Housing in California:
The Thacher School, 5025 Thacher Road, Ojai, CA 93023
jayden.li318@gmail.com
Policy Portfolio
Li (Jayden) LiThe Thacher School, 5025 Thacher Road, Ojai, CA 93023
jayden.li318@gmail.com
Addressing Californiaโs housing problems at the forefront of initiative
How could a city with so much wealth fail to house its own people, and what can I do as an aspiring policymaker?
Serving as a volunteer delivering food and supplies to homeless shelters and the โtent villageโ of Ojai, I met people whose lives contradicted everything I knew about the wealthy town I live ten minutes from. An art student who had lived in Ojai all her life was evicted after mounting debts. A mother explained how incessant price hikes unraveled a decade of stability in her family. In a city where the median home value hovers 210% above the national average, housing affordabilityโand its lack thereofโdeeply impacts generations of Ojai locals, compounded by the regionโs ever-increasing housing scarcity and cost of living.
Iโve delved into policy research and policy initiatives because it turns my helplessness into a method, a field to ask what could be done. By addressing local housing challenges in California, I aim to design solutions for the people in the place I call home.
The UC Riverside Center for Community Solutions (CCS)
The UC Riverside CCS group aims to address pressing public policy questions in Inland Southern California; specifically, my research focused on the Los Angeles and Orange County regions. By providing solutions and services to improve the lives of those in our local region, we can cultivate generalizable knowledge applicable to communities around the world. Through outreach programs and ongoing conversations with community members, industry leaders, and government organizations, I can learn about local issues firsthand and ask policy questions to produce actionable policy within the regional context.
Working with Dr. Qingfang Wang and Kristen Kopko, I serve as the only high school researcher on this team. Through this past year, I have dedicated my time to investigating zoning ordinances across Southern California localities; furthermore, I am working with the city of Riverside to evaluate and implement a new โmissing middleโ housing project through contextual policy research, urban planning methods, and a comparative matrix.
Land codes shape industrial siting, urban density, housing supply, and residentsโ infrastructural welfare. Currently, no rigorous dataset exists that allows researchers to conduct statistical analyses of housing conditions and zoning implementations in these two regions. With the CCS, I created a comprehensive zoning code compilation as an all-purpose resource for future housing policy researchers for the California region.
To build this dataset, I conducted outreach to 125+ municipalities across Los Angeles and Orange County, requesting zoning codes, municipal ordinances, and land-use planning documents that are not readily available online. I compiled raw ordinance texts within Google Sheets into formats suitable for large-scale analysis, standardizing jurisdictional terminology, timelines, and formatting. I also helped pilot AI-assisted extraction methods to speed up data processing, while running manual validation checks designed to catch hallucinated outputs before entries were finalized.
There is a gap in the housing market for small-scale, infill rental and ownership housing, known colloquially as the โmissing middleโโhousing that falls between a detached single-family home and a large multifamily apartment building. Figures 4 and 5 depict working drafts of missing-middle prototypes and potential locations. Working with local construction nonprofitsโBlended Impact Labs and Parkview Legacy Foundationโand the municipal government, my task was to inform the city of Riverside about policy implications through outreach and data comparison.
Altogether, I conducted outreach to more than 150 municipalities, compiling citiesโ lessons learned on missing-middle projects through a comparative matrix. This matrix provides municipal governments with policy considerations as they move forward with infill housing proposals and construction plans.
Preapproved Housing Plans for Missing Middle Housing: A Case Study of the City of Riverside The case study my outreach and comparative matrix fed into. In June 2026, the Riverside City Council adopted preapproved plans for two missing-middle prototypes: a duplex and a bungalow that can be arranged around a shared courtyard. Read the case study โTo situate Riversideโs proposal within a broader policy landscape, I compiled and verified data on over 50 comparable missing-middle and pre-approved housing programs, ultimately producing a matrix comparing Riversideโs approach to other California initiatives. This required direct outreach to planning and zoning departments in dozens of jurisdictions to confirm program details, eligibility criteria, and implementation status, including:
Figure 6 depicts the top-down model we adopted for each city:
At UC Santa Barbaraโs Summer Research Academies, I enrolled in 93LS Research in STEM. I dedicated four weeks to reading empirical literature, learning statistical methods, and building an original research project under the supervision of Dr. Travis Candieas. Our team focused on the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERA) because COVID-19 had intensified the eviction crisis, impacting the housing stability of millions of Americans.
