UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Leading with Values: Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum’s Journey to Tackle Homelessness in Los Angeles

By Sana Rahim (FEMBA ’19)

Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum realized when she was a dance teacher for young girls that she had a passion for teaching and helping others. Later, as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, Kellum examined the factors that create stress in ethnic minority youth, such as poverty, academic underachievement and family dynamics. This work inspired her to launch a career in service of others.

Now president and chief executive officer of St. Joseph Center (SJC) in Venice, Kellum joined UCLA Anderson to talk about her professional journey to SJC as well as her key leadership tenets. SJC’s mission is to provide working poor families with the inner resources and tools to become productive, stable and self-supporting members of the community. Last year, the center prepared more than 25,000 hot meals and permanently housed 304 people.

Alumna Esther Torrez Went from Farming to Finance to Building “Forever Families”

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National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 through October 15. UCLA Anderson, in conjunction with the Anderson Latino Management Association and the UCLA campus, recognizes the significant contributions to society among our Latino and Hispanic students, alumni, staff and faculty. Visit Latino@Anderson to enjoy their stories.

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By Jill Hisey (B.A.’87, ’95) and Carolyn Gray Anderson

Esther Torrez (’82) looks at the shifting financial landscape in much the same way a farmer might regard the agricultural landscape. “Sometimes, you plant a crop,” she says, “and weather destroys the entire crop. Your entire financial livelihood is gone.” Make-or-break solutions to securing a livelihood — whether they come in the form of an advanced education or answers to the problem of homelessness among teens exiting the foster system — form the leitmotif of Torrez’ career.

Torrez grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the granddaughter of a man who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico to work the land around Tulare, raising cotton, rice and cattle. He taught himself math and reading and advanced to management in agriculture. His granddaughter, in her turn, helped her migrant classmates in elementary school learn English. Her dream since the first grade was to become a teacher.

Earning a bachelor’s degree from Fresno State, and a Master of Psychology from California State University, Bakersfield, Torrez became the teacher she dreamed of being and, later, dean of girls at Pioneer Junior High in Porterville. She was recruited away to become an associate professor of psychology and sociology at Bakersfield College, where she also served as a counselor. Eventually, though, Torrez wanted to expand her knowledge of the business world, and she applied to what was then UCLA’s Graduate School of Management.

UCLA Anderson Forecast: Is a Recession in Sight?

UCLA Anderson Forecast anticipates continued modest growth in its second quarter report. Edward Leamer, UCLA Anderson Forecast director, took a deep dive in an accompanying essay into the state of the nation’s economy, offering advice about the three critical forecasting questions: (1) Is the risk of recession elevated? (Answer: No.) (2) Can President Donald Trump make America great again in the sense of getting GDP growth back up to 3% after seven years of 2%? (Answer: Not likely.) (3) Are inflation and interest rates likely to jump up soon? (Answer: That’s hard to say.)

In his essay “Three Things to Worry About,” Leamer indicates that the president and Congress need “to figure out how to get us back into the 3% corridor, or better yet, make America great again by turning the clock back to 1960 when the growth rate was 4.8%.” Those efforts are critical to keep and support programs such as Medicare and Social Security. “A more rapidly growing economy would produce greater tax revenues and would help a lot with the burden of taking care of our elderly.”

Although the country is currently experiencing its 32nd quarter of expansion, “This current expansion has had the mildest rate of growth of any U.S. expansion in the data set,” Leamer writes. A number of factors contribute to the slow rate of growth, including the decline in manufacturing jobs, a weaker auto sector, decline in the growth rate of the working population and in total hours worked, as well as a productivity growth rate of only 0.5% since the Great Depression.

Moving Forward: Can We Solve L.A.’s Housing Affordability Problem?

Photo: Owen CL, Unsplash.com

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By Carolyn Gray Anderson

Last March, Los Angeles voters rejected proposed limits on the construction of large-scale buildings, limits that included a two-year moratorium on development of dense, high-rise residential properties. In a city where working-class and middle-income households are increasingly forced to prioritize housing costs over medical care, food and even transportation, it was a decisive defeat for ballot Measure S. But will augmenting the pace and quantity of available dwellings really make living here more affordable for anyone but the super rich?

The UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate studies the problem of housing affordability as it reaches crisis levels in California. The constraints are especially acute locally because although there is an immense amount of wealth concentrated in L.A. and land values are extremely high, ours is a very expensive city with no real wage growth within the working class.

Ziman partners regularly with the nonprofit Mercy Housing to organize symposia on topics germane to professionals in real estate, government and industry — but with a crucial public education component consistent with the mission of Ziman’s Howard and Irene Levine Program in Housing and Social Responsibility to promote the kind of dialogue that improves society in all economic sectors. Mercy Housing is a national nonprofit organization that provides affordable housing and supportive programs in 41 states to improve the economic status of residents, revitalize neighborhoods and stabilize lives.

Left to right: Paul Ong, Ann Sewill, Doug Shoemaker, Ben Metcalf, Ben Besley, Kevin Ratner

UCLA Wins 19th Annual NAIOP SoCal Real Estate Challenge with Creative Proposal for City of Inglewood

 

Hoisting the Silver Shovel (left to right), Daniel Gates, Scotty Weber, Nora Collins, Joseph Pfeiffer, Alyssa Koehn

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Contributed by UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate

A multidisciplinary team of UCLA graduate students won the 2016 NAIOP SoCal Real Estate Challenge held on November 17 at Carnesale Commons on the UCLA campus against formidable rival USC. Claiming the coveted Silver Shovel, the UCLA team consisted of second-year (Class of 2017) UCLA Anderson MBA students Joseph M. Pfeiffer, Scotty Weber, Nora K. Collins and Daniel Q. Gates, and UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture student Alyssa Koehn (M.Arch. ’17).

The annual event, sponsored by the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP), presents a specific real estate case challenge to a team of students at UCLA and USC. In addition to providing a rich learning experience that requires participating students to produce high-quality professional work within a limited timeframe, the competition is designed to showcase the talents and creativity of the next generation of real estate professionals.

This year, the Challenge involved a 5.07-acre parcel of land located at 10126 Prairie Avenue in Inglewood. The site, which is owned by the City of Inglewood, is adjacent to City of Champions redevelopment site, which includes the new NFL stadium for the Los Angeles Rams, a casino, 800,000 square feet of office development, 2,900 residential units, a 300-room hotel and park space. The teams were challenged to create and present the highest and best use for redevelopment of the site.

Navy Veteran Turned Entrepreneur Wraps the Complete Package

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

Rachel Dailey is a female African-American general contractor — not exactly a common profile. She is also a veteran of the U.S. Navy, where she worked for four years in logistics, learning A to Z how to balance budgets, negotiate with vendors, manage inventory and deal with every possible personality in every rank of the Navy. When she launched Fort Lauderdale-based RTD Construction and Services Inc. in 2016, she was well versed in the pre-planning so crucial to operating a business and stewarding projects from conception to delivery.

“The role of logistics personnel is planning — monitoring budgets, putting together ops, learning how to move money from one project to the next,” Dailey says. “‘Staying in the black’ was always our slogan.”

Dailey earned an MBA but, as a mother of four children, she took the non-traditional route via online learning and found later that, whereas she had learned quite literally by the book, her course of study lacked exposure to real-world scenarios entrepreneurs might face.

She enrolled in UCLA Anderson’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) to drill down to the brass tacks of density tests and the nuances of various markets. And she needed a more strategic network that included mentors. “I didn’t want my next step to be so trial-and-error,” she says.

UCLA Anderson Forecast: Fed Expected to “Normalize” Interest Rates While Job Growth and Wage Increases Drive Consumption

For information on the UCLA Anderson Forecast and this quarter’s conference, please visit www.anderson.ucla.edu/centers/ucla-anderson-forecast.

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UCLA Anderson Forecast’s fourth 2015 quarterly economic report for the United States says the Federal Reserve will start to normalize interest rates as its prolonged “zero interest rate” policy reaches its end, with the most recent financial crisis long over and the unemployment rate indicating near full employment. In California, the there is no indication of any slowdowns or declines in the continuing growth of both employment and income in California and, in fact, the employment sector will grow throughout the forecast period.

The National Forecast
In his forecast for the national economy, UCLA Anderson Senior Economist David Shulman cites a paradox in the current employment picture. While October’s 5.0% unemployment rate is essentially the traditional definition of “full employment,” the employment-to-population ratio is 59.3%, four percentage points below the level recorded prior to the start of the financial crisis in 2006. As such, the recovery may not feel like much of a recovery for many Americans. “Nevertheless,” Shulman says, “employment remains healthy, with the economy generating jobs at a 200,000-a-month clip that will bring with it further declines in the unemployment rate to 4.6%.”

The December forecast also says the Federal Reserve “is about to get the inflation it has been waiting for.” As a result, Shulman says, “With the financial emergency long over, the unemployment rate indicating near full employment and the likelihood that inflation will soon approach its 2% target, we expect the Fed to begin normalizing interest rates by increasing the Federal Funds rate this month. … Thus, we forecast that by the end of 2016 the federal funds rate will be about 1.5% and it will approximate 3.25% at the end of 2017.”

UCLA Anderson Team Joins Mayor’s Office on 10,000 Strong Initiative for Veterans

Left to right: Kristopher Rawls, Courtney Gosnell, Natalie Chladek, Brandon Hale, Guilherme Kratka Lins Rocha

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Explore UCLA Anderson's portal to our military veterans' stories

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By Natalie Chladek (’16)

We are thrilled to be working with the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs for our Applied Management Research project. Our concept was inspired by Mayor Eric Garcetti’s 10,000 Strong initiative, whose goal is to secure employment for 10,000 veterans in Los Angeles County by 2017. With the expectation that thousands of military personnel will leave the service and settle in Los Angles in the next five years, our project will develop sustainable processes to assist veterans in finding work in Los Angeles in the long term.

Our project is divided into three main components. First, we will develop a comprehensive analysis of the Los Angeles business landscape to identify high-growth industries in the area. Second, we will conduct extensive primary research with veterans and employers to determine the core competencies and skill sets of veterans who enter the civilian workforce after their time in the military. Finally, we will use our findings to identify assessment tools that produce useful data and form recommendations for the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs and its partners that they can use to provide better support to connect veterans and prospective employers.

Earn a Million Dollars in Seed Money by Making the World a Better Place

By Nathan Moorman

This year marks the seventh annual Hult Prize competition, organized by the Hult Prize Foundation. Offered in partnership with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, the competition aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas — namely, startup enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people.

Each year, teams are tasked with confronting a different global social challenge with this year’s being “Crowded Urban Spaces.” Participants must look for ways to leverage connectivity to improve life for congested urban dwellers with a focus on increasing residents’ income by better connecting them to products, people and services.

Home Ownership Decline: A Bump in the Road for the Housing Market?

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Forecast panelist Joel Singer discusses the rocky trajectory of home ownership.

On September 28, 2015, the UCLA Anderson Forecast quarterly economic outlook presents Housing Is Back, which examines the state of the California housing market. John Williams, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, will offer his perspective on interest rate policy, and two panels of experts will address questions of affordability, mortgage finance and gentrification.

Register for the Forecast conference.

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By Joel Singer

The national home ownership rate has followed a bumpy rollercoaster with a series of up-and-down movements in the past 20 years, with the end of 2014 marking a period of notable decline. This downward trend has fueled speculation about the future of home ownership in the United States following risks exposed during the recession and foreclosure crisis, as the U.S. home ownership rate fell to the lowest level in more than two decades in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Historically, the national home ownership rate rose steadily through the late 1960s and 1970s, from 63 to 65.6 percent, before declining slightly in the early 1980s. To address a decade of stagnation, national leaders pushed efforts to expand home ownership in the mid-1990s, which led the rate to rise rapidly from 1994 to 2004, from 64 percent to a record high of 69 percent. However, the recent national home ownership rate has declined almost fully to its 1994 level.

While the decline has provoked worry about home ownership access, many experts believe the fall in the home ownership rate actually is at the tail end of its decline and that advantageous conditions are percolating. For example, mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates have greatly decreased, wage growth is expected to follow a period of strong job growth, and there are signs that mortgage credit conditions are improving.