership during the crisis citing the expediency in which city building permits were issued for homes damaged in the Palisades fire and the faster restoration of water and power as compared to other large-scale California blazes. "The Mayor is focused on leading what is on track to be the fastest disaster recovery effort in California history," Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, wrote in a statement to The Times. Read more: Fewer than 20% of L.A. residents give Mayor Bass high marks for fire response, poll shows The polls follow Bass' rocky performance in the wake of the fires. She was in Ghana when the fires broke out, despite warnings of dangerously high Santa Ana winds. She traded barbs with her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, eventually removing Crowley after saying the chief failed to warn her about the concerning weather forecasts. The Luskin survey took the pulse of Angelenos on many other issues, but the main storyline of this year was the fires, said Yaroslavsky. More than 40% of respondents said they knew someone personally affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires, which killed at least 30 people and scorched thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and surrounding areas. More than a quarter of people surveyed said they had lost some income because of the fires. In one nearly unanimous category, 89% of respondents said that those who lost their properties in the fires should be allowed to rebuild at the same location. Read more: L.A. mayor's text messages provide vivid window into early fire response The survey pointed to changes on some other fronts as well, including homelessness, which was Bass' signature issue before the fires. For several years, the percentage of Angelenos who believed that homelessness was getting worse had gone up. But in 2025, the percentage declined 8%, from 60% in 2024 to 52% this year. Still, only 10% of city residents think the homeless situation is improving. The number of 'unsheltered' homeless — people living on the street — in Los Angeles fell by more than 10% from 2023 to 2024 after years of increases, according to the annual count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Mayor Karen Bass' unfavorable ratings spiked following fires, survey shows
Mayor Karen Bass is significantly less popular than she was a year ago, likely because of her handling of January's devastating fires, according to a new survey of Los Angeles residents. The survey by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs found that Bass' unfavorable ratings had shot up by 17 percentage points compared with a year ago. Nearly half of Angelenos polled had unfavorable views of Bass, compared with 32% last year. At her highest levels of popularity in 2023, a few months after she was elected, she was viewed 46% favorably and 23% unfavorably. In this year's survey, 37% had a favorable opinion of Bass, compared to 42% last year. While the poll did not ask whether the fires factored into residents' views of Bass, her drop in popularity was probably related, said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former City Council member and L.A. County supervisor who runs the Los Angeles Initiative at Luskin. 'Bass has taken the brunt of the criticism over the fires. That's the bad news. The good news for her is this happened overnight, and she has an opportunity to, by performing well in recovery, win back people she has lost,' Yaroslavsky said. The survey of 1,400 L.A. residents, taken between Feb. 23 and March 9, follows other poor poll showings for Bass after the fires. Less than 20% of respondents to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released in March said she did an excellent or a good job in responding to the fires. More than 40% said she did a poor or very poor job. Bass has defended her leadership during the crisis citing the expediency in which city building permits were issued for homes damaged in the Palisades fire and the faster restoration of water and power as compared to other large-scale California blazes. 'The Mayor is focused on leading what is on track to be the fastest disaster recovery effort in California history,' Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, wrote in a statement to The Times. The polls follow Bass' rocky performance in the wake of the fires. She was in Ghana when the fires broke out, despite warnings of dangerously high Santa Ana winds. She traded barbs with her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, eventually removing Crowley after saying the chief failed to warn her about the concerning weather forecasts. The Luskin survey took the pulse of Angelenos on many other issues, but the main storyline of this year was the fires, said Yaroslavsky. More than 40% of respondents said they knew someone personally affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires, which killed at least 30 people and scorched thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and surrounding areas. More than a quarter of people surveyed said they had lost some income because of the fires. In one nearly unanimous category, 89% of respondents said that those who lost their properties in the fires should be allowed to rebuild at the same location. The survey pointed to changes on some other fronts as well, including homelessness, which was Bass' signature issue before the fires. For several years, the percentage of Angelenos who believed that homelessness was getting worse had gone up. But in 2025, the percentage declined 8%, from 60% in 2024 to 52% this year. Still, only 10% of city residents think the homeless situation is improving. The number of 'unsheltered' homeless — people living on the street — in Los Angeles fell by more than 10% from 2023 to 2024 after years of increases, according to the annual count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Donald Shoup, renowned parking guru and UCLA professor, dies at 86
