History faculty win grants from the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Congratulations to Caroline Ford and Kelly Lytle Hernandez who have received approximately $10,000 seed grants from the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy for 2016-2017. Caroline Ford will be doing research on “The Paris Housing Crisis and the Campaign for Affordable Housing, 1894-1940”. The project will begin by exploring the origins of the concept of both private and state-sponsored affordable housing in the late nineteenth-­‐century, which was shaped by the Haussmannization’s failure to address the need for housing for the poor. It will examine early legislation passed in 1894 to address these issues and trace the impact of the war, which prompted the government to allow a moratorium on the payment of all rents in 1914 and rent control provisions after 1918. These initiatives resulted in a lack of private investment in housing, largely as a result of the abolition of rents during the First World War, which prompted the huge public outlays for rebuilding and the Loucheur Law itself in the 1920s and 1930s.In addition to her Luskin seed grant, Kelly Lytle Hernandez received a $107,488  Major Research Grant from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation for her project with the  Million-Dollar Blocks, a digital mapping code and protocol that allows researchers to visualize the costs of incarceration by showing how much a city, state, and/or county government spends per block on incarceration. Researchers have completed Million-Dollar Blocks projects in nine U.S. cities. Each city map has made clear that, on many blocks, incarceration is the single largest government investment, amounting to more than $1 million per year. The visualization of these costs have proven to be a powerful tool to help residents, organizers, and policy makers to fundamental re-evaluate funding priorities. Indeed, several cities with Million-Dollar Blocks have adopted a Justice Reinvestment strategy, which diverts funding away from policing and incarceration toward education and employment as well as mental and physical health care services.Los Angeles County maintains the largest jail system in the United States but researchers have yet to apply the Million-Dollar Blocks code and protocol to LA. Largely, this is because of the difficulty in securing data from the Los Angeles police and sheriff’s department. Having recently won a major data battle with both the LAPD and the LASD, Professor Lytle Hernandez is now working with a UCLA-based GIS team and the Los Angeles No More Jails Coalition to build Million-Dollar Blocks, Los Angeles.