California’s housing crisis stems from a shortage of affordable housing caused by restrictive land use regulations that make building new units difficult and expensive. SB 79 reforms these zoning regulations by supporting Transit Oriented Development through the legalization of multifamily housing near train and rapid bus lines. This paper investigates how SB 79 may affect Los Angeles by taking a closer look at the largely single family parcels surrounding the Westwood/Rancho Park station of the Metro E Line. We determine the increase in the number of units that are zoned in the area following SB 79, the number of units that can be legally built under SB 79, and the percentage of existing units built under current zoning capacities. Prior to SB 79, we found that not all parcels in the Westwood/Rancho Park neighborhood are built to current zoned capacity, amounting to only 43.4 percent of potential units built. Under SB 79, the zoned capacity will go from 5779 units to 35,053 units, allowing for 27,493 additional units. The Westwood/Rancho Park station now has considerable room to add housing and density. This adds the potential for the City to house thousands of additional people and help make better use of the City and County’s transit investments. On the other hand, local residents are unlikely to happily welcome thousands of new residents unless new housing happens quite slowly.

Street vending was legalized in 2018 in Los Angeles following years of advocacy by the LA Street Vendor Campaign against its criminalization. Previous literature studying street vending was conducted within the legal framework of its criminalization and examined the impact on individuals and their social networks. These studies have not focused on the changing depictions of street vending in mass media. For this reason, I have developed the research questions: How has the portrayal of street vendors changed in the media and by politicians since street vending’s legalization? How do street vending advocacy nonprofits shape these narratives? I utilized archival materials from 2020-2025 of coverage of street vendors by the LA Times, a selection of quotes from politicians in news coverage of street vending, and systematic random selection of social media posts made by Community Power Collective, a street vendor rights advocacy organization. I found differences in sources of information and framing between the three media sources. Understanding how street vending advocacy campaigns have successfully changed policy and challenged ideas around street vending will further our understanding of criminalization of immigrants’ work and the role the media, politicians, and organizations have to play in shaping narratives around immigrant communities.

Like almost every major city in the United States, Los Angeles has long suffered from a scarcity of affordable housing. But despite this, and unlike most of its counterparts in the Northeast and Midwest, Los Angeles has a longstanding lack of Section 9 public housing. To put it in perspective, New York City has 177,000 Section 9 units. Los Angeles, a city with only half the former’s population, has 6,300. This research project investigates the reasons behind the undersupply of public housing in Los Angeles and examines how the unique social and political forces at play in Los Angeles’ history blunted the development of Section 9 public housing. Using a combination of archival research, literature reviews and ethnographic observation of surviving public housing sites, this project pinpoints three main factors behind this undersupply. 1. Los Angeles’ historically strong individualist and anti-communist inclinations, which led many middle-class Angelenos to be deeply skeptical of publicly-owned housing 2. The absence of a strong social reform movement capable of combatting this mindset in midcentury Los Angeles 3. The incongruity of the spatial concentration of poverty intrinsic to public housing with the spatial control tactics used in the LAPD’s “war on crime” This research project will be shared as a livestreamed video presentation that includes historical background on Los Angeles’ public housing, an overview of research methods, discussion of ethnographic observations, findings and current implications.

This project interrogates the redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles between 1970 and 1990 as a paradigmatic instance of neoliberal urban governance. Rather than treating this transformation as neutral revitalization, it advances the claim that redevelopment operated as a historically specific strategy for reorganizing urban space in accordance with the imperatives of capital accumulation and socio-spatial control. The analysis focuses on the actors who drove this process, the institutional logics that structured their interventions, and the enduring material effects inscribed in the city. The stark contrasts in Los Angeles’s urban character have intensified significantly since the 1970s, a period when the implementation of neoliberal policies began to take on a particularly aggressive tone. Downtown LA serves as a concrete example of the spatial changes that have shaped the city’s urban restructuring. It is assumed that the implementation of neoliberal policies focused on (i) the privatization of public space; (ii) intensive hyper-surveillance of the new privatized enclaves; and (iii) the synergy between these urban “development” policies and the interests of the “growth machine”; provided a particularly fertile breeding ground in Downtown LA. Through a methodology that combines historical sociology with ethnographic fieldwork, the study aims to test whether the urban development strategies undertaken in Downtown LA constituted a deliberate pathway through which to implement a neoliberal governance of space.