Over more than a half century of clear writing, clever quips and exhaustive scholarship, Donald Shoup became one of the world's foremost experts and influencers on a topic seemingly as mundane as it is universal: parking. Shoup, an economist and distinguished professor emeritus of urban planning at UCLA, died Feb. 6 after a brief illness. He was 86. Shoup's central argument, published most expansively in his 700-page seminal work "The High Cost of Free Parking," was that everything that most people think about parking was wrong. Free street parking, Shoup wrote, makes parking and driving worse. The low cost creates a scarcity of spaces that leads people to spend time and fuel circling blocks in misery. And city planners' efforts to solve this problem by mandating that homes and businesses provide more cheap parking only worsen the situation. According to Shoup, this parking conundrum is foundational to many of the ills in modern urban life: congestion, sprawl, pollution and high housing costs. Read more: 'Gimme Shelter': How parking lots explain California's housing crisis Shoup presented his ideas with a cheerful countercultural undercurrent and sprinkle of quirky history. In a 2014 interview with The Times, Shoup noted that the first parking ticket for an expired meter was given to a Protestant minister in 1935. The fine was dismissed, Shoup said, 'on the then-novel explanation that the minister had gone to get change for the parking meter.' Shoup's message, persistence and style gained him legions of followers around the globe. The most ardent called themselves 'Shoupistas.' The professor embraced the attention and happily accepted a playful moniker for himself, 'Shoup Dogg.' Michael Manville, chair of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said Shoup leaned into the spotlight because he realized it would help spread his ideas and because he just liked talking to people about parking. "He spent so much time with his writing because he wanted to make it accessible," said Manville, who first met Shoup as a UCLA graduate student in 2001. "He spent so much time with presentations because he wanted to make them entertaining. He built a method where he was always ready to explain to an activist group or a politician, 'Hey, the missing part here is parking.'" Shoup acknowledged that inveighing against free parking was not popular. He began a 2006 article in academic journal Transport Policy by nodding to parking conventional wisdom through a quotation from George Costanza, the obsessive sidekick from the 1990s sitcom "Seinfeld." Parking at a garage, Costanza said, was 'like going to a prostitute.' 'Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?' Costanza said. Read more: He puts parking in its place While Shoup mostly traveled by bicycle, he told The Times for a 2010 profile that, when he drove, he often circled the block searching for free parking. 'I don't like paying for parking,' he said with a shrug. 'But free parking is ultimately not beneficial.' Shoup's policy prescriptions attempted to take into account the public's prevailing views. He believed that cities should charge market prices for street parking and that the resulting revenue should be directed to improvements in the surrounding community. This blending of classical economic theories on supply and demand and understanding political realities helped build his practical influence, wrote Bill Fulton, a former student of Shoup's and an expert on California planning issues, in a remembrance published this week. 'If you give that money back to the neighborhood where the paid parking is occurring, you can provide a tangible benefit to that neighborhood — and begin to overcome political opposition to paid parking,' Fulton wrote. Shoup was born in 1938 in Long Beach. His father was a captain in the U.S. Navy and the Shoups were stationed in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was bombed. In 1968, Shoup earned a PhD in economics at Yale and, in six years, became a professor at UCLA. He remained there his entire career, retiring in 2015. Fulton recalled that Shoup used to joke that he came upon parking as his life's work because it was 'the bottom of the barrel.' Most public policy academics studied more prestigious national and state issues leaving few interested in plumbing the depths of local policy. Among the few who explored local government, everyone ignored two issues: parking and sewage. 