1986 was a lousy year for urban planning but a relatively great year for journalism. Back then, when I was growing up in Los Angeles, my family received daily deliveries of the Los Angeles Times, the Herald-Examiner, and even the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, which, as its name implied, was quaintly printed during the day and distributed in the evenings—often by teenagers on bicycles, the newspapers hand-wrapped with rubber bands.
I am not sure that truth has ever fully been spoken to power in Los Angeles—the metropolis being the city of noir, deceit, and scandals aplenty—but there was no shortage of outlets, reporters, and discussion fostered by what was then an incredibly healthy journalism industry. California Planning and Development Report was but one specific, unusual, and much-needed addition to this thriving ecosystem.
At the time, those mainstream outlets seldom covered land use, a subject that was hardly an object of discussion the way it has become today. At a time when the state and much of the country was sprawling at a steady, inexorable pace y, there wasn’t much in the way of intrigue. Under the legacy media’s watch, sprawl crept across California’s landscape, smog alerts remained common, BART was the state’s only major rail system, and downtowns were as dead as disco. In November 1986, Los Angeles voters passed Proposition U, a slow-growth measure that haunts the city to this day.
That very same month, Bill Fulton had the radical idea of covering land use and planning as a serious journalistic endeavor, and he has done so ever since. Indeed, when Bill founded CPDR, he did so in part because planning was in such a sorry and beleaguered state.
Back then, I was not remotely attuned to the niceties of urban planning and policy. But, by coincidence, I lived (part-time) in the exact same city as Bill did: West Hollywood. While my parents dragged me to stores at the Beverly Center and the theater performances on Melrose Ave, Bill was plugging away at his newsletter. I was 11 years old, but I intuitively appreciated living in a dense, lively area, compared with the dullness of the suburbs or the Valley, where many of my friends lived.
How times have changed—in both urban planning and journalism.
We celebrate the 40th volume of CP&DR at a time of relative triumph for the approaches and values Bill has long promoted. What were once fringe ideas—smart growth, new urbanism, and transit-oriented development—have now themselves become the dominant ethos of planning.
The rapidity with which modernist planning took over in the 20th century has been rivaled only by the glacial pace
at which we have attempted to undo the problems it introduced. But undo it we must. The smart-growth build-out is far from complete. Still, we hope our state is better for these efforts. Perhaps we can credit some of the changes to this newsletter, to Bill, and certainly to Bill’s contemporaries, colleagues, and students.
I wish we could say the same for journalism.
As cities have come roaring back, their nerve centers have atrophied and disappeared entirely. You don’t need to be a journalist to know that newspapers have folded at a staggering rate: 3,200 since 2005. Some of the influences are obvious: they did not keep up with the transition to digital media and did not figure out how to monetize it. Their ad revenue was siphoned away by sites like Craigslist. They competed for attention with social media. Much of these journalists’ hard work was given away for free.
Most nefariously, many papers have been eviscerated by private-equity schemes that view newsrooms not as civic resources but as distressed financial assets—worth more dead than alive. They are taking a wrecking ball to public discourse—not unlike what planners did to American cities after World War II.
We are now accompanied by many other urban-related media services. Entire websites are dedicated to urbanism, among them Planetizen and Next City, while sites like Atlantic Cities and Curbed have come and gone. Many journalists—not just one or two—have made urbanism their beat. We have Substack newsletters (Bill’s included), Twitter/X feeds, and impressive citizen journalists use social media to cover and comment on urbanism
Despite traditional journalism’s decline, urban planning and the new media ecosystem surrounding it are arguably healthier than ever.
In the next 10 or 40 years, I don’t know how that combination will play out. Where was once Bill’s humble newsletter, CP&DR has aged into a vital legacy publication--that’s good for us, I suppose. And yet,I fear the loss of civic discourse, investigative reporting, and placemaking expertise that come only with robust papers of record. Sniping on Nextdoor and holding hands on Bluesky will not suffice.
What I do know is that Bill and I, supported by our talented contributors, are going to keep trying. We e want our readers to keep trying as well. What does that mean? It means reading actively. It means participating in discussions. It means making the time to be interviewed, sharing tips when something is newsworthy, and doing all the things required to facilitate a civil society, even if other venerable institutions have failed to step up.
Here’s to another 40 years of great land-use journalism—and 40 more years of even better land use.
