Quarterly Report on Business Relocations in Southern California

Business recruitment has long been one of the most popular strategies for state and local economic development in the US, but little is understood about the precise physical location of business moves, such as the surrounding neighborhoods and how far away a firm relocates.  This Report takes a spatially precise approach toward analyzing business relocations in the seven-county Southern California region from 1997-2014. We analyze moves within cities and across city boundaries, as well as the characteristics of the neighborhoods which businesses leave – and move to.

Download the full report here (.pdf).  Register for the webinar covering this report on 8/15/2017 here.

Quarterly Report on Relationships Between Housing, Business, and Open Space

This research explores the notion of urban accessibility, defined as the spatial separation between dwelling units and 32 types of destinations including shopping, open space, and public services. Using data on the roughly five million residential land parcels in Southern California, we use network analyses and multilevel regression modeling to determine what it is about homes that make them more or less accessible to a wide variety of destination types. In most places across the region, older homes, smaller homes, and multifamily residences have a positive relationship to accessibility; however this varies widely across counties and cities.

Quarterly Report on Neighborhood Mixing and Economic Dynamism

We typically think of neighborhoods as fairly homogeneous areas within cities.  Nonetheless, some neighborhoods are highly mixed and others are not based on things like income, racial composition, age, land use, and the type of housing they contain.  We analyze mixing across these dimensions in Southern California, then ask what are the consequences of mixing for economic dynamism in neighborhoods.  Explore this report using our web mapping application, or download the full report here.

 

Second Regional Progress Report

mfi_cover_imageThe 2014 Southern California Regional Progress Report was prepared by researchers with the School of Social Ecology’s Metropolitan Futures Initiative, which aims to build a base of knowledge to guide policymakers in improving the overall quality of life in the Southland.  It is the second installment in a biennial series of Regional Progress Reports.

Continue Reading Second Regional Progress Report

Research Reports and Policy Briefs

 

  • Land Use and Vehicle Miles of Travel in the Climate Change Debate: Getting Smarter than Your Average Bear. 
    by Marlon G. Boarnet, Douglas Houston, Gavin Ferguson, and Steven Spears
  • Affordable Housing in Transportation Corridors – Built Environment, Accessibility, and Air Pollution Implications of Near-Roadway Residential Locations.  Principal Investigator: Douglas Houston, UCI Policy, Planning and Design; Co- Principal Investigator: Jun Wu, UCI Epidemiology & Program in Public Health.   Abstract is here.

Continue Reading Research Reports and Policy Briefs

Peer-reviewed Research

  • Hipp, John R. and Amrita Singh. (2014). “Changing Neighborhood Determinants of Housing Price Trends in Southern California, 1960-2009.” City & Community. 13(3): 254-274. [This project studies whether the relationship between certain characteristics of neighborhoods and home values have changed over a 50 year period in Southern California.  An important finding is that the negative relationship with racial/ethnic minorities has decreased substantially in recent decades.]

Continue Reading Peer-reviewed Research

Regional Dialogues in Governance

 

  • Regional Leadership in Air Quality Program – Marlon Boarnet (Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design) and Lindell Marsh (attorney and lecturer in Planning, Policy, and Design) convened a series of meetings with leaders of key regional agencies and stakeholders in 2009 that produced a common understanding of the region’s land use – air quality – transportation – energy infrastructure challenges.  This effort is supported by SCAG, leading planning firms, UC Irvine, and Cal State University San Bernardino.
  • Community Scholars Program – Supports the capacity building and organizational development of non-profits through applied “place-based” research. Recent Community Scholar projects include the development of a “foreclosure counseling” program for the Neighborhood Housing Services of Orange County and the evaluation of a community building initiative by the Office of Orange County Human Relations (OCHR). The latter resulted in OCHR securing a $225,000 continuation grant from the St. Joseph Health System.