ERA was one of the federal governmentโs main tools to keep tenants housed; we asked whether ERA not only reduced near-evictions but also addressed race- and gender-based disparities in who benefited. To that end, I learned to use R for factor analysis and fixed-effects regression modeling, building measures of housing stability and equity across demographic groups. At the end of the program, we presented our findings to more than 130 students and faculty at UCSBโs Research Seminar, explaining both our policy conclusions and the quantitative methods behind them.
| MR1 (Mental) | MR2 (Evict) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demographics | Pre-ERA | Post-ERA | Pre-ERA | Post-ERA |
| Black | โ0.022(0.644) | โ0.200**(0.004) | โ0.221***(<0.001) | 0.173**(0.011) |
| White | 0.235***(<0.001) | 0.100(0.221) | โ0.012(0.819) | 0.022(0.783) |
| Asian | โ0.195(0.069) | โ0.300*(0.045) | 0.742***(<0.001) | 0.399**(0.006) |
| Other | 0.193**(0.004) | 0.167(0.194) | โ0.060(0.483) | โ0.117(0.348) |
| Male | โ0.184***(<0.001) | 0.290***(<0.001) | ||
| Adjusted Rยฒ | 0.048 | 0.094 | ||
In a continued pursuit to conduct research at the highest level, I enrolled in UCSBโs Research Mentorship Program as a rising senior. Noticing the distinct formation of social enclaves within Santa Barbaraโs various subregions, I posed a question that strived to capture the complexity of policy, social identity, and human behavior:
How do visitorsโ physical interaction with fixtures and spaces in open houses reflect the broader influence of housing policy on social identity?
Conducting over 40 hours of ethnographic research, interviewing real estate agents and prospective buyers in Montecito, the City Center, and Goleta, I tracked behavioral cues and applied grounded theoryโa method of qualitative codingโto 1,000+ interview phrases and observations. In partnership with Amarachi Ugwu, a PhD student from the UCSB Department of Sociology, I authored an 8-page research paper, presented at the UCSB RMP poster session to more than 100 researchers, and presented at the annual Research Symposium to an audience of 130+.
Policy, identity, and behavior operate as a mutually constitutive cycle. Zoning restrictions structure the housing environment and produce measurable patterns of residential sorting. Identity then shapes how people evaluate housing. At open houses, buyers interpret properties through socially produced values about status, safety, family life, and belongingโassociations that real estate agents may reinforce.
These evaluations become observable through behavior: where people search and choose to live. Those patterns can reproduce or reveal the consequences of the zoning policies that shaped them.
A literature review for the Pepperdine School of Public Policy
Why do citizens trust, or distrust, the agencies that govern them, and what can institutions do to earn that trust?
Working with Dr. Peter Pirnejad, Dean of Pepperdine Universityโs School of Public Policy, I conducted an annotated literature review on trust in public agencies. My housing research kept returning to the same problem: even well-designed policy stalls when residents do not trust the institutions delivering it. This project let me study that problem directly.
I read and annotated 60 sources spanning more than a century, from Woodrow Wilsonโs 1887 essay on public administration to 2026 Gallup polling. For each source, I recorded its research design, data, central findings, and limitations, covering survey experiments, structural-equation models, historical analysis, and political philosophy. The result is a structured map of what the field knows about public trust and where the evidence is still thin.
The review is now being used to build a new civics course for Pepperdineโs curriculum, giving students an evidence-based foundation for understanding how public institutions earn and lose legitimacy.
In OECD countries, about 72% of people trust the police but only about one in three trust parliament. Trust varies sharply across institutions.
Brezzi et al., 2021The share of Americans who trusted the government in Washington most of the time fell from 1964 to 1994.
Pew Research Center, 1998Good performance does not guarantee trust, but bad performance reliably erodes it.
Bouckaert, 2012Tough enforcement had no overall effect on trust in regulators across six countries. Fair treatment is more closely tied to legitimacy and compliance.
Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2025; Tyler, 2006The Thacher Public Policy Club
To inspire more students to design local solutions and understand the complex housing crisis Ojai faces, I founded the Thacher Public Policy Club (TPPC). TPPC hosts bi-monthly policy seminars that invite students to hold civil discourse on conservation, housing, and zoning policies. Currently, TPPC has educated its 65+ members with the tools to evaluate policy, produce policy briefs, and conduct theoretical research.
TPPC also provides students with a chance to experience how our municipal government operates. Hosting Breakfast with the Mayor, interested students learn firsthand from Mayor Gilman about the operations of the city of Ojai. TPPC also gives students outreach opportunities with Ojai council membersโstudents have found success discussing their policy initiatives and other partnerships with district representatives and municipal leaders.
