The Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies

Children are being trafficked in the United States for commercial and sexual exploitation – many of them from overseas. In April of 2002, a young Egyptian girl was freed by federal authorities from a couple’s home in Irvine, California, where she was forced to work as a domestic servant for two years. 2 During those two years, she lived in “squalid conditions.” 3 She was denied access to a formal education and was threatened with physical harm by the couple. In 2005, seven individuals were charged by federal authorities for smuggling children across the U.S.Mexico border for the purposes of selling them to American families looking to adopt foreign children. 4 In New Jersey, the Russian Mafia transported under-age girls from Eastern Europe to the U.S. and forced them to work as dancers in exotic dance clubs. 5 There are many more stories of foreign children being sold, rented, and enslaved in the U.S.

On May 28, 2004, the Greater Los Angeles (GLA) Health Care System, a branch of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the California Department of Veterans Affairs (CDVA) in which they partnered to develop and operate a 400-bed State Veterans Home (hereafter called the State Home) and two 60-bed satellite facilities on the West Los Angeles campus of GLA. 1 This agreement was a result of the GLA Healthcare System’s request in 2001 to be considered by a commission appointed by the governor to choose locations for future state homes. GLA 2 and the State entered into this partnership with the purpose of better serving veterans’ health needs through a uniform level of care and seamless integration of medical services.

The Safety Collaborative in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), Local District is a unique coordinated effort to address school safety. The participation of diverse agencies demonstrates the importance of protecting the school environment and recognizes the necessity for a safe learning environment where students are not disrupted in their academic studies. It also demonstrates that violence prevention in schools alone cannot be the source of prevention. In having a variety of stakeholders, schools not only obtain input from other sources, but are also able to cover aspects of safety that schools cannot supply themselves.

Los Angeles is an urban center that faces a slew of environmental and economic challenges. Economic and environmental goals can be met through an environmental sustainable agenda that concentrates on attracting and developing the green economic sector. The green economic sector includes all businesses that provide environmental goods and services such as alternative sources of energy and pollution prevention technology. The foregoing research examines the green economic sector in Los Angeles. It first quantifies existing establishments in the city, and then examines other municipalities and international governments in order to present a set of recommendations to build upon and reform existing programs in the city. This burgeoning sector offers opportunities for revenue generation and job growth within the city. Political attention has been recently focused on these possibilities. Green industry can help to reverse some of Los Angeles' environmental and economic problems.

The Spare the Air/Free Morning Commute (Spare the Air) program in the San Francisco Bay Are funds up to five mornings of weekday transit when air quality is forecasted to exceed federal 8-hour ozone levels during the summer months. Spare the Air has existed for two years and data is limited to three fare free morning commute days. A similar program exists in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area known as Code Red Air Quality Action Days, which funds free transit with the exception of rail and buses within the District of Columbia. These two programs are contrasted with one another along with the Los Angeles region transportation related air quality strategy in order to provide insight on which programs are most effective and appropriate for each region. In order to determine policy appropriateness, a literature review of transit fare elasticity and major air quality strategies in the three regions is undertaken. Lastly, the current Spare the Air program evaluation and the ridership collection, analysis, and reporting methodology are reviewed in order to make suggestions for more effective program administration.

Research on the relationship between community race/ethnic and economic change and the base rates of hate crimes has been rarely studied in the social sciences. The present study examined the role of race/ethnic and economic change in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2000 to determine their relationship to hate crime occurrence. Data collected from Los Angeles hate crime reports, including victim and offender race/ethnicity, the level of severity, and the level of bias, were combined with census data for the 1990 and 2000 censuses for race/ethnic and economic change in the corresponding census tract in which the hate crime/incident occurred. No relationship was found between economic change and hate crimes. While differences among victim race/ethnicity (White, African American, and Hispanic) and their corresponding race/ethnic change (decreasing, stable, or increasing) were largely not significant, there were significant differences between African American and White offenders and their corresponding change in race/ethnic population.

Housing is one of the most important assets to any city or region. Without decent housing, children do not learn, parents cannot hold down jobs, and the physical health of families cannot be maintained. However, as housing markets have boomed, more and more families are shut out of the housing market. For low-income families, this does not simply mean the inability to buy a home. It means the inability to rent a basic apartment. This problem is exacerbated in the urban areas of America where low-income families congregate because of proximity to jobs and services, but where land is scarce and home values are particularly high.

This study compares children of Latino immigrants whose parents have experienced upward mobility to those whose parents have not experienced upward mobility, with a focus on three stages of these students’ educational experiences: their pre-college experience, their adaptation to the university, and their future prospects. Analyzing data from multiple in-depth interviews with twelve incoming freshmen at UCLA and at least one of each of their parents, this study demonstrates that even when the economic differences are narrow, there are visible differences in the way these children experience their education and adapt to mainstream institutions. First, material resources available to youth, such as safe environments, better resourced secondary programs, school supplies, and other resources significantly affected how these youths experienced their education. Second, parental optimism rooted in experiences with upward mobility lent credence to the American system of opportunities, making these parents optimistic about their own endeavors and their aspirations for their children.

Cluster economies establish criteria in which to examine an industry, its mechanism of production, its effect on the city’s economy, and its potential for sustainability in an unknown future. Clusters can be defined by a geographic concentration of firms and institutions of a particular industry, the subsequent consumer efficiency achieved from the geographic concentration, an interconnectedness between firms, buyers and suppliers and clients and firms, and the potential to generate collective action in the production of goods and services (Porter 1998). This study uses these conditions as a basis for examining a group of galleries and museums in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles in order to establish the existence of an arts cluster economy. The study finds a significant concentration of art facilities in the Miracle Mile neighborhood with location quotients for both galleries and museums substantiating data regarding the increasing number of establishments. A survey of visitors corroborated that consumers experience greater utility in attending art facilities in the Miracle Mile, and interviews with galleries and vendors, as well as informal conversation with museum representatives, revealed interactions between businesses as well as the presence of collective action. However, barriers to collective action, such as heterogeneity of firms, inhibit the Miracle Mile cluster from achieving optimal production of collective action, suggesting the possibility of public intervention such as the implementation of specific community plans, public signage programs and outside agents to increase the effectiveness of the arts cluster economy.