Podcast: Top Planning Stories of 2020

What is it about duplexes that make them such a popular topic? And why did only one CEQA case make the top five legal stories of the year?

The pandemic, racial injustice, an end to California's population growth -- has California planning ever seen a year like this before? >>read more

CP&DR's retrospective of the triumphs, failures, and tensions that influenced California's built environment in the 2010s >>read more

The state’s housing shortage and affordability crisis yet again dominated CP&DR’s coverage >>read more

Senate Bill 827 gets its own category in CP&DR's annual list of its most-read stories >>read more

The California Planning & Development Report's annual roundup of its most popular articles of the year >>read more

If ever a year produced a greater variety of land use news in California than 2016 did, we at CP&DR can’t name it. >>read more

With the economy humming along, innovative ideas sprouting up around the state, and, of course, the occasional dispute, 2015 was as lively a year for land use as any other in recent memory. To mark the new year, CP&DR presents its most-read stories of 2015. 

New laws that bring back redevelopment in a limited way. The Office of Planning & Research's effort to do away with the traffic "level of service" standard. And whether you can live in California without a car.

These are just a few of the most-read stories from California Planning & Development Report in 2014. And now you can check them out again. Here's CP&DR's Top 20 List � in order:

CP&DR usually publishes a top-10 list of the biggest planning stories of the year, but the process enumerating the stories this year took a strange turn this year. Until they repeal Proposition 13 or Nevada launches an invasion, the convoluted quest to kill the state's nearly 400 redevelopment agencies and/or send their tax increment back to Sacramento is a mega-story for the ages.

In Year Three of the Great Recession, it's comforting to think that California has heard all the bad news it's going to hear. Or at least we're so accustomed to bad news, that we've stopped getting depressed by it. As a result, many of this year's top stories come with silver linings.

The no-growth vs. slow-growth vs. build-everything debate has become a faint murmur, since not much of anything is getting built anyway. What is getting built, though, is generally pleasing to the smart growth crowd.

Fans of infrastructure development have surely cheered the progress on projects like High Speed Rail and Los Angeles Metro's 30/10 Initiative. Then again, skeptics may be assuring themselves that these projects will never get built.

Many people in the planning and development community are saying good riddance to 2009. It was a year marked by extreme financial distress for government agencies and private industry. If 2008 was a year to "do more with less," then 2009 was a year to "do less with even less" -- a year simply to hunker down and try to endure.