Almost 30 years ago, an ambitious young developer named Rob Maguire created an audacious proposal for the greatest development project never built in downtown Los Angeles. Responding to a request from the Community Redevelopment Agency for a development plan atop Bunker Hill, Maguire put together a magnificent team – including most of the leading architects and planners of the day – and proposed combining a reconstruction of Bunker Hill's historic urban fabric with a few tall office towers.

The project was never built, but it wasn't long before Maguire set the tone for big-time development in L.A.

A roundup of green news: San Francisco may soon have the most stringent environmental building standards in the country; the state's "million solar roofs initiative" gets a slow start; new Oakland office tower would be among the tallest and greenest.

The downtown in the East Bay city of Hayward has many features that any redevelopment agency would envy — an Amtrak station, a Bay Area Rapid Transit station, historic buildings, and a modern grocery store with additional shops. Soon to come is a 12-screen movie theatre and more retail shops. But what may be helping the downtown area even more is years of work to create additional housing in and around downtown, within walking distance of BART and its connections to jobs in Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties.