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In parts of California’s Mojave Desert, Joshua trees stretch seemingly to the horizon, bringing greenery and whimsy to an otherwise desolate landscape. The habitat of the western Joshua tree a wide swath of inland southern California, from its namesake National Park all the way to the northern reaches of the Owens Valley. It is anything but rare. And yet, wildfire, development, and, most of all, climate change are already threatening the next generation of Joshua trees. Surveys indicate that young trees are taking root in only 50% of the current range; in a worst-case scenario, the tree could go nearly extinct. This invisible precocity led to the Joshua tree’s consideration for endangered status under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) in 2019 and its protection as a candidate species in 2020. Several years of discussion ensued. When the Fish and Game Commission voted on its official listing in 2022, the commission deadlocked, on a 2-2 vote. In 2023, at the urging of environmental groups, the legislature passed the Joshua Tree Conservation Act (SB 122) as a trailer bill. Brendan Cummings, conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said there was widespread support for conservation, including from the Newsom administration, and the act was necessary to avoid undue delays. “Absent the WJTCA, there would likely be years of litigation and uncertainty regarding the listing of the species under CESA,” said Cummings. The act affords the western Joshua tree the equivalent of threatened status under CESA—including restrictions on residential development and a near-ban on commercial and industrial development on parcels containing Joshua trees--and is believed to be a novel approach to species conservation. “It’s the first time a law has been passed explicitly to protect an individual climate-threatened species in California, and it may be the first anywhere in the country” said Brendan Cummings, conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It provides real and meaningful protections for the species.” The act went into effect earlier this year and is expected to remain in effect for at least 10 years. That may mean 10 years in which desert communities struggle to promote development and meet their Regional Housing Needs Allocation numbers. It is yet another instance in which conservation is complicating the state’s efforts to provide housing – especially on the urban fringes. The largest cities located within the range of the western Joshua tree include Lancaster, Palmdale, and Victorville.

This article is provided to you for free by the paying subscribers to  California Planning & Development Report .  To learn how you too can subscribe to  CP&DR and support our work, just click here . A few weeks ago, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo ran an unusually whiny guest essay in the New York Times. He complained about inflation, interest rates, and increases in housing prices. Most of all, he complained about land use. The federal government controls 80% of the land in Nevada, mostly through the Bureau of Land Management. Lombardo cited estimates that, at the current pace of development, the Las Vegas metro area will run out of developable land as early as 2032. "The reality of this ownership surrounding the urban areas of the state is a limiting factor on the development of new housing options," he wrote . (I'm sure water supply is another factor, though he didn't mention it.) He has a point: the Las Vegas Review-Journal has declared a "housing crisis," with home prices up to an average around $450,000 and a shortage of 78,000 affordable rental units. Otherwise, this is nothing new in Nevada politics. Until the Golden Knights arrived, complaining about the Bureau of Land Management had long been the state's most popular sport. Lombardo's request was, though, more specific than the general libertarian griping that Nevadans are used to. He called for the Biden administration to open 50,000 acres of desert to development so Nevada can add as many as 335,000 homes for anyone who enjoys their American Dream cooked medium rare. It's worthwhile for us Californians to keep tabs on our neighbors to the east. We have an alpine lake to care for, interstate highway traffic to manage, supertrains to develop, tortoises and Joshua trees to protect, and athletic teams to plunder. And, a concerning, but understandable, percentage of mostly middle-income Californians have considered decamping for Nevada . Those folks are exactly who Gov. Lombardo would like to settle on whatever land he can wrest away from the feds. (His essay doesn’t mention it, but it alludes to a bill introduced by Utah Rep. John Curtis to facilitate the sale of federal land nationwide.) A few decades ago, the idea that Las Vegas might run out of land would have been laughable. In 1980, the metro area's population was 438,000 (about the size of Reno's today); now, it's almost 3 million. The situation Las Vegas faces today is a version of the one that most of California's major urban areas faced decades ago: constraints to growth. San Francisco has been hemmed in since the Victorian Era, and Oakland has always been squished between mountains and bay. In Los Angeles, "sprawl hit