Publications
Total Results: 102
Refereed Book Chapters
2022
Can I Borrow [for] your Car? Income, Race, and Automobile Debt in California in California
Pandemic in The Metropolis: Transportation Impacts and RecoveryEvelyn Blumenberg, Fariba Siddiq, Samuel Speroni, Jacob L. Wasserman
The COVID-19 crisis elevated the importance of private vehicles. The pandemic drove riders off public transit and spawned additional car-based activities such as drive-through testing and vaccinations and curbside pick-ups. Yet millions of low-income and non-white households do not own vehicles. This chapter draws on a unique credit panel dataset to examine automobile debt and delinquency in California. In particular, we examine whether automobile debt patterns during the pandemic differed from those during and coming out of the Great Recession (December 2007–June 2009). We also analyze the response to the COVID-19 recession across neighborhoods by income and race. Similar to the situation during the Great Recession, we find that the number of automobile loans per borrower declined. While the automobile debt burden (the ratio between total automobile debt and aggregate income) also declined, it fell far less during the pandemic than during the Great Recession. Moreover, automobile loan delinquencies spiked during the Great Recession but instead continued to drop during the pandemic. Finally, the COVID-19 crisis affected consumers differently by both race and income. Automobile debt burden rose in low-income, Latino/a, and Black neighborhoods, a pattern that preceded but continued unabated during the pandemic. The findings suggest that COVID-19 relief may have helped some families manage their automobile-related expenditures. However, other factors, such as increasing automobile prices, likely contributed to growing debt burdens, a potential source of financial distress.
Refereed Journal Articles
2022
Commute Distance and Jobs-Housing Fit
TransportationEvelyn Blumenberg, Fariba Siddiq
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the affordable housing crisis is forcing households to seek lower cost housing in the outer reaches of major metropolitan areas, helping to explain recent increases in commute distance. To test this relationship, we use spatial regression to examine the relationship between the availability of affordable housing in close proximity to jobs (jobs-housing fit) and commute distance in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The analysis draws on 2015 Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Origin–Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) by workplace supplemented with data from the 2013–2017 5-Year American Community Survey on affordable housing units. We find substantial variation in jobs-housing fit across Los Angeles neighborhoods. The imbalance is greatest in higher-income neighborhoods located along the coast and in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Controlling for other determinants of commute distance, a higher ratio of jobs to affordable housing is associated with longer distance commutes. To address growing commute distances, policymakers must greatly expand and protect the supply of long-term rental housing particularly in job-rich neighborhoods.
Refereed Journal Articles
2022
Who Lives in Vehicles and Why? Understanding Vehicular Homelessness in Los Angeles
Housing Policy DebateChristopher Giamarino, Evelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen
Homelessness continues to grow and to affect the lives of an increasingly diverse group of individuals. Many scholars have studied people living in homeless shelters and outdoors in tents. An overlooked population is the growing number of the unhoused living in vehicles. We draw on data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Homeless Demographic Survey to understand the characteristics of people living in vehicles and the extent to which they differ from the nonvehicular unhoused population. Compared to those living in tents, in makeshift shelters, and in public spaces, people living in vehicles are more likely to be women and to live in larger households with children, and are less likely to be chronically unhoused. These findings will help effectively target policies and services. Safe parking programs can provide temporary relief to those living in vehicles and, if done well, the interventions necessary to transition into permanent housing.
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Regional Differences in the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Sufficiency in California, April–July 2020: Implications for Food Programmes and Policies
Public Health NutritionEvelyn Blumenberg, Miriam Pinski, Lilly A. Nhan, May C. Wang
Objective:
To evaluate regional differences in factors associated with food insufficiency during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic among three major metropolitan regions in California, a state with historically low participation rates in the Supplementation Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s largest food assistance programme.
Design:
Analysis of cross-sectional data from phase 1 (23 April–21 July 2020) of the US Census Household Pulse Survey, a weekly national online survey.
Setting:
California, and three Californian metropolitan statistical areas (MSA), including San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley, Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim and Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario MSA.
Participants:
Adults aged 18 years and older living in households.
Results:
Among the three metropolitan areas, food insufficiency rates were lowest in the San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley MSA. Measures of disadvantage (e.g., having low-income, being unemployed, recent loss of employment income and pre-pandemic food insufficiency) were widely associated with household food insufficiency. However, disadvantaged households in the San Francisco Bay Area, the area with the lowest poverty and unemployment rates, were more likely to be food insufficient compared with those in the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim and Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario MSA.
