Bill Fulton's blog

Last Wednesday afternoon, I arrived in Seattle and checked into a room on the 16th floor of the Hyatt At Olive 8 hotel and began preparing to moderate a panel the next day on transferrable development rights programs. The hotel was brand-new and less than a block from the convention center. It was comfortable and cool, the first LEED certified hotel in Seattle. Little did I realize that the very room I was staying in existed because of the King County transfer of development rights program I was there to discuss.

There's an old joke that what the locals fear more than a federal government in disarray is a federal government that has its act together. Well, now the joke's being put to the test.

According to walkscore.com, I work in a walker’s paradise. The walkscore of our office in Ventura, California, is 95.

I also live in a pretty good walking environment. My duplex has a walkscore of 78—and that’s way better than the walkscore in the cavernous suburban house I used to live in, which was 3.

So, what’s all that worth?

The Regional Targets Advisory Committee reached agreement on basic principles that the California Air Resources Board should adopt in implementing SB 375 and setting land use/transportation targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. But if a panel discussion at an SB 375 event in Ontario last week is any indication, the individual RTAC members are still having a big of a hard time getting past their own agendas.

The Urban Land Institute has a reputation of being an organization in which enlightened developers get together with the occasional savvy planner and designer. So with a real estate downturn in full swing, it's not surprising that the main topic at ULI's Fall Meeting in San Francisco last week was ... planning, not development.

For the second time this year, we’ve been reminded that the California Environmental Quality Act is not a set of tablets brought down from Mount Whitney. It’s just a state law, and it can be changed whenever the Legislature and the governor can agree on changing it – especially during bad economic times.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was listening to yet another SB 375 panel at the California state planning conference, a text message popped up congratulating me for being named the 99th top urban thinker in a recent Planetizen poll.

For a publication based in California, we sure write a lot about Portland. I guess this isn’t surprising, given Portland’s iconic status as the planners’ nirvana – the place where planners’ crazy ideas get implemented and actually work and make everybody happy. But there’s another reason why we write about Portland: It is a place where a lot of things California planners talk about are ground-tested and, most of the time, actually work.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to tour a short strip of York Boulevard in the Highland Park district in Los Angeles. York’s tucked away near Occidental College, a mile or two east of the Pasadena Freeway and the Gold Line. The boulevard is generally narrow – from Avenue 50 to Avenue 56 it’s only one lane in each direction – and it straddles the divide between the yuppie hillside to the north and the Latino working-class flats to the South.

It seems to me that, like so many other policy initiatives, this whole SB 375 thing can either be a bureaucratic nightmare or a useful way to move forward. We can devote an enormous amount of time and attention to figuring out how to comply with the law ... or we can figure out how to drive less.