the wall" in the 1980s. Even the Inland Empire cannot gallop as it once did. In each case, mountains, coastlines, other cities, and, yes, protected open spaces have forced cities to grow through density rather than expansion. Las Vegas metro doesn't have a coastline, but it does have the feds. The problem in California to accommodate more people has not generally equated with an embrace of density. The densification of California has been built on awkward constructions like the dingbat, the strip mall, and, more recently, five-over-one apartment buildings. Much of our dense development has taken place on commercial corridors, which, though nominally efficient, are inherently ugly. The most pleasant neighborhoods, where skilled architects could likely work wonders on attractive, appropriate designs, are often those that are most reluctant to grow. We have, so far, failed to create graciously dense places, and instead settle for too many self-defeating jumbles that give density a bad name. At 5,046 residents per square mile, the City of Las Vegas is not exactly Hoboken, but it’s denser than you'd imagine (compare with Phoenix, at 3,100). It has plenty of small houses on small lots (making it relatively inexpensive on a per-unit basis), and it has its share of small apartment buildings. Many residents commute to one of the greatest concentrations of employment (especially blue-collar employment) in the country: the Las Vegas Strip. So, there are gravitational forces keeping residents in the city. And yet, it's a fraction of the density of some of the cities celebrated by its hotel-casinos. More importantly, it wears its density awkwardly -- far more so than most major California cities. The City of Las Vegas has a Walkscore of 42 (meaning "car-dependent," which seems generous). Walkability plummets to 33 in North Las Vegas, and 30 in Henderson. By contrast, the City of Los Angeles scores 69. Lombardo’s proposal would accomplish two things: 1) promote low-density sprawl; and 2) undermine the city’s incentives for (denser) redevelopment. To its credit, Las Vegas wants to grow. It wants none of the slow-growth paralysis that has hobbled too many parts of California. Unfortunately, Lombardo's plea indicates that he wants Las Vegas to continue to sprawl, presumably by continuing to build inexpensive single-family homes, parking-heavy apartment complexes, and whatever inconsequential commercial developments are needed to keep suburbanites fed, fit, and fueled up. We all know how that is going to end. Even the Nevada desert is not infinite. In the meantime, even Las Vegans don't want hourlong commutes. Even a place accustomed to extreme heat probably doesn't want climate change to get worse. "Nevadans know what hard work looks like," Lombardo writes. If that's the case, he and his constituents should be all about density. Density is hard work. Urban design is hard work. Sustainability is hard work. Walkability is hard work. Favoring greenfield development is taking the easy way out. Behold the vibrancy of downtown Las Vegas. Lombardo has said that provision of housing "begins with eliminating governmental barriers to development." Sure, but it doesn't have to be the federal government that does the eliminating. He could instead do what his California counterparts Govs. Brown and Newsom (along with legislators) have been doing for the past decade. He could instead focus on local governments and their development policies. He could collaborate with planners and developers. They, and other stakeholders, could reach a consensus about what a denser Las Vegas could be like. They could encourage innovative design rather than the same old expedient stucco boxes that is advertised as "resort living" that populate inland California communities from Victorville to Hemet to Santa Clarita. They could build genuine urban neighborhoods, worthy of Las Vegas's global reputation, rather than what is essentially a forgettable back-of-house to serve the Strip. Back in 1972, architects Robert Venturi , Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour famously celebrated Las Vegas’s design sensibilities. They reveled in the superficiality of signage and simulacra. Now, Las Vegas--not the Strip, but the actual city--faces the opportunity to get real. It could be more dense. It could be more efficient. It could be both inexpensive and attractive. It could take a cue from all the ersatz historicism that it's famous for, accept the gift of artificial constraints, and consider a new approach to urbanism. Granted, Las Vegas is probably never going to be Paris, Venice, or New York. It could, though, be cosmopolitan. Or it could be Riverside. In short, with a little imagination--real imagination, not just spectacle--southern Nevada could learn from the lessons that California so vividly teaches. Don't get me wrong. Water supply notwithstanding, I don't want Las Vegas to not grow. If done right, a denser Las Vegas will accommodate California exiles and anyone else who wants to live there -- it'll just do it better than it currently does. And California needs a little competition. Let's compete for residents and let the best state -- not the luckiest one, or the whiniest one--win. Map courtesy of Bureau of Land Management . Image courtesy of Andrew via  Flickr .

