Insight

Increasingly, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to be in the municipal bond business. Last fall, he championed the passage of almost $40 billion in bond measures on the state ballot, mostly for infrastructure. In his State of the State speech, he called for Californians to pass

In the beginning there was the general plan. This is an overstatement of Dan Curtin's world view, but not by much. The dean of California land use lawyers, who died a few weeks ago at age 73, was an almost priestly man of faith who believed in God, the rule of law, and the proces

Proposition 90 may have lost, but it hasn't gone away for good. It is likely to be back in 2008.

Twenty years ago this fall, the population of California stood at slightly north of 27 million people - an alarming increase of 4 million since the 1980 Census. Many people were wondering how the state would be able to accommodate such a huge population.

Should Californians vote to "protect our homes," or should they vote against a "taxpayer trap?" This, in a nutshell, is the campaign about Proposition 90, the property rights initiative on the ballot in November.

Home prices are flattening out. Interest rates are going up. Foreclosures are at their highest rate in years. The real estate boom is clearly over. But does that mean California's high-density/infill/mixed-use boom is over as well?

The regional housing wars have begun again in Southern California. And how they come out will go a long way toward determining how much influence the state's four major "blueprint" regional planning efforts will have over local development patterns - especially infill housing - d

So, the smart growthers have their candidate for governor. No statewide public figure in California has been more closely identified with "smart growth" and "New Urbanism" than Phil Angelides. This affiliation didn't matter in the Democratic primary. And it probably won't matter

Back in January, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - still stinging from a unanimous round of losses in the 2005 special election - decided to focus on infrastructure as a way to change the subject and exhibit political leadership as he prepared to run for re-election.

How much infill can we build in California? This is the big question everybody is trying to answer these days.

Everybody in California is talking about form-based codes these days. Cities throughout the state are in the process of adopting these codes. The wave is growing so fast that form-based codes appear to represent a revolution in the making.

For almost 60 years, urban redevelopment and eminent domain have been intertwined, both in public policy and in the public's mind. Since at least the passage of the Housing Act of 1949 - and in some states even before that - eminent domain has been used to assemble large blocks o