Joel Kotkin is just thinking about the children. Too much, if you ask me. As you may recall, two weeks ago it was Wendell Cox who used the Wall Street Journal opinion pages to herald the "war" that California's urban areas are launching on the suburbs.

Of California's roughly 37 million people, not a single one of them remembers a time when the state was not growing at a seemingly out-of-control pace. With the exception of the Depression and World War II years, our state has tripped over itself to build homes, roads, and entire

State Controller John Chiang sent what many cities consider to be an ominous letter, advising them to hand over assets that they may have acquired from redevelopment agencies. The letter, dated April 20, instructs cities, counties, and other agencies to cast a wide net to identif

The fate of thousands of would-be redevelopment projects now rests in the very busy hands of the California Department of Finance. Working with an augmented crew, the department has so far received roughly 200 Recognized Obligation Payment Schedules (ROPS) and has so far sent bac

Yesterday, at Day Three of the APA's National Planning Conference, a panel of planning directors and other city officials from Southern California cities offered their take on a range of issues – good and bad – that cities in the region are facing. The panel was designed for a no

LOS ANGELES -- For all the efforts that California has expended to embrace regional planning , it turns out that regional planning may already be outdated.

Is the era of smart growth over? Not exactly, but a group of panelists at the American Planning Association conference in Los Angeles suggested Sunday that we may be moving past the 2000-era concept of what smart growth is – and into a new era that combines managing growth, place

You may not yet have heard, but tanks are massing on the border of Santa Clarita.

Gov. Jerry Brown's successful effort to shut down the state's now defunct redevelopment agencies has taken another casualty: the California Redevelopment Association. In a statement released today ( pdf ), CRA officials and board members announced that the organization, absent it

early two years ago I wrote an that pondered the effects of legalized marijuana on California's cities. The options, for those cities that didn't forbid cannabis entirely, seemed to range from stoner wastelands to magical c

LOS ANGELES - Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, began this afternoon's general assembly session by saying that the organization's 2012 - 2035 Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy "isn't perfect, b

According to Randall Arendt, a renowned planner and fellow of the Royal Institute of Town Planners, the effective planner must have four basic skills: observing, recording, communicating, and self-educating. Given the essential nature of urban planning, it's assumed that most of