USC Sol Price School of Public Policy

Este trabajo está basado en parte de la tesis de Rocío Cristina Acosta Peña “The sustainability of the low-density residential
areas in the context of Chihuahua: An analysis of the impact of housing production on sustainable urban development”, para obtener el grado de MSc Planning and Development, University College London.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority), in conjunction with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), has been preparing engineering plans and environmental documents for future construction of a high-speed rail (HSR) system. When completed, the nearly 800-mile HST system will provide new passenger rail service to more than 90% of the state’s population, extending from San Francisco and Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles and San Diego in the south. Some of the project challenges include its size, engineering complexity and cost; the need to obtain environmental permits assuming the use of design/build contractors; and an ambitious construction schedule. The project is also an expression of the forward-thinking environmental sustainability for which California is legendary.

The HST project is one of the first times FRA has implemented Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) guidance on environmental mitigation and monitoring. Published in January 2011, the guidance requires that federal agencies issuing NEPA documents monitor how mitigation commitments are implemented and their effectiveness. These requirements are similar to California requirements under CEQA. With completion of their first joint EIR/EIS for the Merced to Fresno High-Speed Train Project, the Authority and FRA were presented with the challenge of developing a system to manage its compliance data in a way that would ensure compliance was effectively documented and reported to permitting agencies. To address this challenge, the Authority and FRA are now creating an environmental compliance system that will coordinate, track, and report on Authority and contractor permitting and environmental compliance activities prior to, during, and following project construction.  Referred to as EMMA, the Environmental Mitigation Management and Assessment system, it will also track and report on the Authority’s progress in fulfilling its sustainability commitments. Extensive research was done to assess how other projects and agencies have handled similar compliance management challenges. The purpose of this paper is to document the scope of the challenge, how other entities have addressed similar challenges, what best practices are, what recommendation was ultimately adopted by the Authority, and how effective the recommendation has been in managing the HSR system’s compliance data.

In addition to compliance data, the Authority has committed to integrate environmental sustainability in design, construction and operation. Significant effort has been required to translate a range of sustainability features into quantifiable performance standards. The paper will also demonstrate how EMMA has been utilized to track and report on sustainability metrics for the HSR system.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority), in conjunction with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), is responsible for planning, designing, building and operation of the first high-speed rail (HSR) system in the nation. California high-speed rail will connect the mega-regions of the state, contribute to economic development and a cleaner environment, create jobs and preserve agricultural and protected lands. By 2029, the system will run from San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin in under three hours at speeds capable of over 200 miles per hour. The system will eventually extend to Sacramento and San Diego, totaling 800 miles with up to 24 stations. Some of the project challenges include its size, engineering complexity and cost; the need to obtain environmental permits assuming the use of design/build contractors; and an ambitious construction schedule. The project is also an expression of the forward-thinking environmental sustainability for which California is le...

This paper provides an overview of policies in non-health domains that promote public health. We first present a framework for thinking about the types of interventions that can promote improved public health. We then review four specific strategies that have been found to be effective and analyze the combination of institutions and rules to determine which levers have been important for achieving the observed success. Our goal is to provide a range of examples of successful policies for mitigating the adverse effects of social determinants of health and for the financing and institutional structures that produced them. These should offer a jumping-off point for deliberations about the types of financing and institutional arrangements that are most likely to produce sustained activity at scale.

The housing crisis of the 2000s exposed fissures in the U.S. financial system. These shortcomings allowed the system to become encumbered with excessive risk and ultimately triggered the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In the wake of the deep recession, many academics and researchers wrote post-mortems identifying key causes of the crisis. In 2010, Congress passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also known as Dodd-Frank, and President Obama signed it into law. It sought to address many of the identified problems by reforming regulations pertaining to mortgage lending, securities trading, banking, insurance, consumer protection, and corporate governance. This chapter explores three causes of the crisis that the regulatory reforms have yet to fully address. First, we highlight challenges that prevented credit rating agencies from being a useful source of information for mortgage-backed securities investors to impose effective market discipline on issuers. Second, we show the failure of several institutional arrangements designed to prevent firm owners and managers from looting the institutions over the short run at the expense of shareholders, who are expecting a maximization of profits over the longer term. Finally, we consider markets from the consumer perspective. We note the tension between overcoming market tendencies to ration credit and exposing households with limited resources to risks associated with products that can broaden access to credit by easing borrowing constraints. In each case, we offer possible strategies for more effectively tackling these problems. Regarding ratings agencies, we propose a new structure where agency-investor conflicts of interest are removed and agencies only assess " ratings eligible " products. Reforms in executive compensation, covenant banking for investment banks, and increased penalties for looting that make criminal liability a real deterrent for firm owners and managers are possible avenues to reduce the likelihood of looting by insiders. Third, we argue that significant investments should be made in financial education to make consumers an additional bulwark – to go with laws and regulations – against abuses and bad outcomes.

Real estate booms and busts have been a recurring feature of the global economy for decades, including in the 20th century, the Great Depression, the thrift crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the East Asian Crisis of the late 1990s, and the recent crisis. Real estate is particularly prone to pro-cyclical behavior due to the temporal lag in construction and the difficulty in short selling the underlying asset and the lack of effective derivatives to trade bubbles. In the most recent cycle, real estate investment trusts may have helped prevent overbuilding, but the complexity, heterogeneity, and opacity of mortgage securitization products encouraged the market to underprice risk, resulting in a credit bubble. While regulatory efforts and market memory may contain oscillations for some time, we have not seen the end of booms and busts in real estate markets.

We review the history of health insurance in the U.S., emphasizing how our system came to be so heavily based on voluntary employer action. We assess the consequences of placing EBHI at the center of our nation’s healthcare system. We examine how the ACA undertakes to change the employer-based health insurance environment, and how the Obama Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are implementing the relevant provisions. Finally, we project how employers will respond to these changes, and how the U.S. healthcare system will evolve as a result.