'Don didn't want to study sewage,' Fulton wrote. 'So he studied parking.' As mayor of Ventura in 2010, Fulton brought Shoup's ideas into reality through a parking strategy for the city's downtown. The city began charging for some of its parking spaces, which spurred employees of local businesses to use nearby free city lots, freeing up curb spaces for customers. By that point, numerous cities around the country were experimenting with Shoup's ideas. The Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit founded to advance Shoup's ideas, has documented policies in more than 3,000 cities that rely on Shoup's research. On the nonprofit's website, over 70 people — including mourners from Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; Istanbul; Brisbane, Australia; and elsewhere — have shared memories of Shoup and celebrated his scholarship. Read more: Column: Donald Shoup, UCLA's parking guru, on how L.A. should manage its meters One of the biggest changes inspired by Shoup's work came in 2022 when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that eliminated mandatory parking requirements for most developments near mass transit across California. Newsom said the law would reduce the cost of housing while lowering climate change-inducing car trips. 'Housing solutions are also climate solutions,' Newsom said. The law took effect when Shoup was 85 years old. Shoup liked to acknowledge his later-in-life success, according to his wife, Pat Shoup. He published "The High Cost of Free Parking" when he was 67. 'He always said it was fine to be a late bloomer if you made it to the flower show,' Pat wrote in her husband's death notice. 'He made it and left a long trail of blossoms in his wake to benefit others.' Shoup remained active following his retirement from UCLA. He continued to teach and was often seen within the Luskin School of Public Affairs building, per a remembrance published by the university. Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) marveled at Shoup's energy and how the professor continued to inspire people. Recently, she watched a crowd filled with people of all ages rapt as he gave a lecture on reforming handicap parking laws to increase access for people with disabilities. Friedman, who authored the 2022 parking law when she served in the state Legislature, said the army of Shoup adherents provided a critical mass of support as she tried to move the bill forward. 'He inspired a passion among his students and fellow academics that turned his work into a movement,' Friedman said. 'That's what was unique about him.' Shoup is survived by his wife Pat, brother Frank Shoup, his niece Allison Shoup, nephew Elliot Shoup, Elliot's wife Megan and their three children. There will be no funeral or church service, but UCLA will celebrate his life at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Donald and Pat Shoup Endowed Fellowship in Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School or the Parking Reform Network. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
13-02-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Donald Shoup, renowned parking guru and UCLA professor, dies at 86
Over more than a half century of clear writing, clever quips and exhaustive scholarship, Donald Shoup became one of the world's foremost experts and influencers on a topic seemingly as mundane as it is universal: parking. Shoup, an economist and distinguished professor emeritus of urban planning at UCLA, died Feb. 6 after a brief illness. He was 86. Shoup's central argument, published most expansively in his 700-page seminal work 'The High Cost of Free Parking,' was that everything that most people think about parking was wrong. Free street parking, Shoup wrote, makes parking and driving worse. The low cost creates a scarcity of spaces that leads people to spend time and fuel circling blocks in misery. And city planners' efforts to solve this problem by mandating that homes and businesses provide more cheap parking only worsen the situation. According to Shoup, this parking conundrum is foundational to many of the ills in modern urban life: congestion, sprawl, pollution and high housing costs. Shoup presented his ideas with a cheerful countercultural undercurrent and sprinkle of quirky history. In a 2014 interview with The Times, Shoup noted that the first parking ticket for an expired meter was given to a Protestant minister in 1935. The fine was dismissed, Shoup said, 'on the then-novel explanation that the minister had gone to get change for the parking meter.' Shoup's message, persistence and style gained him legions of followers around the globe. The most ardent called themselves 'Shoupistas.' The professor embraced the attention and happily accepted a playful moniker for himself, 'Shoup Dogg.' Michael Manville, chair of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said Shoup leaned into the spotlight because he realized it would help spread his ideas and because he just liked talking to people about parking. 'He spent so much time with his writing because he wanted to make it accessible,' said Manville, who first met Shoup as a UCLA graduate student in 2001. 