Perhaps the most significant thing about state and local ballots in California this fall is what’s not on them.

This article is brought to you courtesy of the paying subscribers to California Planning & Development Report . You can subscribe to CP&DR by clicking here. You can sign up for CP&DR ’s free weekly newsletter here. A colloquium on population trends hosted by a metropolitan planning organization is not necessarily the place you’d expect to hear a new metaphor. But, this is Los Angeles, and we’re pretty creative. And we’ve had quite a while to come up with ways to discuss our twin trends of rising population and stagnant housing production. It was USC demographer Dowell Myers who noted, in keeping with our region’s coastal orientation, that “you need enough shells for the hermit crabs to crawl into.” In Myers’s world, the shells are homes: rental apartments, condos, single-unit homes, whatever. The hermit crabs: well, they’re us. It’s just easier to be sympathetic if we think about cute sea creatures rather than sinful, wasteful, aesthetically objectionable human beings. Myers is the region’s foremost demographer. So, he, of all people, knows how many shells we’ll need, and why we need them. The number, as all planners know, is daunting; the reasons are more interesting than you might think. The Southern California Association of Governments convenes its annual Demographics Summit to help its member jurisdictions understand the trends they are facing. This year’s summit had an overwhelming, and overwhelmingly compelling, thesis: the state’s population is stagnating. For the first time pretty much since 1848. The reasons center partly on out-migration, of largely middle-income folks who seek lower costs of living in places like Nevada and Texas; that trend is complemented by lack of in-migration, caused largely by California’s prohibitive housing costs. Arguably, the stronger force lies in a trend commonly ascribed to developed countries but that is, in fact, sweeping the majority of the globe: plummeting birth rates. In Southern California, as in many countries, the fertility rate has dropped well below replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. At the generational scale, these numbers will result in population decline. Now, you don’t need a half-day conference to decide that the population will decline, starting around 2042. There’s much more to it than that. In fact, a whole lot is going to happen in Southern California, and, likely, statewide until widespread population loss really takes hold. Spoiler alert: housing-constrained regions cannot simply wait for demographic destiny to kick in. Myers described two major drivers of demand for new housing. The first is the fact that the SCAG region, like others statewide, has a shortage of housing relative to the population it already has and to the preferences of the people who live there. A disproportionate number of SCAG constituents are cohabitating, with parents or flatmates, against their preferences. They would like to form their own households, and they are willing and able to pay reasonably, but they cannot. They are trapped by low housing production and, consequently, high housing prices. Myers noted that, whereas most places in the United States are permitting new homes at greater than pre-recession rates, California is doing so at half its pre-recession rates. Myers refers to these as “invisible households,” or, if you prefer, shell-less hermit crabs. He explained that doubling up is not an ethnic preference or a “California thing.” It is a reluctant response to economic and geographic realities, caused by California jurisdictions’ overwhelming hesitancy to welcome new housing. As University of Newcastle (UK) demographer Rachel Franklin said at the SCAG workshop: “It’s a policy failure of people want to move or migrate but don’t feel like they can.” (She said the same for having kids: many forces contribute to those falling birthrates, but scarcity of housing is a big one.) The second factor is the converse of the first. Whereas many young people who are living in their childhood bedrooms want nothing more than a front door and an address all their own, the people of their parents’ generation want square feet — lots of them. Empty nesters either age in place, living in homes that might previously have included kids, or they simply crave (and can afford) a lot more space than the average 20-something is willing to tolerate. So, said Myers, “As population gets older, you need more housing to accommodate the same number of people.” (Notably, this also means that single-family neighborhoods with lots of empty nesters are less dense than they used to be and, therefore, ideal for  ADUs and duplexes .)   