Expanding sustainable transportation access for residents and staff at Century Villages at Cabrillo

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

August 1, 2021 - July 31, 2022

Principal Investigator

Areas of Expertise

other

Campus(es)

UCLA

Project Summary

My overall research objective is to produce transportation research on access to opportunity for low-income and communities and people of color, done in partnership with community partners. Through this work, I seek to understand better what transportation access intervention models designed in collaboration with the community can improve people’s life outcomes. Historically, transportation plans and programs have not met the needs of disadvantaged populations.Newer technological advances in transportation — ride-hailing and micro-mobility — have similarly failed to provide increased access to high-need communities partially due to not being scoped and designed in collaboration with the community. For this reason, I seek to advance research towards my research objectives through building relationships with community-based organizations and doing research in partnership to help solve real-world problems.
Many groups of people experience transportation disadvantages and exclusion. People who live in affordable housing are a group of people with lower levels of transportation access with whom transportation researchers are increasingly partnering. People living in affordable housing face
disadvantages because of low household incomes and because affordable housing complexes are located on the “urban fringes” given historical exclusionary zoning practices. Because of this, low-income residents living in affordable housing developments may have higher transportation
costs or have limited access to jobs, healthcare, or educational opportunities (Hickey, et. al, 2012).
I am proposing a community-based research partnership between myself and the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and the Century Villages at Cabrillo (CVC) development in Long Beach, California. This proposed partnership is inspired by a forthcoming vehicle lending pilot program that the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles will soon launch and that myself and Lewis Center Director Evelyn Blumenberg will evaluate. This proposed relationship-building grant with CVC will build on the partnership between UCLA and HACLA and serve as an additional foundation for future collaborations on transportation interventions with housing partners and studying their effects on increasing access to opportunities.