Chancellor Gene Block has been honored with the Los Angeles Business Council’s Chairman’s Award for leading UCLA’s commitment to developing and guaranteeing housing for students.
The award was presented at a reception on the eve of the 21st annual Mayoral Housing, Transportation and Jobs Summit, which was organized by the council and held at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center. The event also featured the presentation of a study on Los Angeles’ housing crisis by UCLA professor Stuart Gabriel.
UCLA in 2022 became the first University of California campus to guarantee campus housing for all undergraduates — four years for students entering as freshmen and two years for transfer students.
In accepting the award, Block spoke about UCLA’s focus on expanding the availability of housing, which, among other benefits, allows students to take better advantage of campus resources and opportunities, helps to build community and connections, and minimizes the financial, environmental and even mental health costs of commuting.
Speaking the following day at the summit, where participants included Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and other policymakers as well as business and nonprofit leaders, Block said he was proud that UCLA had hosted the event for 20 of the 21 years of its existence. He emphasized that as a public research university, UCLA plays a critical role in tackling the region’s wide-ranging challenges.
Affordable housing, sustainable transportation and smart grid technology, he noted, are just a few of the realms in which UCLA researchers are making a difference.
Analyzing the housing bottleneck in Los Angeles
One of the UCLA units bringing its expertise to bear on the region’s housing issues is the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, of which Gabriel is director. At the summit, Gabriel, UCLA’s Arden Realty Professor, spoke about new research aimed at tackling a particular set of challenges in the Los Angeles housing crisis: permitting and approvals.
The study, conducted with Edward Kung of Cal State Northridge, concluded that streamlining the permitting and approval process for multifamily housing projects could significantly accelerate housing production “as Los Angeles confronts an affordability crisis, rising homelessness and ambitious state-mandated housing goals.”
The research found that less than 60% of Los Angeles’ multifamily housing projects that received permits since 2010 have been completed and that the projects took an average of more than 1,400 days — more than 3 1/2 years — one reason the region has not been able to keep up with housing demand as the population has grown.