Conclusions:
Food insufficiency risk among disadvantaged households differed by region. To be effective, governmental response to food insufficiency must address the varied local circumstances that contribute to these disparities.
Reports
2021
Access to Opportunities Primer
Samikchhyal Bhusal, Evelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen
Transportation allows people to reach the opportunities that they need to participate in social and economic life. It enables workers to get to jobs to earn a living, students to get to school to obtain an education, or people to see a doctor to get healthy. But for people who lack transportation, whether it be because they do not own vehicles or because public transit does not get them to where they need to be when they need to be there, these opportunities can cease to exist. This concept — the role of transportation in helping people reach essential destinations — is what is meant by the term “access to opportunity.” This primer seeks to help policymakers, public officials and their staff, and advocates understand access to opportunity — why it is an important concept, its determinants, and how it relates to other adjacent issues and policies in housing and economic development. As readers will find, untangling disparities in transportation access from the legacy of racist policies like redlining and discrimination is difficult, if not impossible. Addressing disparities in access to opportunities, therefore, cannot be done through transportation planning and policy alone. However, increasing transportation access is an essential part of this effort. We hope that this primer will be used to better inform and more effectively target transportation planning and policies to increase access to opportunity and reduce existing disparities. Presented in the pages that follow are a series of questions and answers to provide readers with a baseline understanding of transportation and its role in access opportunities. A focus on accessibility is essential to making transportation investments that engender more equitable regions for all.
Reports
2021
Access to Child Care in Los Angeles County: Recent Trends and COVID-19 Implications
Samikchhyal Bhusal, Evelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Travel in the Digital Age: Vehicle Ownership and Technology-Facilitated Accessibility
Transport PolicyEvelyn Blumenberg, Julene Paul, Gregory Pierce
Despite their negative externalities, cars provide many benefits. Chief among these is the ability to travel to destinations within a reasonable time budget. Consequently, in the U.S. most households—even low-income households—own and use automobiles. But technological innovations may be altering this dynamic. New technology-facilitated services and activities may reduce the advantages of private vehicle ownership, potentially allowing households to live car-free or downsize their household vehicle fleets. In this study we use data from the 2017 U.S. National Household Travel Survey to investigate the relationship between these innovations and vehicle ownership. We find a positive relationship between the use of ridehail and carshare services and the likelihood of being a zero-vehicle household. The data also show a positive relationship between online shopping and working from home and the likelihood of having fewer household vehicles than adults. Combined, the findings suggest that new technology-facilitated activities may allow some households to eliminate or reduce their dependence on privately-owned vehicles. For other households, new technology-facilitated services may not directly affect their decisions about automobile ownership, but rather increase their access to opportunities while easing the financial burden of vehicle ownership. Agencies and organizations should explore opportunities to better connect households—particularly households with travel and financial constraints—to technology-facilitated services and activities that enable improved access.
Policy Briefs
2021
Jobs-Housing Balance in California Cities
Evelyn Blumenberg, Hannah King
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Jobs–Housing Balance Re-Re-Visited
Journal of the American Planning AssociationEvelyn Blumenberg, Hannah King
Problem, research strategy, and findings
In many U.S. metropolitan areas housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years relative to average incomes. A worsening shortage of affordable housing in these metros may push households away from job-rich cities and expensive neighborhoods into outlying areas, where housing is cheaper but jobs are more distant. To examine this issue, we revisit the jobs–housing balance, a popular topic of research in the 1990s, with a focus on the relationship between housing and the spatial location of workers relative to jobs. Our analysis draws on data from the Longitudinal Employer–Household Dynamics Origin–Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) for cities in California in 2002 and 2015. In contrast to earlier jobs–housing balance research, we find that California cities are becoming less self-contained over time, defined as a decline in the number of workers who both live and work within a jurisdiction relative to the number of commuters who travel either into or out of a city for work. Statistical models show that self-containment was higher in cities with lower housing costs and, in 2015, in cities with a greater balance between jobs and employed residents.
Takeaway for practice
The deepening housing affordability crisis in many metropolitan areas like those found in California are pushing workers and jobs farther apart, increasing the economic, social, and environmental costs of commuting. Policies to increase the supply of housing in job-rich and high–housing cost areas could help reverse this troubling trend, though they are likely to meet with considerable resistance. Our findings also underscore the importance of efforts that include but extend beyond housing production, such as policies to better match job skills and housing prices to the characteristics of workers.
