Blogs

The following is a fictitious letter written, by the magic of anthropomorphosis and creative license, by the Oakland A's baseball team to the City of San Jose. It stands to reason that any

Last week's UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference included a session on updates from the faraway land of Washington, D.C. Federal policymakers ended the year with a few new developments, and continued policies, that may be of interest to planners. This summary comes

Consider this headline, which accompanied a recent Citylab article on a townhouse development in Echo Park: "In Los Angeles, Density That Doesn't Overwhelm." It doesn't take much to unpack that statement. It implies that density is inherently overwhelming.

UCLA Extension convened its annual Land Use Law and Planning Conference last week in Los Angeles.

As the inane "debate" over climate change drags on in the more benighted corners of our republic (Washington, D.C., included), it's becoming abundantly clear that California is no longer the place where America's fruits, nuts, and loose ends come to rest. I've been on the periphe

As the inane "debate" over climate change drags on in the more ignorant corners of our republic (Washington, D.C., included), it's becoming abundantly clear that California is no longer the place where America's fruits, nuts, and loose ends come to rest. I've been on the peripher

I went to brunch a few Sunday mornings ago at Louie's, a place that I will unironically describe as a gastropub. My Sunday rituals usually consist of visits to the farmers market and worrying about deadlines.

There is, perhaps, no place on Earth so supremely well suited for high-speed rail as the leeward side of the island of Formosa. Sheltered from the Pacific winds, all of Taiwan's major cities hug the island's western coastal plain, unbroken by the mountains that characterize the i

I noticed the da Vinci apartment complex for the first time only a few months ago. How could I not notice it? It looked like a plywood ocean liner beached against the northbound side of the 110 freeway. Rising 4-5 stories at the time, it hovered over the freeway, uncomfortably cl

Last week Harvard history professor Naomi Oreskes defended the public figure that many planners love to hate: the NIMBY. In a column in the Washington Post entitled, "Stop hating on NIMBYs. They're saving communities," she argues that "NIMBY" does not deserve the pejorative conno

News Item: the Los Angeles City Council has rescinded a long-standing ordinance requiring all high-rise buildings in the downtown area to have rooftop helipads . When the ordinance was in effect, all downtown buildings were flat-headed in design to accommodate the helipads.

As if we needed another story about Prop 13's unintended impacts on education, here's a new twist.