SANDAG Member Cities Sue Agency over Housing Vote 
Four of San Diego Association of Governments' member cities are suing the agency for what they claim is an inequitable use of a weighted vote favoring larger cities at the expense of smaller communities. Coronado, Imperial Beach, Lemon Grove , and Solana Beach have filed a legal challenge to the Regional Housing Needs Assessment adopted by SANDAG in July. Together the cities will argue that SANDAG failed and disenfranchised San Diego County residents by employing a weighted vote over the objections of a super majority of its board. SANDAG violated the organization's stated goals, the litigants say, to work cooperatively within their respective regions to distribute the assigned housing allocation. The methodology that was adopted resulted in the four cities being assigned between 258 percent and 1,800 percent increases from prior housing allocation cycles.

Google’s Plans for Downtown San Jose Take Shape
Google has released renderings and sketches for its mixed-use, 80-acre campus in downtown San Jose. More than half of the "Downtown West" 80-acre project will be allocated for residential and public space and include features like childcare centers, outdoor movie screenings and ecological viewing stations. It comes a year after the company files its initial campus framework. The project proposed 30 buildings and around 4,000 housing units, as well as office space for non-profits including YearUp and Tech Challenge, following a step Facebook took at its Menlo Park headquarters in 2018. The company is proposing amenities including public maker spaces, a hotel and "performance areas" for live music, events, and movie screenings. The company aims to include at least 10 parks and several trails while making nearly all of the site's buildings run off of solar or electric energy. It will also have "ecological systems viewing" areas designated to raise awareness of environmental issues, the proposal documents state. The company said it aims to make 65 percent of the campus accessible through bike, public transit, carpool, or foot. It will also connect to Caltrans. (See prior CP&DR coverage.)

State Economy May Take Two Years to Recover
California’s economy will bounce back, but not for at least two years, UCLA economists predict. The UCLA Anderson quarterly forecast suggested California payrolls will drop 7.2 percent this year to 16 million jobs, down 1.5 million since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The state's economy is expected to grow just 1.3 percent next year and 3.5 percent in 2022. Likewise, the unemployment rate is forecast to come down in fits and spurts to 8.6 percent next year and 6.6 percent in 2022. Some industries are faring better than others, the economists note. The leisure and hospitality sector will likely see payrolls fall up to 25 percent this year; the housing market is expected to see a quick recovery to pre-recession levels." Residential building permits are expected to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year, and grow in the following years. The forecast comes with a major caveat: it assumes that Congress will allocate at least $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus before the end of the year, and that the pandemic's impact on economic activity is relatively mild in 2021 and 2022. Negotiations in Congress have stalled, and no one can say with certainty the direction the pandemic will take. "None of these assumptions are assured, and if they do not come to pass, our forecast, presented here, is too optimistic," the authors caution.

CP&DR Podcast: Future of Housing
In Diana Lind's new book Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing, Lind shows why a country full of single-family houses is bad for people and the planet, and details the new efforts underway that better reflect the way we live now, to ensure that the way we live next is both less lonely and more affordable. CP&DR's Josh Stephens spoke with Lind about how Brave New Home can help planners anticipate, and promote, innovative approaches to housing for the podcast. 

Quick Hits & Updates
The World Economic Forum and the City of Los Angeles released a roadmap to support the roll-out of "urban air mobility" in cities. Though flying vehicles may be out of technological reach for the foreseeable future, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement: "Our city's strength stems from our creativity and our willingness to test new ideas... even in the face of COVID-19 today, our eyes are fixed on the horizon of a reimagined tomorrow.”

Los Angeles Metro will consider plans for a gondola project that would connect Dodger Stadium and Union Station. The Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit gondola--as it has been called--would move up to 5,500 people per hour in each direction, meaning more than 10,000 fans could be transported to Dodger Stadium in the two hours before the start of a game or event.

San Francisco's Embarcadero could be devastated by earthquakes and rising seas, according to an exhaustive new study from the Port of San Francisco. The 82-page report says natural disasters could flood downtown streets and inundate BART and Muni tunnels. The study's findings will be used to prepare a list of recommended projects to strengthen the most vulnerable areas along the seawall, which dates back to the early 1900s.

California's Active Transportation Program added a small pilot program this year to test the feasibility of supporting "quick-build" projects--a moniker for projects meant to allow a city to quickly redesign and implement safer street redesigns. The California Transportation Commission added the pilot program to test whether these kind of projects should be part of future ATP funding cycles. CTC staff has released recommendations to fund eight proposals for a total of $4.4 million.

An analysis of the condition of Los Angeles tenants during the COVID-19 emergency found that distress has occurred along multiple dimensions, almost all of them stemming from losses of work and income. The data, obtained by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, shows that despite extraordinary economic difficulty, most renters are paying on-time and in-full.

The Census Bureau has found that California has the highest real-world poverty rate of any state, 17 percent over the previous three years and much higher than the national rate. Living costs, particularly for housing, impoverish at least 7 million Californians, and the state topped the poverty charts even as California's overall economy was booming in the 2017-19 period.

San Francisco is enacting a new temporary permit program for outdoor entertainment and amplified sound, Mayor London Breed announced. The new Just Add Music permit, known as JAM, will cover entertainment in shared spaces and other outdoor locations that are seeing dramatically more activity during the pandemic. Included on the list of activities that would require a JAM permit are outdoor fitness classes, farmers markets, and drive-in gatherings.