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Beginning in 2020, we collaborated with the Price school to begin a series we’re calling Community Impact from Price Research. We wanted to find a way we could share how research initiatives begin, how we involve communities & stakeholders, and what impacts policymakers and communities should think about.

Accelerating Fair Chance Hiring

In our new series on Community Impact we speak with Victoria Ciudad-Real, John Roberson III, Gary Painter, and Jeffery Wallace about findings from their collaborative project Accelerating Fair Chance Hiring among Los Angeles employers.

The project, in which the Price Center partnered with LeadersUp and the State of California Workforce Accelerator Fund, used an employer survey and co-design sessions with Angeleno employers to determine the best way forward with Fair Chance hiring processes.

What can employers take away from this project?

Overview

Why Fair Chance

Benefits for Employers

Co-Design

Economic Roundtable's Locked Out report

For this bonus episode of the Bedrosian Bookclub Podcast, we’re talking with Daniel Flaming & Anthony Orlando on the new report on homelessness in the time of COVID (and after). The Economic Roundtable report uses past pandemic and past recession data to predict how COVID joblessness will translate into homelessness over the coming years. Looking at joblessness as well as the housing market, the authors predict that this recession with see more than double the unhousing that we saw in 2008 (when 10% of the jobless became homeless within the three years following the recession).

These dire predictions also come with concrete policy solutions that will help prevent this unhousing from happening after the pandemic, and hopefully prevent catastrophes after the next recession or pandemic.

Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the COVID Economy is underwritten by the Economic Roundtable, and is written by Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns, and Seth Pickens.

Researchers wanted to understand how rental affordability operates, discover how it impacts residents in Los Angeles specifically, and how its effects differ across populations. Teams of students conducted interviews in Spanish and English, across two neighborhoods in Los Angeles: Promise Zone (LAPZ), in Central Los Angeles, and the South Los Angeles Promise Zone (SLATE-Z).

Joblessness leads to Homelessness

Housing Crisis

“COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession.

The Economic Roundtable used data from the 2008 Great Recession to estimate the linkage between job loss and homelessness and forecast the amount and type of pandemic-driven homelessness in Los Angeles, California and the United States.”

Use the button to download the full Locked Out report.

How do Renters Cope with Unaffordability?

Jovanna Rosen led a team of researchers at the Price Center for Social Innovation in an in-depth survey of Angeleno renters to better understand the housing affordability crisis impacts on families in the region. The Survey was an in-person, door-to-door survey of 800 Los Angeles renter households. A daunting undertaking, given the fractured and fast paced lives families live today.

Researchers wanted to understand how rental affordability operates, discover how it impacts residents in Los Angeles specifically, and how its effects differ across populations. Teams of students conducted interviews in Spanish and English, across two neighborhoods in Los Angeles: Promise Zone (LAPZ), in Central Los Angeles, and the South Los Angeles Promise Zone (SLATE-Z).

Survey Overview

Policy Considerations

Community Partners

Engaging Ungergrads

In 2019, the team found that 73% of households surveyed were rent-burdened, meaning that the households spent over 30% of total income on rent and utilities. Importantly, 48% of these households were severely rent-burdened, spending over 50% of household income on rent and utilities. 

Families in these households were forced to cut back on spending for basic necessities, like food or clothing, in order to meet their rent needs. The additional hardship brought be the COVID-19 pandemic serves to deepen the need for policymakers to address the deeply embedded problems within the rental market.

 

NDSC Criminal Justice Data Initiative

Researchers at the Price Center for Social Innovation and the Safe Communities Institute worked with local sources to create a public data set on criminal justice.

A key in creating the dataset was defining both community and law enforcement ideals of "public safety." Through engaging communities across Los Angeles, the team was able to determine some sets of data that could help answer some of the questions. Then, working with a few law enforcement agencies, the data collected was added to the Neighborhood Data for Social Change platform.

Key Takeaways

Police Brutality & Bias

In rethinking policing in the United States we must revisit the idea of public safety. Communities define public safety as issues of nourishment, where law enforcement views the issue only through crime and punishment.

This project, in its beginning stages brings to light the canyon that lays between a public understanding of what it means to be safe within communities and a policing understanding. Further work on this project will look to collecting data from more law enforcement agencies and collaborating with them alongside communities to better work together toward better understanding, less biased policing, and more just communities.

 

Bedrosian Center