Put those two factors together and that’s why the region needs to build more housing even if the total population is destined to go nowhere for the foreseeable future. So, we need more housing. That’s not exactly news. But, there’s more to it than that. Franklin attended the conference without any particular interest or investment in California but plenty of experience in a place that is already shrinking: Europe. Her observations of European depopulation have given her a head-start to think about what to do. Her general response: don’t panic! Her main point is that cities and even regions have no control over macro-scale demographic trends. What they can control are their own built environments. “If we focus on quality and well-being,” she said, “the other stuff will work itself out.” What that means is that the people who already live in a given jurisdiction deserve high-quality housing options. And, if those options exist in surplus, then places that are depopulating might actually attract new residents. In other words, Franklin envisions a race to the top rather than our current race to the bottom. Franklin's point is that we should stop arguing about growth. Stop arguing about whether we want more neighbors or not more neighbors and instead make our cities better. Let's get past the petty arguments and work towards quality of life. Franklin grounds her policy arguments in an ethical principle: no one should be stuck someplace they don’t want to be, and everyone should be able to move to a place where they want to be. In other words, mobility equals morality. If cities build enough housing and create places that are nice enough, the ability to move around and the number of places that people want to live will expand. At that point, precise numbers like fertility rates become subordinate to the everyday reality of streetscapes, doors, and bedrooms. (On that count, Franklin might disagree with California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation process and the painstaking, if thankless, work that metropolitan planning organizations like SCAG do to make sure that nearly all of its jurisdictions are at least mildly annoyed at their allocations.) How do we make this hopeful vision happen? If we believe Myers, then we have to recognize that the demand for new housing, especially dense housing for young adults, and better places already exists. If we focus on Franklin, the economics are murkier. Creating better cities and better housing absent high demand from wealthy people seems impossible. But, this is California we’re talking about. The policy barriers to housing production are so high and so entrenched, we can still change the economic calculations in many places with the stroke a pen. For instance, just as Los Angeles’s Measure U helped reduce the city’s zoned capacity by 6 million people—made famous in Dr. Greg Morrow’s graph—new policies could reinstate a significant amount of that capacity instantly. Small fixes like single-stair reform and loosening of other fire codes could help too. And developers are still figuring out all the ways they can use recently passed housing laws. But, what if that just invites development of “ luxury housing ”? Franklin would say, so what? If we make the city nicer by adding new housing and we don’t subtract existing housing, then it’s a win-win — for humans and hermit crabs alike.

In the early years when the logistics industry started taking over the Inland Empire in the 1980s, the region was a warehouse developer’s dream: large tracts of land and relatively few residents to protest against the pollution and unsightliness with which they are associated. Four decades and roughly 4,000 warehouses later, the region is home to 4.7 million residents — and many of them are clamoring for cleaner air.

In addition to previously announced ballot measures (see CP&DR coverage ), California cities are considering a colorful range of ballot measures related to land use November 5. Some are seeking to take on state control over housing; others are expanding or firming up their counties, and still others are wondering about pickleball.

This month’s local land use ballot measures addressed some common issues – tenant protections, open space, and broad notions of local control included – and emerged with little by way of discernible patterns.

In the face of declining attendance at services and the burden of relatively large parcels of land — often acquired decades ago — what some churches want for Christmas is… housing.

2024 might have seemed like a quiet year for  CP&DR news. On the one hand, there was no single mega-story that defined the year or attracted a inordinate number of readers.

