A couple of weeks ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion reported that the City of San Francisco was looking to relocate because its current location had become too expensive. Funny though this was, I expected the follow-up story to focus on the economic development incentive pac

Everybody always loves to complain about the California Environmental Quality Act, but despite all the complaining we don't now much about how effective it really is and what all the CEQA activity adds up to.

Love 'em or hate 'em, those litigators at the Center for Biological Diversity are the best in the business. Seems like they always find a way to win.

California is full of prime infill development locations, but it's also full of freeways. And more often than not, the two go together.

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