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Who’s on Board? Examining the Changing Characteristics of Transit Riders Using Latent Profile Analysis
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research BoardAndrew Schouten, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg
Subsidies of public transit have more than doubled since the late 1980s, with a disproportionate share of funds going to rail services. These investments have important implications, including how they affect both the composition of transit users and their travel behavior. To investigate how transit users and use are changing, we use Latent Profile Analysis and data from the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Surveys to examine changes in transit users in the U.S. and in five major metropolitan areas. Nationwide, we find that the share of Transit Dependents grew by 17% to account for two-thirds of all transit users in 2017. These least advantaged riders were more likely over time to reside in very poor households and to be carless. There was a corresponding decline in Occasional Transit Users, for whom transit is part of a multi-modal travel profile. Higher-income, mostly car-owning Choice Transit Riders increased slightly over time but accounted for less than one in ten transit riders in 2017. Their growth was concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas where densities and land use are most transit-supportive. While increased rail transit service has shifted riders away from buses, transit’s role as a redistributive social service that provides mobility to disadvantaged travelers has grown over time. Efforts to draw more multi-modal and car-owning travelers onto transit have been less successful. As transit systems struggle to recover riders following the pandemic, transit’s waxing role of providing mobility for those without will likely become even more prominent.
Reports
2021
Vehicle Availability Patterns and Trends Commuting in America 2020
Evelyn Blumenberg, Julene Paul, Gregory Pierce
This report examines trends in vehicle availability in the U.S. from 2000 to 2017; presents overall trends, with a focus on zero-vehicle households; and assesses the commute mode patterns of workers by their household automobile availability. The analysis draws on three different data sources comprised of multiple associated datasets—the Public Use Microdata Samples of the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey (ACS), and the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS).
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Rating the Composition: Deconstructing the Demand-Side Effects on Transit Use Changes in California
Travel Behaviour and SocietyAndrew Schouten, Evelyn Blumenberg, Brian D. Taylor
Transit use in the U.S. has been sliding since 2014, well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The largest state, California, was also losing transit riders despite substantial public investment and increased service in the pre-pandemic period. This downturn prompted concern among transit managers and planners interested in service-side interventions to reverse the decline. However, relatively little is known about changes in the demand for public transit and how shifts in demand-side factors have affected patronage. Drawing on California data from the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Surveys, we quantify demand-side changes as a function of two factors—changes in ridership rates of various classes of transit riders (“rate effects”) and changes in the composition of those rider classes (“composition effects”). Statewide, we find that while shifts in the population composition were in some cases associated with lower levels of ridership, the largest declines in transit patronage were associated with falling ridership rates. Specifically, those with limited automobile access and Hispanic travelers rode transit far less frequently in 2017 compared to 2009. Transit ridership rates and rider composition in the San Francisco Bay Area were relatively stable during the study period, while both rate and compositional changes in the Los Angeles area were associated with much lower levels of total ridership. Overall, our findings demonstrate the important role of demand-side factors in understanding aggregate transit use, and suggest that planners and managers may have limited policy tools at their disposal when seeking to bolster ridership levels.
Refereed Journal Articles
2020
Car-Deficit Households: Determinants and Implications for Household Travel
TransportationEvelyn Blumenberg, Anne Brown, Andrew Schouten
In the U.S., households with less than one car per driver (auto-deficit households) are more than twice as common as zero-vehicle households. Yet we know very little about these households and their travel behavior. In this study, therefore, we examine whether car deficits, like carlessness, are largely a result of financial constraint or of other factors such as built environment characteristics, household structure, or household resources. We then analyze the mobility outcomes of car-deficit households compared to the severely restricted mobility of carless households and the largely uninhibited movement of fully-equipped households, households with at least one car per driver. Data from the California Household Travel Survey show that car-deficit households are different than fully-equipped households. They have different household characteristics, travel less, and are more likely to use public transit. While many auto-deficit households have incomes that presumably enable them to successfully manage with fewer cars than adults, low-income auto-deficit households are—by definition—income constrained. Our analysis suggests that low-income car-deficit households manage their travel needs by carefully negotiating the use of household vehicles. In so doing, they travel far more than carless households and use their household vehicles almost as much as low-income households with at least one car per driver. These results suggest that the mobility benefits of having at least one car per driver are more limited than we had anticipated. Results also indicate the importance of transportation and employment programs to ease the potential difficulties associated with sharing cars among household drivers.
