The Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies is hosting three events during Winter 2025. Please see the details below:

Food will be provided for those who RSVP. We encourage all attendees to register by two weeks before the event date.

Upzoning and Gentrification in New York City with Assistant Professor Minjee Kim

Date: Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025 @ 12:30-2 PM
Location: 2343 Public Affairs Building
About the Research: Reforming zoning to increase housing development capacity, or upzoning, is an increasingly common strategy for improving affordability. There is strong evidence that a larger housing supply is associated with greater affordability, but we know less about the effects of upzoning itself. Minjee Kim, Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning department, will discuss her new research on upzonings in New York City and long-term changes to neighborhood demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics. She will also share where gentrification appeared strongest, different mechanisms of gentrification, and what her findings may say about designing more effective upzoning policies.
About Minjee Kim: Minjee Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning department at UCLA. Her research is situated at the intersection of real estate development and urban planning. She writes about land use regulation and zoning, large-scale real estate developments, exactions, and urban public finance. Her works have appeared in high impact academic journals such as the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Planning Literature, and Urban Studies. She has been recognized both nationally and internationally as an emerging expert in US land use regulation and zoning and has been working closely with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to promote land-based public financing. She earned her PhD and Master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was previously employed as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University. She has multiple years of experience working in local governments including the cities of Boston and Cambridge and strives to conduct research that can inform planning practice and public policymaking.

A Decent Home Documentary Screening co-hosted with the Luskin Center for Innovation

Date: Thursday, February 6th, 2025 @ 6-8:30 PM
Location: 2343 Public Affairs Building
Description: 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, the Luskin Center for Innovation’s Greg Pierce will hold a moderated discussion and Q&A with Director Sara Terry, Policy Director Miguel Miguel of Pacoima Beautiful, and Assistant Professor Jose Loya. The conversation will touch upon the film's contents and Miguel and Loya's research on equitable home financing, mortgage disparities, and barriers to homeownership for communities of color in Los Angeles.
About the Moderator: Greg Pierce (he/him) is faculty in the 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.
Our Speakers:
- 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 PhD. 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 is a Policy Director for Pacoima Beautiful, where he manages policy operations, staff training and development, and research on new policies supporting residents in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. He graduated from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs in 2023 with a Master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning, where he conducted research under Assistant Professor Jose Loya. Preparing housing and Census data, he organized relationships between the mortgage and housing markets to investigate homeownership disparities in communities of color. He was previously an environmental intern for the City of Los Angeles and received a Bachelor's degree from California Lutheran University in Geological and Earth Sciences/Geosciences/Paleontology.

CHIPing In: A Spatial Assessment of Los Angeles’ Rezone Program with Aaron Barrall and Shane Phillips

Date: Thursday, February 27th, 2025 @ 12:30-2 PM
Location: 2343 Public Affairs Building
Description: Los Angeles has a state-mandated housing target of 456,000 new units by 2029. As part of that effort, in December the city council approved the Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP), which upzones multifamily areas across LA. Aaron Barrall, data analyst at the Lewis Center, will share results from a detailed evaluation of CHIP with an emphasis on fair housing outcomes and development feasibility. Although the policy shifts housing capacity towards higher-opportunity neighborhoods and is likely to increase housing production, it also differs from LA’s original plan by excluding all properties with single-family zoning, greatly reducing its potential benefits. We will discuss what these decisions may mean for future growth, affordability, and access to opportunity in the city.
About Aaron Barrall: Aaron is a housing data analyst at the Randall Lewis Housing Initiative for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, assisting faculty, students, and staff with data analysis and visualization. Before joining the Lewis Center, he worked as a private-sector urban planner, where he developed comprehensive land-use and housing plans. He has also held environmental-related roles at state and local government agencies.
About 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.