The midpoint of 2011 is rapidly approaching, and that means the first glimpses of the "Sustainable Communities Strategies" created under SB 375 are beginning to emerge. In particular, the "Big Four" metropolitan planning organizations � those from the Los Angeles Area, the Bay Area, San Diego, and Sacramento � are all moving forward with their SCS processes, and discernable trends are beginning to emerge.

The unique geography of the San Francisco Bay ensures that there is only one Bay Area. Uniqueness and unity are not, however, the same thing, and planners are now working to convince the Bay Area ' s own residents and public officials that there is indeed One Bay Area.

Thanks to the recession and various iterations of the dot-com boom and bust, Silicon Valley has a large, stagnant pool of empty office and light industrial space. The same region is woefully underbuilt with housing. Unsurprisingly, homebuilders are making inroads into the underused office parks and industrial sites in Santa Clara County.

A State Lands Commission policy prohibiting development seaward of the most landward historical position of the mean high tide line was an invalid underground regulation because it was not promulgated as a regulation pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act, the Third District Court of Appeal has ruled.

Correction Appended While the mission of the National Park System is to preserve natural wonders for the enjoyment of all Americans, a Native American tribe in Northern California is asking to keep a piece of Redwoods National Park for its own purposes. 

In Triumph of the City, Ed Glaeser has written a love letter to his lifelong object of study, the global metropoles in which a majority of the world's population now resides. 

An appellate court has upheld the City of Berkeley's application of the density bonus law and the California Environmental Quality Act exemption for an infill project.

The Malibu policeman's immortal warning "keep out of my beach community!" in the 1998 leisure-sport epic The Big Lebowski could just as easily have been uttered last autumn by certain residents of Orange County's unincorporated community of Sunset Beach. In this case, though, they would not be shouting at The Dude but rather at the entire City of Huntington Beach. Instead, a group of Sunset Beach residents are suing the City of Huntington Beach for, they say, unfairly imposin

In 2007, then-Attorney General Jerry Brown established a new paradigm for planning in California. With his settlement in a lawsuit against San Bernardino County, he clearly signaled that cities, counties, and county subregions would have to account for, and attempt to mitigate, greenhouse gas emissions in their general plans under the California Environmental Quality Act and AB 32. In fact, Brown went so far as to vow to sue any city that failed to account for its greenhouse

An appellate court has directed a trial court to set aside all of a project's approval because portions of an environmental impact report were found to be inadequate. The Fifth District Court of Appeal declined to follow the practice of allowing severance of project approvals unaffected by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) violation. Instead, the court required that the project approval be set aside in its entirely once the CEQA violation was shown.

Since January we have witnessed the unusual spectacle of elected local officials throughout the state expressing intense and emotional anger and frustration about the possible end to redevelopment -- and no reaction at all from anybody else. Nothing from the people in blighted neighborhoods, who supposedly benefit from better housing and more jobs and more retail choices.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a District Court's grant of summary judgment to two adult bookstores. The stores had claimed that a Los Angeles ordinance requiring the dispersal of adult businesses violated the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit found that the declarations upon which the summary judgment was based were biased did not amount to "actual and convincing" evidence sufficient to cast doubt on the rationale for the ordinance. The ruling is the l