Affordable, TOC, GIS, and Client Project Capstone
By: Jayne Vidheecharoen
Tags: Graduate School, UCLA, Urban Planning

The Fall Quarter 2020 round-up

This was a pretty good quarter. I got a lot of my required classes out of the way last year so this quarter was more free-form and it seemed like there were more overlapping connections between the classes. This quarter I had Affordable Housing, Transit-Oriented Communities, Intro to GIS, and our Client Project class for Capstone.

Affordable Housing

This is my third and final class taught by the affordable housing “queen bee” Joan Ling

“Unless you learn the rules, and learn why they’re stupid, you’re never going to change the world.” — Joan Ling

As usual, a challenging but good class where we got deep into the weeds. We dove into low-income housing tax credits and the various funding programs that need to be pieced together to make a project pencil out in the proforma. Our team (Muthia Faizah, Gerrlyn Gacao, Rumsha Sajid, Ellie Troxell, and I) picked a site in Southeast LA for our proposal and worked on the site analysis, design, and financial analysis. We wrote up a whole long report but we also have this shorter final slide presentation that summarizes it up if you’re interested.

Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC)

Our TOC class actually has a much longer full title that summarizes the whole class pretty well actually: “Just Transport and Inclusive Economies: Land-Use and Financing Strategies to Create Equitable Transit-Oriented Communities.” It was taught by Richard France of Estolano Advisors, and covered a wide range of topics centered on equity, and had lots of great guest speakers. The core piece was a group project that ran through the whole quarter. Our group (Bryan Graveline, Steven King, Shinah Park, Will Proctor, Noy Ramon, Zack Zeilman, and I) picked a site at Wilshire & La Brea, a future stop of the Metro Purple Line. We analyzed the current conditions of the site and created a proposed strategy. This also produced a super long report but the short and sweet version is this final slide deck.

Intro to GIS

This year’s Intro to GIS class, taught by Yoh Kawano, was the first time the program has tried a more “data sciencey” approach to GIS, and I’m glad we got to be the guinea pigs. In the past, the class mainly focused on learning proprietary tools like Esri’s ArcGIS. But this time, our class used Python and Jupyter Notebooks. I was pretty excited about this change because it felt a lot more modern and relevant. And the outputs look way cooler. This was my first time using Python and found it to be a relatively friendly language.

I also thought the class was interesting because the majority of the people had never programmed before and I am always interested in seeing how beginners experience programming for the first time. I’ve taken a lot of random programming classes over the years and I actually think this was one of the best in terms of how the programming concepts were taught to beginners and applied to a meaningful project. Yoh also has a good level of empathy for beginners and explains things patiently.

“Python and computer science won’t tell you anything about how to ask an interesting question” — Yoh Kawano

Screenshot of one of our interactive maps showing CalEnviroScreen scores in the census tracts, overlaid with affordable housing projects funded by HCIDLA. Try it out here

I really appreciate how it is centered around an interesting research question and then learning the tools needed to answer those questions. It feels a lot more purpose-driven than some other classes that are more about the tools or mechanics, with little consideration for the end value.

For this class, we paired off for our project. Laura Daza and I worked on a project about Affordable Housing & Environmental Vulnerability and compiled our final report as a Story Map, which you can check out here.

Client Project

And finally, the capstone class. Our capstone project is a year-long endeavor so this first class is really about keeping us on track with various checkpoints and milestones to get us to that end goal. I’m going to be working with SCAG on creating an equitable scorecard/prioritization tool for grants. Still pretty early in the research phase but looking forward to sharing more once it starts coming together.

Overall

I think this quarter was one of the more fun ones because it was a lot of project-based work, which I’ve always enjoyed more than just doing a bunch of theoretical readings. And I don’t know how else to wrap, so I’ll just end with another one of my favorite Joan quotes from this quarter: