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Eden Housing has been trying to build an affordable housing project in Downtown Livermore since 2018. Two local groups with the same backer have gone to court with different lawsuits to stop the project – or at least move it.

In November of 1986, I showed up at the California Chapter, American Planning Association, conference ; maybe the second one I had ever attended ; with the pilot issue of four-page newsletter that no one had ever heard of or seen before called California Planning & Development Report. I thought it filled a need but I wasn't at all sure it would last. At the time I was a fledging land use journalist ; an occupation that most people thought was a hilariously unlikely proposition ; freelancing for a wide variety of publications, including APA's own Planning magazine, as well as California Business (now out of business) and California Lawyer. Industry newsletters ; printed and mailed ; were all the rage in those days, and I figured that if I compiled all the interesting stuff that crossed my desk each month, at least my friends would pay to read a newsletter. Which is pretty much what happened first. Our first regular issue in December of 1986 was launched with 15 subscribers. Although I had only lived in California for five years, I was fortunate enough to have several advantages in undertaking this work. I had worked my way through UCLA planning school by working at the L.A. Daily Journal, a newspaper for lawyers ; and I still use the skills I learned there in writing up court cases for CP&DR. I also attended a huge number of continuing education programs dealing with land use then offered by UCLA Extension, which proved to be my true education in the California land use system. I also had two incredible pieces of luck. Vicki Torf, my wife at the time, happened to be a graphic designer. In those pre-desktop publishing, pre-internet days there is no way I could have launched CP&DR without her. And I happened to live in West Hollywood, which had just incorporated amid national publicity. At a time when most of my planning school classmates were interning somewhere, I wound up as chair of the West Hollywood Planning Commission. That gave me even more of a real-time education in how land-use decision-making actually worked. Preparing CP&DR before the internet was a tough job. To gather material, I subscribed to so many newspapers that we had to get a much larger rural mailbox at our home in Ventura. I spent endless hours reading and clipping articles from around the state, often enlisting others to help, including Steve Svete, later one of the founders of Rincon Consultants. (As a toddler, my daughter often imitated this work, sitting on the floor of our living room and furiously throwing random papers around into different piles.) Shortly after I started CP&DR, I got a call from Warren Jones, who had founded Solano Press Books. He told me he had always wanted to write guide to planning in California but realized he would never get around to it and asked me if I wanted to do it. I turned him down flat. But after a couple of years of writing CP&DR ; and lecturing in planning at Cal Poly Pomona ; I realized I had the material and I told him yes. Since then, CP&DR and Guide to California Planning, now in its seventh edition, have really been one project, not two, with CP&DR providing the week-by-week update and GTCP the comprehensive overview. But CP&DR has never been a one-person effort. Along the way, I’ve worked with some great journalist. In the '90s and early '00s, Morris Newman ; trained as an urban designer but a real estate journalist at heart ; wrote an endless number of wry columns and hard-hitting analyses of public real estate deals. From 1999 to 2009, Paul Shigley ; an extraordinary journalist ; served as editor of CP&DR, bringing insight, diligence, and great reporting to the publication; he also co-wrote three editions of GTCP. For many years, Larry Sokoloff ; a Bay Area journalist that I originally worked with at the Daily Journal ; covered a wide range of land use stories from around the state. And since 2010, Josh Stephens has brought both solid reporting and a clever eye to California land use issues. I'm grateful to all of them for their commitment. Of course, the role of CP&DR has changed since the pre-internet era. At the beginning, when my rural mailbox was stuffed with newspapers, CP&DR simply brought news to planners, developers, and land use lawyers that they couldn't otherwise access. Today, our role has changed. Everything is out there on the internet ; even videos of Planning Commission and City Council meetings. There are plenty of free sources of information that we compete with, including the many fine summaries of legal rulings published by prominent law firms. And of course AI allows people to do their own research. But CP&DR still plays an important and, I hope, essential role. We still scour the internet to find land use news that nobody else brings to a statewide audience. And we try to bring perspective, context, and analysis that California land use practitioners can’t find anywhere else. Today we have hundreds of paying subscribers and thousands of folks who read our weekly e-newsletter. I'm grateful to every one of you for sticking with us and seeing value in what we do. We're charging full steam ahead and we hope to keep at this for a long time to come.

