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In November, if election patterns hold steady, around 250,000 voters in Solano County will decide whether to welcome as many as 400,000 new neighbors. It is likely to be a serious test of “yes in my backyard” sentiment in California — or, in the case of Solano County — yes in my pasture, field, or rangeland. The vote would mark a preliminary step in the development of the project, which was being promoted by corporate parent Flannery Associates and known as “California Forever,” but was recently rebranded the “East Solano Plan.” The developers submitted over 20,000 signatures in late April, which the county is now verifying; 13,000 valid signatures are needed for it to qualify for the November ballot. Currently titled, “East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative,” the measure would set the terms for a general plan amendment and development agreement between the company and the county. “It will be contentious and emotional,” said John Carli, mayor of Vacaville, in central Solano County. “Whichever way it goes, it’s going to create further divisions. The sides are becoming entrenched.” The project has gained infamy for its magnitude, nearly doubling the county’s population, and its origins: a consortium of backers from the technology industry who have espoused progressive views about urbanism while surreptitiously acquiring roughly 60,000 acres of rural land well beyond the existing urban fringe. (In early April, the company successfully defended a lawsuit filed by a group of ranchers who accused the company of price-fixing.) Most of the development would take place between Travis Air Force Base and the City of Rio Vista, with a “security zone” to separate development from the base. California Forever cannot simply start pouring and framing whenever it wants to, in part because of the county’s strict Orderly Growth Ordinance, which is designed to preserve open space and direct growth to the county’s half-dozen existing small cities. Overriding the ordinance to rezoning the 17,500 acres of land that the company wants to develop from agricultural to mid-density urban requires either assent of the county’s Board of Supervisors or a popular vote. Flannery Associates has chosen the latter route. It is a major gamble, given the fact that – according to CP&DR ’s long history of ballot measure coverage – developer-initiated ballot measures designed to end-run elected officials rarely succeed.

In what has become a nearly annual ritual, the legislative session has claimed its first major land-use victim, and its a familiar one: tax-increment financing. Assembly Bill 2945, the Reconnecting Communities Redevelopment Act, would have funded infrastructure projects from tax increments collected from immediate surrounding communities and administered by state-approved local agencies. It was but the latest version of redevelopment proposed in California; its recent demise in the Assembly Appropriations Committee ignominiously adds to the number of times the policy has died.