Policy Briefs
2020
Vehicle Ownership Trends and Their Implications for Transit Ridership
Evelyn Blumenberg, Andrew Schouten
Refereed Journal Articles
2020
Driven to Debt: Social Reproduction and (Auto)mobility in Los Angeles
Annals of the American Association of GeographersJane Pollard, Evelyn Blumenberg, Stephen Brumbaugh
Since the financial crisis of 2008, subprime lending in the United States has flourished in auto loan markets. This article charts, for the first time, some of the contours of this underresearched part of the subprime landscape. In so doing, it makes two contributions. First, it widens and resituates debates about subprime lending by building on a suite of feminist political economic scholarship to argue that the sites, practices, and agents of social reproduction provide an essential—and largely neglected—perspective on the endurance and deepening of subprime markets. Second, the article leverages the intrinsically geographical, place-bound nature of social reproduction to provide a more holistic treatment of the financialization of everyday life. The article uses (auto)mobility as a novel vantage point from which to connect hitherto disparate social science literatures on financialization, transportation planning, welfare, and urban form. Drawing on secondary data and qualitative fieldwork in Los Angeles, the research explores the proliferation of subprime auto lending and the gendered, raced, and classed inequalities in mobility that mediate everyday life—the daily commute, the school run, the grocery shopping trip—and the demand for subprime debt.
Policy Briefs
2020
What Can Be Done About Falling Transit Ridership in the Bay Area
Brian D. Taylor, Jacob L. Wasserman, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett
Policy Briefs
2020
Why is Public Transit Falling in the San Francisco Bay Area, and What Might Be Done About It?
Brian D. Taylor, Jacob L. Wasserman, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett
Policy Briefs
2020
The Bay Area is Losing Transit Ridership—But Transit Commuting is Growing
Jacob L. Wasserman, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett
Book Chapters
2020
Why Women Still Need Automobiles
Engendering Cities. Designing Sustainable Spaces for AllEvelyn Blumenberg
Engendering Cities examines the contemporary research, policy, and practice of designing for gender in urban spaces. Gender matters in city design, yet despite legislative mandates across the globe to provide equal access to services for men and women alike, these issues are still often overlooked or inadequately addressed. This book looks at critical aspects of contemporary cities regarding gender, including topics such as transport, housing, public health, education, caring, infrastructure, as well as issues which are rarely addressed in planning, design, and policy, such as the importance of toilets for education and clothes washers for freeing-up time. In the first section, a number of chapters in the book assess past, current, and projected conditions in cities vis-à-vis gender issues and needs. In the second section, the book assesses existing policy, planning, and design efforts to improve women’s and men’s concerns in urban living. Finally, the book proposes changes to existing policies and practices in urban planning and design, including its thinking (theory) and norms (ethics).
The book applies the current scholarship on theory and practice related to gender in a planning context, elaborating on some critical community-focused reflections on gender and design. It will be key reading for scholars and students of planning, architecture, design, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policy makers, providing discussion of emerging topics in the field.
Reports
2020
What’s Behind Recent Transit Ridership Trends in the Bay Area?
Volume II: Overview and Analysis of Underlying FactorsJacob L. Wasserman, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett, Hannah King, Julene Paul, Madeline Ruvolo, Andrew Schouten
Transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area is falling. Yet some operators, areas, times, directions, routes, modes, and services have fared better than others. These differences help reveal the causes of the Bay Area’s overall ridership slump and inform policy and service decisions that aim to restore Bay Area transit use. To investigate these temporal and spatial trends, we analyze ridership on the eight largest Bay Area transit operators in considerable detail in Volume II of our report.
Overall, we find a significant level of “peaking.” Ridership losses at off-peak hours, on weekends, on outlying routes, in non-commute directions, and on smaller operators account for a large and disproportionate share of the whole region’s patronage decline. Downtown San Francisco and commute-oriented rail lines like Caltrain have gained ridership as less central, lower-service routes have lost patronage. These patterns match our statistical modeling of BART ridership, on which station-area jobs had the greatest influence, one that has grown over time. The most significant exceptions to the Bay Area’s peaking problem are operators in urban cores, like Muni and AC Transit, where residential and employment density throughout the network have blunted peaking, though not necessarily overall losses.
Absolute patronage declines and peaking are intertwined but distinct problems, with cross-cutting divisions. Yet on all agencies, we see at least some evidence of peaking. The resulting dependence on peak trips both incurs high costs and depresses passenger satisfaction.