This blog is brought to you free of charge courtesy of the paying subscribers to California Planning & Development Report. The mascot of Pacific Palisades High School is the Dolphin, which, unlike most mascots, is nonfictional. Pods of bottlenose frequently accompany morning swims, games of beach volleyball, and sunset strolls just down the hill from campus. That's how idyllic this place is. Or was. An estimated 30 percent of Palisades High’s buildings are now ash. Thousands of homes and businesses were far less lucky. Though the Palisades feels like a world apart from Los Angeles, it is—unbeknownst to some residents—not its own city but rather a neighborhood unto Los Angeles. It's suburb an , but it's not a suburb. Over 100 years ago, it was founded by Methodists looking for a pleasant escape far from the urban core. It was meant to be a happy (and, incidentally, alcohol-free) community. Its primary social club was named, cheerily, the Uplifters. Even over the span of four generations, that intentional spirit of neighborliness persisted. The Palisades was a place where people enjoyed living -- even, and especially, in contrast to other wealthy Los Angeles communities that trade on seclusion. The Palisades did not lack for flaws. To state the obvious, it was expensive, and it was not remotely as diverse as the city it inhabits. But it was a fundamentally decent place. I know firsthand: I lived there for a few years when I was in elementary school, and I have hung out there regularly ever since. Today, I live in Brentwood, just east of the Palisades. From the top floor of my building, I watched flames gnaw away at the hills to the west, not knowing which of my friends’ homes had been consumed. I’ve been on evacuation watch for days. I use the past tense deliberately. As everyone now knows, the Palisades is, essentially, no more. (Altadena, an unincorporated community at the foot of the perennially flammable San Gabriel Mountains, was similarly beloved by its residents and similarly devastated by a separate fire. I've never been there, and I'm sad. I'll never get to go to Fox's bar or the Bunny Museum.) Last Tuesday, the Palisades Fire erupted as quickly as the planning process is slow, progressing from spark to cataclysm in less time than it takes to read the introduction to an environmental impact report. As developer and former L.A. Police Commission Steve Soboroff told the Los Angeles Times, the Santa Ana winds were so fierce and chaotic, “this isn’t just a fire.... this is like a thousand fires." Within 24 hours, the Palisades fell victim to the same combination of human-made and natural forces that devastated Paradise, Santa Rosa, the Berkeley Hills, Redding, and too many other California communities, both urban and rural. Much of the national discussion has focused on preparedness (including sniping about fire hydrants and ugly talk about the L.A. Fire Department’s hiring policies by people who wouldn't know California from Mars). I don't know if any preparation could have prevented the ravagement brought by winds over 80 miles per hour and brush unquenched for eight months. Anyone casting blame this soon, and anyone placing blame on individual officials, do not understand governance. The hot-take cynics are part of the problem, not the solution. My heart aches for everyone who has lost their homes and for everyone who have lost their neighborhoods. What to do? Assumption 1: Urbanists, environmentalists, and financiers can argue forever about whether the Palisades ought to be rebuilt. None of that matters. It will be. Hopefully many residents will return so they can stitch their social fabric back together. Assumption 2: Rebuilding will take longer than anyone wants it to. Assumption 3: The displacement will reverberate throughout Los Angeles. Assumption 4: The materials, technologies, building techniques, and other strategies of 2025 are more fire-resistant than those of any previous era—certainly more than those of the post-World War II era when most of the Palisades was built. A favorite argument of opponents to housing development is that "more units won't reduce prices." By that logic, fewer units shouldn't raise prices. We're about to find out the hard way whether that's true. I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not. I, for one, am grateful that developers have built as many "luxury" units as they have. Displaced Palisadeans are going to snap them up. Once those units run out, they're going to dip into the mid-market. At every turn, we're going to get the vacancy chain in reverse: residents aren't going to trade up and make lower-cost units available for lower-income residents; instead, they're going to trade down and bid up rents. We don't have a housing crisis, or an affordability crisis, a vacancy crisis, or a wildfire crisis. We have an everything crisis. The adequacy of a city's housing supply cannot depend on which way the wind blows. A resilient city is one that has more than the bare minimum for the people who live there and not--as is the case in Los Angeles--a shortage such that invisible under-housed residents are forced to live with entire families in one bedroom and turn dining rooms into dormitories. It's one in which housing is plentiful enough to be affordable and, in times of crisis, plentiful enough to withstand a demand shock such as the one about to emanate outward from the 90272 zip code. So, keep those "luxury" buildings coming. While we're at it, let's build some non-luxury buildings too. Los Angeles just adopted a new zoning code, designed in part to accommodate its 456,000-unit regional housing needs allocation—the magical RHNA number. Critics have rightfully called out the new zoning code, known as the Citywide Housing Incentive Program , for steering dense housing away from single-family neighborhoods. It’s not ideal, but it’s on the books. Fortunately, laws like SB 9 require the city to approve duplexes and lot splits. Gov. Gavin Newsom had pledged to “cut red tape,” and the city will have to expedite all of this. (With what personnel? Well, for starters, plenty of entertainment-industry folks are now under-employed. Maybe they can be trained in the art of permitting.) What about the precious public process? What about property values? What about the sacred rights of single-family homeowners? What about aldermanic privilege that makes it all but impossible to consider the greater good? What about CEQA? These are just some of the questions that opponents of development often ask—and are sure to ask in this case. Well, $250 billion in property damage, health impacts, and economic losses says enough is enough. Before that first spark landed on Tuesday morning, Los Angeles was already facing an imposing set of stressors: the decline of the entertainment industry; the election of a locally unpopular president (who defeated an L.A. resident); the exodus of priced-out residents; a counterproductive transfer tax ; a housing shortage and homelessness crisis; haphazard planning for the world's biggest international event three years hence; and, eight months without rain. Los Angeles has been stagnating, ceding talent, energy, and global prominence drop-by-drop to every place from Las Vegas to Austin to Miami. We are one self-inflicted misstep away from a downward spiral, if we're not already there. We must accept that the envy of the world is not a permanent condition. Beyond that, there's an even more important element to urban resiliency: people. A strong city does not require everyone to agree all the time. But, it does require unity, mutual respect, basic understanding, and a sense of common purpose -- especially when crises arise. Los Angeles generally lacks this quality. It's hard to love your neighbor when you're bitter about how much you're paying in rent, or when you're sitting behind him at a stoplight. We need to get over that. It's time to get over our fear of density. Whatever the new zoning says, we all know that zoning is no match for popular sentiment. So long as Angelenos oppose density, the density we do get will be, very often, unattractive, out-of-scale, misplaced, and overpriced. The destruction of one neighborhood is a call to improve all neighborhoods in this city. This effort requires teamwork: to lobby public officials; to encourage developers; to care for the afflicted; to welcome new residents; to accept that the status quo is expensive, dull, and deadly. This city needs to stop burning and then stop fiddling. It needs to build. What about the Palisades itself? As provocative as Mike Davis may have been about the fact that Los Angeles persists only by the mercy of mother nature, I will not make the " case for letting Malibu burn ," or, as the case may be, the Palisades. If the Palisades is to be rebuilt, it can be rebuilt better. The Palisades’ primary sin was its exclusivity. That's relatively easy to solve for, and it can be a model for the rest of the city. Palisades village consisted of more than just a main thoroughfare. It branched off into side-streets filled with shops, cafes, and small offices that, for lack of a better word, are a lot cuter than California's typical commercial strips are. The result was a matrix of a half-dozen blocks that felt like a real town. It flouted Los Angeles' unwritten rule of urban design: the more impressive the natural setting, the more heinous the built environment must be. In building back the Palisades, we can add 2-3 stories of apartment units to all of those commercial buildings. If European cities are any guide, it can come back even livelier and more uplifting than it once was. Meanwhile, residents who rebuild their homes have the exciting new option of building duplexes and/or ADUs with no questions asked. It can achieve elegant density. (It's worth noting that many homes in the Palisades were under-occupied , with, for instance, empty-nesters staying put in houses where rugrats once scurried and teens once sulked. Those neighborhoods can easily absorb sublettors and mothers-in-law.) It's been said that the Palisades Fire is our "Hurricane Katrina." The analogy is apt. But Los Angeles is the opposite of New Orleans. New Orleans was never famous for its landscape, unless you count suboceanic flatness as a natural wonder. It's famous for its architecture, streetscape, culture, and civic spirit. Those are all things that Los Angeles needs, now more than ever. The best way for the city a whole to recover from this tragedy is to learn from the Palisades. We can't all frolic with dolphins. But, a pleasant urban streetscape needs not, and should not, belong only to celebrities and wealthy folks on the urban fringe. What about other cities in California? Far be it for me to compare Los Angeles to any other place. But every jurisdiction in this state faces its own potential catastrophes. And, unless there's a little Atlantis at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, literally every city faces fire risk. To my fellow Californians: don't imagine that this "could" happen in your cities; imagine that it has already happened. Imagine the devastation. Imagine the displacement. Imagine the costs, financial and human. Then work backwards and think about everything you and your offices possibly could have done to prevent it, mitigate its damages, and create places that will be worth rebuilding if the worst comes to pass.

