Los Angeles’s Transit-Oriented Communites Program: Challenges and Opportunities

In recent years, municipalities throughout California have struggled to meet housing needs, and construction of new housing units in the state has not kept apace of demand, resulting in increased housing costs that rank among the highest in the nation. At the same time, California faces pressure to achieve ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals in the relatively near term. Meeting those goals will require significant decreases in transportation sector emissions, which represent about 40 percent of the state’s GHG emissions. Particularly impacted by both the affordability and climate change crises are low-income Californians, whose communities suffer disproportionate impacts from lack of housing availability and vulnerability to climate change—and who also are California’s most reliable transit riders.Lawmakers seeking to tackle both housing and greenhouse gas reduction goals have turned to transit-oriented development programs—zoning programs that promote increased housing density close to mass transit options like bus and rail—as one way to address both issues. This paper focuses on one such transit-oriented development program, the City of Los Angeles’ Transit Oriented Communities Affordable Housing Incentive Program (TOC Program). The TOC Program offers density and other development incentives to projects within a half-mile radius of major transit stops, in exchange for developer commitments to provide a set percentage of deed-restricted affordable housing units within those projects.The TOC Program has been a major driver of affordable housing production in the City of Los Angeles since its adoption in late 2017, but certain structural and legal constraints may be impeding its full capacity to augment affordable housing supply. This paper explores those potential constraints and offers recommendations to increase the program’s efficacy. It also explores how the program can provide data and lessons learned to lawmakers considering similar inclusionary transit-oriented development programs within their jurisdictions, or even at the state level

Optimal Focusing for Monochromatic Scalar and Electromagnetic Waves

For monochromatic solutions of D'Alembert's wave equation and Maxwell's equations, we obtain sharp bounds on the sup norm as a function of the far field energy. The extremizer in the scalar case is radial. In the case of Maxwell's equation, the electric field maximizing the value at the origin follows longitude lines on the sphere at infinity. In dimension $d=3$ the highest electric field for Maxwell's equation is smaller by a factor 2/3 than the highest corresponding scalar waves. The highest electric field densities on the balls $B_R(0)$ occur as $R\to 0$. The density dips to half max at $R$ approximately equal to one third the wavelength. The extremizing fields are identical to those that attain the maximum field intensity at the origin.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

Adolf Reinach: An Intellectual Biography

The essay provides an account of the development of Reinach’s philosophy of “Sachverhalte” (states of affairs) and on problems in the philosophy of law, leading up to his discovery of the theory of speech acts in 1913. Reinach’s relations to Edmund Husserl and to the Munich phenomenologists are also dealt with

On the Fourier transform of the characteristic functions of domains with C1C^1 -smooth boundary

We consider domains $D\subseteq\mathbb R^n$ with $C^1$ -smooth boundary and study the following question: when the Fourier transform $\hat{1_D}$ of the characteristic function $1_D$ belongs to $L^p(\mathbb R^n)$?Comment: added two references; added footnotes on pages 6 and 1

OPE analysis of the nucleon scattering tensor including weak interaction and finite mass effects

We perform a systematic operator product expansion of the most general form of the nucleon scattering tensor $W_{\mu \nu}$ including electro-magnetic and weak interaction processes. Finite quark masses are taken into account and a number of higher-twist corrections are included. In this way we derive relations between the lowest moments of all 14 structure functions and matrix elements of local operators. Besides reproducing well-known results, new sum rules for parity-violating polarized structure functions and new mass correction terms are obtained.Comment: 50 pages, additional references adde

LDEF fiber-composite materials characterization

Degradation of a number of fiber/polymer composites located on the leading and trailing surfaces of LDEF where the atomic oxygen (AO) fluences ranged from 10(exp 22) to 10(exp 4) atoms/cm(sup 2), respectively, was observed and compared. While matrices of the composites on the leading edge generally exhibited considerable degradation and erosion-induced fragmentation, this 'asking' process was confined to the near surface regions because these degraded structures acted as a 'protective blanket' for deeper-lying regions. This finding leads to the conclusion that simple surface coatings can significantly retard AO and other combinations of degrading phenomena in low-Earth orbit. Micrometeoroid and debris particle impacts were not a prominent feature on the fiber composites studied and apparently do not contribute in a significant way to their degradation or alteration in low-Earth orbit