'He spent so much time with presentations because he wanted to make them entertaining. He built a method where he was always ready to explain to an activist group or a politician, 'Hey, the missing part here is parking.'' Shoup acknowledged that inveighing against free parking was not popular. He began a 2006 article in academic journal Transport Policy by nodding to parking conventional wisdom through a quotation from George Costanza, the obsessive sidekick from the 1990s sitcom 'Seinfeld.' Parking at a garage, Costanza said, was 'like going to a prostitute.' 'Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?' Costanza said. While Shoup mostly traveled by bicycle, he told The Times for a 2010 profile that, when he drove, he often circled the block searching for free parking. 'I don't like paying for parking,' he said with a shrug. 'But free parking is ultimately not beneficial.' Shoup's policy prescriptions attempted to take into account the public's prevailing views. He believed that cities should charge market prices for street parking and that the resulting revenue should be directed to improvements in the surrounding community. This blending of classical economic theories on supply and demand and understanding political realities helped build his practical influence, wrote Bill Fulton, a former student of Shoup's and an expert on California planning issues, in a remembrance published this week. 'If you give that money back to the neighborhood where the paid parking is occurring, you can provide a tangible benefit to that neighborhood — and begin to overcome political opposition to paid parking,' Fulton wrote. Shoup was born in 1938 in Long Beach. His father was a captain in the U.S. Navy and the Shoups were stationed in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was bombed. In 1968, Shoup earned a PhD in economics at Yale and, in six years, became a professor at UCLA. He remained there his entire career, retiring in 2015. Fulton recalled that Shoup used to joke that he came upon parking as his life's work because it was 'the bottom of the barrel.' Most public policy academics studied more prestigious national and state issues leaving few interested in plumbing the depths of local policy. Among the few who explored local government, everyone ignored two issues: parking and sewage. 'Don didn't want to study sewage,' Fulton wrote. 'So he studied parking.' As mayor of Ventura in 2010, Fulton brought Shoup's ideas into reality through a parking strategy for the city's downtown. The city began charging for some of its parking spaces, which spurred employees of local businesses to use nearby free city lots, freeing up curb spaces for customers. By that point, numerous cities around the country were experimenting with Shoup's ideas. The Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit founded to advance Shoup's ideas, has documented policies in more than 3,000 cities that rely on Shoup's research. On the nonprofit's website, over 70 people — including mourners from Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; Istanbul; Brisbane, Australia; and elsewhere — have shared memories of Shoup and celebrated his scholarship. One of the biggest changes inspired by Shoup's work came in 2022 when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that eliminated mandatory parking requirements for most developments near mass transit across California. Newsom said the law would reduce the cost of housing while lowering climate change-inducing car trips. 'Housing solutions are also climate solutions,' Newsom said. The law took effect when Shoup was 85 years old. Shoup liked to acknowledge his later-in-life success, according to his wife, Pat Shoup. He published 'The High Cost of Free Parking' when he was 67. 'He always said it was fine to be a late bloomer if you made it to the flower show,' Pat wrote in her husband's death notice. 'He made it and left a long trail of blossoms in his wake to benefit others.' Shoup remained active following his retirement from UCLA. He continued to teach and was often seen within the Luskin School of Public Affairs building, per a remembrance published by the university. Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) marveled at Shoup's energy and how the professor continued to inspire people. Recently, she watched a crowd filled with people of all ages rapt as he gave a lecture on reforming handicap parking laws to increase access for people with disabilities. Friedman, who authored the 2022 parking law when she served in the state Legislature, said the army of Shoup adherents provided a critical mass of support as she tried to move the bill forward. 'He inspired a passion among his students and fellow academics that turned his work into a movement,' Friedman said. 'That's what was unique about him.' Shoup is survived by his wife Pat, brother Frank Shoup, his niece Allison Shoup, nephew Elliot Shoup, Elliot's wife Megan and their three children. There will be no funeral or church service, but UCLA will celebrate his life at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Donald and Pat Shoup Endowed Fellowship in Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School or the Parking Reform Network.