A Jurupa Valley landowner seeking to build a 10-unit-per-acre mobile home park in a 2-unit-per-acre residential zone doesn’t need a general plan amendment to move the application forward, an appellate court has ruled. The court seemed to place the zoning code above the general plan, but it also found provisions in the general plan that seemed to support the project.

A suburban-style Roseville shopping center properly qualifies for an Article 32 infill exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act, an appellate court has ruled in an unpublished decision. The shopping center’s exemption had originally been challenged by nearby residents because a fast-food restaurant was included, saying that was an “unusual circumstance” that permitted as exception to the exemption. When the fast-food restaurant was removed from the project, the residents switched to the argument that the possibility of traffic cutting through the adjacent neighborhood constituted an unusual circumstance. But the Third District Court of Appeal ruled for the city. While acknowledging that nearby residents feared cut-through traffic on Camino Real Way, an adjacent private road, the court wrote, “the record contains no factual foundation supporting the proposition that the approved project will create significant traffic-related safety issues for residents of the subdivision due to increased traffic on Camino Real Way from non-residents.” The case arose from a proposal to construct a Grocery Outlet supermarket that included three parcels allowing three separate businesses, including a fast-food restaurant with a drive-through. During the approval process, neighbors argued that the fast-food restaurant would create significant traffic and noise impacts that would disqualify the use of Article 32 exemption. However, the city concluded that it could not approve the fast-food restaurant and retain the Article 32 exemption. Subsequently the developer withdrew the fast-food restaurant from the project, though a future retail or restaurant development on that project remained possible. In court, the neighbors argued that the possibility of cut-through traffic was an unusual circumstance and that the city piecemealed the project by excluding the fast-food pad from its decision to apply the exemption.

In the latest housing element skirmish from Redondo Beach, an appellate court has ruled that the city’s mixed-use overlay district doesn’t meet the requirements of the housing element law.

An appellate court has upheld San Diego’s revised impact fee ordinance, saying it meets the Nollan/Dolan standard. But the unpublished ruling depends heavily on the Ehrlich ruling from the 1980s, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently repudiated.

Although SB 79 and the big infill housing exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act got all the headlines this year, the Legislature was active on a variety of planning and development bills this, with Gov. Gavin Newsom signing more than 40 bills into law. Unlike last year, Newsom vetoed no bills on CP&DR ’s list.

The acrimonious battle between the City of San Diego and La Jolla citizens who want a separate city continues in court – with the citizens recently winning a battle to throw out a lawsuit from the city on anti-SLAPP grounds. The judge in the case essentially concluded that the citizens’ attempt to move the La Jolla incorporation attempt forward constitutes free speech.

Under a new state law, rezonings related to the housing element aren’t subject to the California Environmental Quality Act. But UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf says there’s a tradeoff: environmental impact reports will almost certainly be required for all housing elements, putting more pressure on cities and counties to identify the environmental impact of every possible housing site at the housing element level.

The California Chamber of Commerce is floating a ballot measure that would create a series of “shot clocks” for actions under the California Environmental Quality Act.

The owners of a Long Beach gas station wanted to add a car wash. But the property is adjacent to a school and in close proximity to several other gas stations, and Long Beach Unified claimed that the air quality analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act was inadequate.

A Santa Barbara developer with a pending builder’s remedy project has sued the state in federal court, claiming a new law violates the developer’s constitutional rights. The developer’s lawsuit also names the City of Santa Barbara as a defendant, claiming that the city’s overlay zone does not conform with state Housing Element law. The overlay claim builds on a recent appellate court ruling from Redondo Beach. (Previous CP&DR coverage about that ruling can be found here .)