At a time when many retailers are cutting back – or going out of business entirely -- Costco has the opposite problem. I've been to Costcos on weekend afternoons when they were so busy, you'd think they were giving away their inventories. Even getting a frozen yoghurt took 15 minutes. Costco membership inspires feeling of pride on par with sports teams. That translated into $176 billion in revenue last year in the United States. So it's no wonder that Costco wants to build more stores, which already number over 800 nationwide (compare that with over 4,100 Walmarts). The trouble is, fervor alone cannot shoehorn a warehouse of 150,000 square feet into urban Los Angeles. Even where there's space, the zoning is often unkind. That's why Costco is getting into the urban infill housing business. Everything about housing development is antithetical to Costco's business model. Costco is in the business of building the same big-box store – with the same gigantic parking lot – pretty much anywhere. Urban infill housing is costly, complicated, and customized. But some people will do anything for an entitlement. That’s why Costco’s proposal to develop a roughly 800-unit apartment complex in South Los Angeles is a Trojan Horse that will also not-so-secretly facilitate the development of the chain's 17th Los Angeles County store. It will be built on the site of a shuttered medical center a few miles west of the USC campus, near a stop on L.A. Metro's Expo Line. Rather than wade through the tedious, costly, and uncertain process that would it need to gain approval for a traditional standalone store, Costco and its development partner Thrive Living taking advantage of AB 2011, which exempts multifamily housing projects on commercially zoned property from CEQA review, plus density bonuses provided by Los Angeles’s Transit Oriented Communities program (TOC). Home sweet Costco. The density bonuses, which require 184 of the residential units to be affordable, raise the allowable number of units on the site from 593 to 918. It’s an elegant alignment of interests for both parties: Thrive gets a deep-pocketed partner with whom to build housing, and Costco gets to open its doors, stock its shelves, and begin generating revenue without suffering through environmental review and inevitable lawsuits. That’s no small matter when the average Costco store takes in $252 million per year. (The project was proposed over a year ago, and underwent site plan review in February, but recently gained attention thanks to an X/Twitter post by L.A.-area housing advocate Joe Cohen.) Even if it loses money on the housing (which isn't likely, especially if it's paying for the land anyway), Costco will surely make up for it in the pallets of protein powder and cases of canola oil that it's going to sell. The poison pill in AB 2011, which has rendered the law nearly useless, is that it requires developers to pay construction workers “prevailing wage” for onsite labor -- which generally equates with high-cost unionized workers. But Costco and Thrive have a solution for that: modular construction. By using mass-produced elements, Costco will minimize the use of on-site labor. It's savvy move for a company that knows how to buy in bulk. The end result may be the type of mixed-use development that, while achingly pragmatic, would give even the most sanguine New Urbanist a heart attack. From the renderings, it will not be a human-scale, finely detailed series of storefronts and front doors. It will, rather, be an enormous box hemmed in by slightly smaller boxes (Cohen likened the design to that of a prison – apparently coining the term “Costco Prison” – but he walked back that assessment in the face of a Tweetstorm of flack). And, in a rarity for Costco, much of the parking will be underground. In fact, parking is where this project gets really interesting. Based on TOC guidelines, the project is required to provide at least 1,141 parking spaces, for residential and commercial combined. But, based on AB 2097 – which prevents the city from imposing any parking requirement within a half-mile of a transit stop – that requirement drops to exactly zero . In fact, the developers are choosing to provide 1,515 spaces. This seemingly sensible investment contradicts the worst fears of pro-parking folks: zero parking minimums does not necessarily mean zero parking. Developers may be frugal, but they’re not insane. (Ponder, for a moment, what zero parking would look like at a Costco.) Frankensteinian as its form may be, it’ll be an apt representation of the regulatory tangle that, for better or worse, provided the necessary lightning bolt. Housing advocates probably won't worry about the aesthetics anyway. Eight hundred units is a lot, even in Los Angeles. And it will include 184 units of sorely needed affordable housing. Even so, it'll be a stark contrast to its neighbor, which happens to be Village Green, an Ebenezer Howard-style development from the 1940s that's on the National Historic Register. With laws, trees, and graciously spaced-out apartment blocks, Village Green represents high-density, affordable housing of a vastly different era. The Village Green trend didn't last. But, it's likely that the Costco Living trend is just starting. Big boxes aren't just stores. They are, by definition, real estate plays. Between the demand for housing, the urbanist antipathy for wasted space, new state laws friendly to mixed-use and adaptive reuse, and other local regulations akin to Los Angeles’s TOC (e.g. the Bay Area’s own TOC program), more such developments seem inevitable -- it would be financially irresponsible of the Costcos, Targets, and Walmarts of the world not to pursue them. The South L.A. Costco is just the prototype. On the one hand, I’m sure few urban planners want big box stores to dominate American retail even more thoroughly than they already have. On the other hand, it's possible that we've already lost the war against big boxes. And, their incursion into urban areas is only going to accelerate; greenfield sites on the urban fringe are simply too far from population centers to be feasible. If we can get some housing as part of the peace treaty, so much the better. Now, it's true that residents of those 800 apartments -- some of which will be small studios and one-bedrooms -- probably aren't Costco's target customers. Then again, once they try the frozen yogurt, they might be hooked. Resources Los Angeles Dept. of City Planning CUP Site Plan Review, February 2, 2024 (PDF download) Rendering by AO Architects.  This article is brought to you free of charge by paying subscribers to California Planning & Development Report . You can subscribe here .

For decades, housing advocates, and some policymakers, have stressed the dire need to develop new housing in infill areas and — for a host of reasons — leave open space alone. These advocates now have an ally, albeit it an unwelcome one, in the form of the insurance industry.

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.