There were lots of highlights, and some lowlights, at my first state planning conference. Here I list the best and the worst of my experience at the California Chapter, American Planning Association conference last week in San Jose. I'll let you decide which is a highlight and which is a lowlight.

1. Flew up Monday morning (October 1) after playing musical chairs to get a seat in Southwest Airline's "open seating." I was surprised the cab driver from the airport knew San Jose was the 10th largest city in the country.

2. Arrived just in time to sit down to a self-appreciating speech by Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. San Jose has made great strides to produce affordable units, but I didn't think his outfit was as great as he kept saying it was.

3. Went to "Successful Infill Projects – Past Present and Future," where William Anderson showed us a bunch of projects in San Diego. The city is going for a "City of Villages" strategy. He said wide sidewalks and lenient parking requirements are the keys to successful infill. Anderson cautioned that "right-size density" is important and that some projects with too much density have made them infeasible. A flourishing redevelopment district hinges upon the success of failure of the projects proposed. The City of Villages plan has been percolating for many years, as Bill Fulton's Insight column from 2002 suggests.

4. Meandered over to "'Ground-truthing' Smart Growth and New Urbanist Developments." I sat down in one of the only available seats in the front and thought I was in the wrong room for about ten minutes while I was lectured on permeable surface pavements. I finally noticed "Groundtruthing" was in quotes and this was basically another LEED workshop. Sarah Sutton of DC&E spoke inspiringly about green rooftops. She mentioned they're great for birds and butterflies and I started thinking about how green roofs wouldn't need to be mowed if there were deer on them. Go to stopwaste.org and follow the Bay Friendly Landscaping link to learn more about green roofs.

5. Who'd have thunk a workshop about parking would be the most entertaining of the conference. "Smart Parking for Smart Communities" opened with the most creative PowerPoint I've seen when Dr. Rick Willson of Cal Poly Pomona played the role of a disheveled car who is homeless and confused by new pushy regulations with "unbundling" and "peak demand." Distraught with the system, Dr. Willson, the car, went to his therapist to hear, "It's probably you." Then Dan Zack of Redwood City explained how he read Dr. Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, and used it to model the city's downtown parking strategy. Patrick Kennedy, a well-known developer from Berkeley, later commented that Zack was the Tom Cruise of parking and that the Italians don't make very good parking lifts. Dr. Willson's "My Homeless Car" PowerPoint can be found at his website, http://www.csupomona.edu/~rwwillson/ and Redwood City's parking management plan can be found at http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Downtown%20Redwood%20City%20Parking%20Plan.pdf. Patrick Kennedy's website is www.panoramicinterests.com/index2.html . check out the ARTech Building with 21 apartments and only 17 parking spaces fitted with lifts.

6. The next workshop was "Implementing Infill Development: Moving Beyond CEQA." But the discussion never strayed too far from CEQA and EIRs. There was plenty of talk about statutes and tiering. The purveying message seemed to be that LEED certification should be enough to streamline infill projects, but I wondered about other important stuff like affordable housing and proximity to transit.

7. The next morning I attended "Smart Growth and the Workplace," an excellent tag-team presentation by Ellen Greenberg and Dena Belzer. California doesn't have the same traditional strong-centered metropolitan employment areas as the East Coast. So, in order to obtain the vibrant, dense transit corridors with a variety of services that serve as the template for great smart growth design, the West Coast needs to look beyond the "creative class" of the new economy and also target older industries and retail for smart growth clusters to be linked by transit.

8. Form-based codes seemed like a black-box to me so I decided to attend "Implementing Your Community's Vision with Form-Based Code." Daniel and Karen Parolek presented detailed descriptions of how form-based codes provide holistic and prescriptive regulations that can be used to streamline the approval process. Daniel said every time he looks at how specific districts plug into the city of Grass Valley's form-based code he finds something new. It made me wonder about unintended consequences and what affect form-based codes have on the "givings and takings" associated with zoning. Our own Bill Fulton followed with a witty synopsis of Ventura's implementation of the code for the downtown area. He said rather than dividing the entire city into transects, it is sometimes more efficient to implement the codes only in specific areas. For more on this visit formbasedcodes.org. Grass Valley's new code update is at http://www.cityofgrassvalley.com/services/departments/cdd/DEVELOPMENTCODE/GVDeveloCode041007_Article2.pdf. Ventura's downtown specific plan is at http://www.cityofventura.net/depts/comm_dev/downtownplan/pdfs/dtsp.pdf

9. My last workshop was El Toro/The Great Park: Setting New Standards in Sustainability. I learned that Lennar is the greatest sustainable developer ever, according to Bob Santos, president of Lennar. The park, as envisioned, does sound nice, with photovoltaic solar panels on every home and tentacle-like tracts of open space extending from the park into the town center. It sounds like Lennar is using the development as a guinea pig for integrating sustainability into all of its projects, but I bet new homes in Irvine have a lot more financial wiggle room than Lennar's eight new developments in Bakersfield have.

10. We left the conference a little early to check out Santana Row, a new urbanist development west of downtown. I was impressed and thought it superior to similar developments in Southern California, such as Valencia Town Center. But when we asked a policeman leaning against the wall at the entrance to the main drag if it was a public street, he replied it was not and that the Row has a contract with the police department. One of my counterparts commented the development was "fake" and I didn't believe her until then. Developments like the Row, while aesthetically pleasing, may not be the next best thing for California if they choose what diversity, if any, to permit walking on their streets. The Santana Row website http://www.santanarow.com/ describes the development in more detail, while CP&DR's Morris Newman offered his take on Santana Row in a Places column four years ago.

- Aaron Engstrom