Larry Sokoloff

Salinas is the blue-collar workhorse of Monterey County and the center of a wealthy agricultural region. But unlike its sister cities on the nearby Monterey Peninsula, Salinas has a downtown that is devoid of upscale restaurants and boutique hotels.

Although it is home to the National Steinbeck Center, a museum honoring the Nobel laureate and Salinas resident John Steinbeck, downtown Salinas has never taken off. Instead, the community has sprawled out on the fertile farmland that surrounds it.
   

The Navy closed Moffett Naval Air Station in 1994, and, at first, some buildings sat empty. But now, given the right economic conditions, Moffett is poised to be a national model of base reuse with various parts serving as a business incubator, business park and research university. Collectively, those projects could add as many as 4,000 residences, more than 2,000 students and upwards of 5,000 employees to the former base.

San Diego County has been a national leader in habitat conservation planning, setting aside areas where rare and endangered species can thrive in the midst of ongoing development. Now, 12 years after a plan for the southern, inland part of the county was adopted, a second habitat plan has been released, this time for the inland North County.

To many Californians, the lively, pedestrian-oriented streets and plazas of San Francisco are what make the city so enjoyable. But away from these celebrated areas, San Francisco has many of the same problems with its streets as other aging urban areas. There are countless blocks of treeless roads that are more useful for shuttling speeding cars to freeways, than for providing safe corridors for pedestrians and bicyclists.

The city has set out to improve those streets that don’t match up to the city’s reputation with an ambitious “Better Streets Plan."