The management of the Planning Grants and Incentives Team at the Department of Conservation announced today its recommendations for the next round of Prop. 84 Sustainable Communities Planning Grants (see CP&DR Insight Vol. 25, Nos. 5-6, March 2010 ) which is administered by the S

What the government builds and where it builds things can have a major impact on a community and on the way generations of people live their lives. The siting of college campuses in California provides a poignant, and depressing, case study.

If I ever write a book about the crisis of the world's largest cities, this photograph from the Oct. 24 edition of the LA Times should be on the cover: A 27-story, 400,000-square-foot private home (!) built by a Mumbai billionaire Mukesh Ambani, reportedly the world's fourth-rich

So, yet again Wendell Cox � a leader of the anti-anti-sprawl crowd -- has trotted out an impressive-looking quantitative report that purports to prove that certain metropolitan regions have high home prices because of "more restrictive land use regulation". In his New Geography

The passage of Proposition 26 – which requires two-thirds voter approval for certain local fees – won't stop the gears of land use planning and development approvals from churning. However, it does turn traditional thinking on its head – a fee is a tax unless proven otherwise – a

Here's the factoid of the week at the California Chapter, American Planning Association, conference: Out of all the local sales tax declines since 2005, 40 percent are due to declining auto sales. That's right: Local sales tax revenue in California has dropped $600 million in the

The City of Chico's draft general plan opens with the darndest thing: a sustainability element.

Urban Land Institute, it's time you and me had a serious chat about your awards criteria. As the foremost trade group of real estate developers, I find value in many of your publications and programs. And I find it understandable that you would laud large-scale development projec

Property taxes collected by redevelopment agencies provide the largest ongoing source of funding for low- and moderate-income housing development in California – about $1 billion annually. How agencies account for and spend that money may be about to change in light of a state Se

It's no secret that car sales are down these days, and that this downturn is causing a problem for cities in California. But based on a panel I participated in on Friday at the Westside Urban Forum in Los Angeles, I'd say the problem facing cities is a little more nuanced than I

The state Capitol is one weird place. Sometimes, I'm not sure if it's even of this earth. At the moment when you think major redevelopment "reform" is on the horizon, state lawmakers instead rewrite inconvenient laws that were getting in the way of San Diego's desire to use redev

Much has been written about the economic potential of alternative energy. So the proposal to build a 7,000-acre solar farm in Riverside County near Blythe struck me as notably promising. The new plant would be capable of generating 1,000 Mw, or more than all the photovoltaics tha