To state the obvious: wildfires move more quickly than city bureaucracies do.

The name of California’s most storied economic region — Silicon Valley — betrays reality. The San Francisco Peninsula does not mine silicon. And, really, it’s not even a valley. An emerging industrial region in California seeks to trade on the “valley” name. But, this time, the demonym is real. Plans for “Lithium Valley” envision what would likely be the most extensive lithium extraction operations in the United States, accompanied by a range of related industries. If it is realized, this vision would transform what is currently one of the poorest and most climatically inhospitable corners of California — the Imperial Valley — into an industrial center, powered by lithium. And, it’s not merely a valley. At roughly 180 feet below sea level, it lies in one of the lowest depressions in the Western Hemisphere. Under discussion since the 2022 publication of the state-level Lithium Valley Commission’s recommendations and released in draft in February, the Lithium Valley Specific Plan, along with a programmatic environmental impact report, commissioned by Imperial County, would govern 51,785 acres of northern Imperial County, along the southeastern edge of the Salton Sea and just north of the City of Calipatria. Though the plan is on the verge of adoption—with companies including Controlled Thermal Resources, Berkshire Hathaway, and EnergySource eager to break ground or expand existing operations—portions of the plan face at least one legal threat from environmental justice advocates. Roughly one-fifth would be reserved for conservation and open space. The rest would center on a 21st century oil rush: the extraction, via pumping (not mining), of lithium-rich brine from under the Salton Sea bed for processing and inclusion in batteries, including, and especially, those that power electric vehicles. By some estimates, the region’s 17 million metric tons of deposits could contribute to 375 million cars—and, backers say, they can be extracted more easily and with less environmental impact than competing deposits in Nevada, Arizona, and Arkansas, among others. “There's a lot of different places that have discovered that they have lithium, but there is nowhere that is at the level that we're at as a county with creating an entire ecosystem around the opportunity with lithium, said Bari Bean, Deputy County Executive Director for Natural Resources. In conjunction with the area’s existing geothermal energy production, the plan hopes to attract industries that would process lithium and manufacturing lithium-related products onsite (much of which currently takes place overseas). It envisions 70 million to 80 million square feet of industrial and related development, including data centers for major tech firms. The goal is to develop a comprehensive energy-based economy rather than an isolated extractive activity. “It’s one thing to take the lithium out and ship it to China,” said Brian Mooney, Principal and Senior Vice President of the Planning and Design Division at RICK, lead consultant for the Lithium Valley Specific Plan. “Why not create the battery manufacturing close to the source?” The sprawling plan includes a host of provisions designed to facilitate development, improve onsite infrastructure, create transportation connectivity, and protect ecological resources. It calls for five distinct, separate zones focusing on, respectively, lithium extraction; processing and manufacturing; warehousing and logistics; “community opportunity areas” including housing, businesses, and services; and conservation areas covering Salton Sea playas. The community opportunity areas would directly abut Calipatria, on the southern end of the plan area. Most of the plan area is currently zoned for agriculture. “We are envisioning a complete urbanization of an area that is all agricultural canals,” said Mooney.